The Pivot That Saved His Company (And Nearly Broke Him)

Speaker A: And I just asked the question, like, hey, what if we started over? No product, nothing, no sunk cost. And just knowing what we know today, we designed the ultimate solution to this problem. And so the following week we had a bunch of demos booked for, you know, people thought they were coming in to buy software. And I just started pitching them on this process that we had laid out. And a lot of it was services. And we were really trying to constrain ourselves to like only building SaaS products. Embracing that changed our business and it saved us and we got traction and are where we are today because of it.

Speaker B: On today's episode of the Lead More podcast, we examine the question of how do you know when it's time to take a left turn? How do you know it's time to find a new path? Or when do you reach the point whether it's forced on you or you decide to switch gears?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: How do we find that answer? And so I go talk to my friend Marcel Petipa. He is the CEO of Parakeeto. Parakeeto is a really fascinating sort of, uh, technology enabled consulting firm that helps agencies be more profitable. I've known Marcel for a long time. In the very early days of building out this company, Lemonly, my old company was a user, uh, and today they help big and small agencies really get into their numbers and figure out how to be more profitable, how to uh, more effectively run their agency. And so Martel is a very smart man, he's very wise, he's got frameworks. But I was really glad we did this interview now because he's at a crossroads today and, and had some really honest and open answers about how to know, to find a new path when it comes to creating momentum. Part of it is knowing that you're on the right path before you can then apply some pace and speed up. And so he's at that point right now and had some really great answers and a really good discussion. So let's kick it over here to Marcel Petipa. All right. Welcome to the show. Marcel. Good to see you buddy. How are you today?

Speaker A: I'm doing great, John. It's nice to see you again.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's been a while. We've been, uh, long friends, connecting through the SaaS world and through mutual, uh, entrepreneur friends. Uh, you've been building for a long time. And so I want to start out with talking about the story of Parakeeto because like a lot of businesses, what the initial idea was isn't maybe what it is today. And that's part of the journey which makes startups and entrepreneurship so beautiful. So give us the high level kind of what is Parakeeto today? And maybe what did it used to be?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's an excellent question. It's funny how you said that this is what makes entrepreneurship beautiful. And the first thing I thought is beauty is pain. Um, anyway, I digress. Yeah, so Parakeeto, it started as an idea, um, that actually came out of, uh, one of our original co founders and still a board member today, Jared Ferguson, a mutual friend of ours who we all met in Toronto, I think at uh, a Dan Martell event years ago. And, um, he ran and still runs agencies, several agencies. And um, he had problem that they were spending days every week in spreadsheets trying to answer the simple but not necessarily easy questions that you ask yourself every day when you run an agency. Like, are we making money on our clients and projects? Is our team busy or not busy enough? Are we going to need to hire people? And all the sort of what if questions. And what if we, what if we get this client? What if we don't? What if we sell this at this price? What if we don't? And so like the profitability management of the business, which sort of requires you to grab data from all over the place and make it all make sense and, you know, build data that can help you answer these questions. So he just thought, like, there has to be a better way to do this. And we, uh, got connected through Dan and I resonated with that problem. Having run, you know, very briefly, my own very, uh, small agency early on in my career and, uh, just immediately said like, yep, this resonates. Let's go talk to some agency owners. And everybody we spoke to after you pierced through the armor, they all had the same problem. And so we just thought, okay, this is a problem that needs to be solved. Let's go ahead and solve it. And that kicked off sort of a seven year journey that brings us to today. And a lot of sort of, uh, trial and error in terms of trying to figure out the right way to solve that.

Speaker B: I mean, you're right that, uh, you know, we were early customer at Lemonle, like the problem has existed and still exists today. I coach agency founders and you're wearing the hat like data, right? How do we get, how do we move? Like gut is intuition and gut are powerful, but how do we pair that with some data and insights? Uh, and I don't know how you feel, but like, I'm always championing, uh, because you live in the SaaS world as well. But like, I'm always championing the idea of a services business. They can be very profitable and like, lifestyle businesses can be very great lifestyles. What do you think about that?

Speaker A: Yes, well, that'll be important to the story, uh, because when we finally accepted the role of services in the solution to this problem, our business changed. And so one of the sort of parts of the original question was, how did the idea change over time? And to your point, the problem stayed the same, but we spent several years trying to figure out, how do we solve for this. And so the first idea that we had was let's build a platform where you bring in all the data from all these different places and, and then we'll build these dashboards and reports. And so the sort of key assumption that I made in that original product design that was looking back, probably one of the stupidest ideas I've ever had in my life was that the data coming in from those systems would be clean. But you know as well as I do that if you went into your harvest or your ClickUp or your Monday.com, the naming convention is messed up and there's, you know, tasks play all over the place and nothing's structured properly and like, it's a mess. Um, so, you know, that failed mostly due to that reason. We spent like a year and a half on that trying to make it work, work, and it just never really did. Then we thought, okay, um, the issue is that the data is not clean. So let's go to where the data structures are created, which is when projects are being estimated. And we built a product to help agencies estimate projects better. I think this was one of the products that, um, you guys were using at Lemonly for a period of time.

Speaker B: I remember that.

Speaker A: Um, and then what we found with that was that was a useful little widget, but it wasn't really solving the whole problem. And so some people would buy that and pay a couple dollars a month for it, but the rest of the problem still needed to be sol and the scope of that was really significant. And so that brought us to about two and a half, three years into the business. And then one day my co founder and I had a conversation after sort of threatening to quit for four straight quarters in a row if we didn't hit these arbitrary metrics and missing those metrics every quarter, we sat down and we just sort of said, like, look, uh, although we're not getting traction, I'm more convinced than ever that this problem is real. And I just asked the question like, hey, what if we started over? No product, nothing, no sunk cost. And just knowing what we know today, we designed the ultimate solution to this problem. And it doesn't have to be something that we know how to do. It doesn't have to be scalable, it doesn't have to be software. It doesn't even have to be possible. Doesn't even have to be things that we're interested in, like just no constraints, not thinking about ourselves at all. What would be the best experience for the customer ever that would totally solve this problem. And so we spent hours mapping this out. Um, I remember we were in a room and we had sticky notes all over the wal. It was like very classic startup scene. And we stepped back after a little while and I said, I think that we can sell this. And so the following week we had a bunch of demos booked for people thought they were coming in to buy software. And I just started pitching them on this process that we had laid out. And a lot of it was services. And we had this idea that a lot of these things that we're going to do manually to start with, we can eventually start to build technology to automate and leverage these things. But I think what we realized in that moment was the solution to this problem is a combination of both. And we were really trying to constrain ourselves to only building SaaS products because we wanted to be SaaS founders, because all kinds of reasons that were really kind of dumb at the end of the day. Um, and so embracing that changed our business and it saved us and we got traction and are where we are today because of it.

Speaker B: Okay, so a lot of great insights in that story. Um, I want to go back to the subsequent quarters of not hitting these arbitrary metrics. So you ha. You know, you're a data guy, you got the hat on. So like you're going back to the quarterly reports and you're like, shoot, we're short. What does that conversation look like? Why were you like, no, no, we're really close. We're right on the brink. Like, what was keeping you going if you weren't making these sort of arbitrary metrics?

Speaker A: It's a great question, you know, um, and so the frame that my co founder, Ben and I at the time, um, so Ben kind of came into the company a little bit later. Jared had agencies to run, so he sort of step back into a shareholder role. We brought in Ben, and Ben and I, you know, spent five years building the company. Uh, but he's a person that is like a top 1% type of engineer. And um, I like to think that I've got a good network, I have some skills. Right. So both of us were kind of had this idea of we could go get jobs and we would work a lot less, make a lot more money. And so like what are we doing here? And the business when we were trying to build software was stuck at uh, you know, 10, 20 grand a month forever. Just, we really couldn't break past that plateau. And so yeah, every month we'd be like, okay, what needs to be true for us to be able to justify continuing to build this business? And we would say this many users, this much revenue, this much whatever. And it wasn't at the end of the quarter that we realized we were off. Like we, we knew we were off every week for the entire quarter. But what that forced us to do was continue talking to customers, continue trying new things, continue iterating, continue learning. And our level of conviction that the problem real and that it was underserved and that there was value in solving it and that there was willingness to pay to solve it, that all increased with every passing quarter. And our understanding of the problem and how nuanced it was also increased. I think what needed to change, however, and what eventually did change and unlocked a lot of progress for us was the frame that we were applying to how we were solving that problem. I think uh, in the early days we made the mistake of over engineering assumptions that were fundamentally untrue. And then we were trying to make incremental changes to something that was strategically off. And so I think the third time that we sort of reinvented ourselves, we had this rule of no real technology, we weren't allowed to use databases and write real code or whatever it was like only get to build on things that already exist. Airtable and Google sheets and these kinds of things. We placed this constraint on ourselves because we recognized that we had fallen into this trap of being too slow to iterate on the learnings that we had and being too constrained in our ability to actually change what we were doing.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And I think that that was sort of eventually the big realization. But along the way it was just our conviction that the problem was real and that to us felt like the most important thing. And we felt convinced that if the problem is there and it's severe enough, then we can eventually figure out a way to solve it.

Speaker B: Cool. Okay, so we're going to talk about momentum today and I think the story you just told makes me think of uh, my part of the momentum Framework is choosing the path. It was almost like by eliminating other paths, by putting that constraint, you maybe didn't know the path you were going down, but at least the path you were seeking became more clear. Like, talk about how constraints actually opened up a new solution. Right.

Speaker A: Yeah. So what's interesting is typically applying constraints. Yes. Would help with this, but in our case, we had to remove constraints.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Um, and the constraints that we were applying to ourselves up to the point where we, we kind of redesigned the whole business and introduced services and things changed, was this has to be. Software has to be like SaaS based company, you know, that we. It has to be SaaS. That was basically the big constraint and we could go down a, uh, whole rabbit hole on why that was. Right. But like this fallacy of like, there's

Speaker B: probably some identity, there's some idea.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Like I want to be a tech founder. Like, tech founders are the coolest. And you know, tech is. Tech is better than everything and I'm better than etc. Right. Um, it was all, you know, for me, at least I can say that it was a lot of like, insecurity sort of manifesting itself as like saying, no, I got to be a tech founder. So when we removed that constraint, that's what opened up all of these opportunities that were staring us in the face. Funny enough. Like, you know, I mentioned we were doing 10 to 20 grand a month. Like, a significant portion of that was just like consulting work that I was picking up because people were like begging me to do it. And I was like, oh, what the hell, you know, I'll do a little consulting here and there. And then we turn around, we're like, this is like the only thing we're getting most of the business.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, and it was staring us in the face the whole time. And we just, like, we were blind to it because we had this arbitrary constraint. And so it was, in that case, it was removing the constraints that opened up, uh, the path that we eventually went down.

Speaker B: So you knew the problem well and you knew it existed. It was just finding a different path to solve it. So. Yeah. Was it sort of the clarity of the problem that kept you going? Your desire that you fall in love with that problem? Like, I guess I'm curious of why you didn't just quit right when you had all these other paths you could choose?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a good question. I think a big part of the reason for that is stubbornness. Um, that's still a factor today, to be honest, is just like refusing to fail, refusing for the story of this business to be that we failed and gave up. I think we both sort of shared that quality and that we, to a fault, almost like really like to see things through m and believe that if we follow the right process and we do the right things and act in good faith, that like, we'll eventually be successful. But underpinning all of that was the problem. Um, I always see business this way. When I think about, I have this like 4x MVP framework. When I think about the requirements to build a great business, I think about like, the first minimum viable thing is the problem. You gotta have a clear problem that's like the foundation for everything. Then you have to have a point of view on why that problem exists in the first place. Um, whether that's that it's never been solved or that it was solved at a time, but the world has changed in such a way that the old solutions no longer work. And then you have to have a minimum viable process that when you follow these steps, that problem gets solved in a repeatable way. And we really just kept getting deeper and deeper and deeper into those first two P's, the problem and the point of view. And that's really what kept us going. It was like, we know that there's something here and if somebody can solve this, then it will be a big business and it will have a big impact. And we see how much small firms are struggling with this.

Speaker B: Okay, cool. So pull the constraints away. The path became maybe less defined, but more clear in the sense of, uh, whatever it takes, we're going to figure it out. Sticky notes all over the wall. Talk about how you then created some momentum. Was it quick and easy? Was it less clear and slow? What did the next four quarters look like after you pulled those constraints away?

Speaker A: Um, they were incredibly stressful, but there was an incredible amount of momentum. And so we did something that I believe very strongly in and has always served me really well. It's just not fun. But, um, I think more entrepreneurs should do it. And a lot of entrepreneurs that have been successful that I've spoken to have done this, which is we got on calls the following week. All we had was an idea on a bunch of sticky notes on a wall that at the time we took a photo of because we didn't have virtual whiteboards at the time. Um, and we started, we started convincing people to give us money for this thing. It's like, yeah, yeah, pre sold it, but like, um, and generally I, like we had pre sold other versions of Parakeeto in the past, when we framed it as a pre sale, in this case, we got on and because it was mostly services, we were like, yeah, this is like, this is how it works. This is what we do. This is what it costs. And then people started saying yes. And we went from being stuck at like 10, 20 grand a month to within 3 months doing like 70k in bookings in a single month. So. And then it was like, oh shit, we actually need to like do all of this. And so that entire first year was just scrambling to like, I would like get on calls with customers, make a promise about what was going to be on the next call, and then get off the call and be like, we need to build this by next Tuesday. And that was like the entire year. But selling ourselves into those problems was, it was painful, but I don't know that we would have been able to accomplish what we did without that level of pressure.

Speaker B: Yeah, so it's almost the classic, like you were building the plane as you were flying it, right? Like getting these commitments, you knew if you got close to the problem, you had a way to solve it. A little less defined on what that would be.

Speaker A: And Ben and I, um, for better or for worse, we, we, we have a lot of integrity. And so we were willing to sacrifice everything before we would let a commitment that we made to a customer fall through the tracks, you know, including sacrifice our evenings and weekends. And we did that for a long time.

Speaker B: So let's fast forward today because I think you would describe Parakeeto very differently than when we, when the story started out. What's, uh, it might be at another crossroads today. What. Tell us a little bit about where Parakeeto is evolving now. When you think about momentum. You know, sometimes I think what I like about your story is it's startups are not, you know, it's the, if you zoom out, it might look like up and to the right, but when you zoom in it's like way up, down, sideways, backwards, loop de loop. Right. Like that's the real life of any company.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So tell us about what Kirby path you're on now.

Speaker A: Yeah, so I mean today I would describe Parakeeto as a technology enabled consulting company. So we have built a bunch of technology that helps us do what we do. Um, and what we do is we help agencies measure and improve their profitability and we sort of play the role of profit manager, which, you know, is sort of like a term that I'm trying to coin because the job in that small agency, it doesn't really have a name today, but we, we would all recognize that if we run an agency. It's like when you. Let's imagine you have a team of 20 or 30 people. You have the CEO, you have the finance person, you have the ops person. But whose job is it to sit in the middle and pull all of that information together and make it make sense? And usually it's like one of those three people sort of gets m volun told like, hey, this is your job now, go figure it out. And they have no idea what they're doing. And it's also not a good use of any of their time. So that's sort of the job that we do. We sit there, we pull all the data together. The technology we've built helps us pull that data together, get it cleaned up, and then we build reports, we coach our clients on them. Um, so that's what we do today. And there was a. I'll jump in

Speaker B: on that quick because I think we have both coached or served or delivered help for agencies. And how many times have we seen. And I was there as uh, CEO of Lemonly, where you grow and actually make less money. Right. Like no one's sitting around. There's this knock on these agencies. They can be amazing businesses. If you're asking yourself, are we making money? Right. Selling things top line revenue is not an indicator of a good agency versus bottom line profit. Right.

Speaker A: Yeah. This is sort of the blessing and the curse. Ah. Of what defines a service based business, which is that you're in the business of human capital. And when you sell something, your cost basis is determined by how much time it takes to get it done. And unfortunately you can make assumptions about that, but you can't really predict it up front. It's not very route. And if you aren't installing the right metrics and the right measurements around that, it can run away from you very quickly. And we've seen this many times before, as I'm sure you have. The bigger business where the founders are making less money than they were when it was half the size. Um, and a lot of times they're suffering from indigestion, not starvation. They just happen to feel the same. And on the P and L that they're looking at, they look the same too.

Speaker B: Yeah, stress goes up, profit goes down. And I think you're exactly right that no one's wearing that. I like that profit manager hat. And it might be a slash rule, but who's in? You know, I'm just going to keep selling things and you're going to just keep delivering those things. But we're not asking ourselves, are we making money on those things?

Speaker A: Yeah. And are we aligned? Are we aligned? Like, when I sell something, am I. How do I know that the price is good? How do I know that it's setting us up for profitability, like at the whole agency level? And when I pass that off to delivery, are the expectations structured in such a way that it plugs into the way that we then run the project, measure the progress, et cetera. And when I'm talking to finance, like, are we speaking the same language? And so even just, uh, simple things like what metrics are we talking about and how do we define them and what do they mean? Are things that are often, like, not actually as clear as you would need them to be? And so those are sort of all the things that we want to come in and solve for. Uh, and still today, a lot of consulting. Um, Cool. Yeah.

Speaker B: So, yeah, I mean, tech enabled consulting company makes so much sense to me. It's like, why would you, how could you not be in 2025? Right. Tech enabled to some degree. Um, not only internally to give, to deliver better services and give better insights, but like, I'm guessing that makes it stickier too, when they're running your reports, your dashboards, your technology as well.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yep.

Speaker B: Uh, so let's go to what, uh, are other ways maybe non parakeeto, that you've seen momentum impact your life? Could be. I know you're a big fitness guy. I was also thinking about, uh, writing a book. You co authored a book with three other people, which is a unique experience, I imagine. Uh, software is a science. Uh, tell us, which way do you want to go? Where have you put momentum into action?

Speaker A: Um, I think software as a science

Speaker B: is

Speaker A: a good story about this because that's a project that really did lose a lot of momentum, um, at a certain point and then sort of gained momentum back the will and started pushing. Yeah. And eventually we, you know, we published the book and it was very successful and it continues to be very successful and we're very proud of it. But, um, yeah, co authoring a book with four people was challenging. And, uh, all four of those people were very busy. Like the busiest people that you could possibly meet. Um, all products of the Dan Martell world. So calendar blocking and virtual assistants and trying to coordinate a meeting between the four of us was absolute rocket science. Um, and so it really is a miracle that the book got published. Um, and we actually wrote it, I think we rewrote the book eight times.

Speaker B: Oh, wow.

Speaker A: We went through like, yeah, like eight drafts of it and then went back and rewrote every single word from COVID to cover, uh, before it ended up getting published. So, yeah, it started to really feel like a grind, um, through the middle of that process.

Speaker B: And maybe the question I'm wondering is if someone's listening, thinking about, they could be on a board, they could have a couple co founders, they could. I mean, heck, maybe it's their family and there's lots of, uh, cooks in the kitchen, let's say. How do you tackle, like a big project, like a book for Claire? Because what you said. Yeah, all four of these folks don't willy nilly do things like, if you're going to write a book, you're going to have a game plan, I'm guessing, to write a book. So how do you do something like that with four people?

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that's sort of the challenge that we ran into is we had a game plan for the book and we ran that game plan and then it didn't go the way that we expected. Um, and then the challenge was all four of us have extremely high standards where we were like, if we're not going to write a real good book, then we're not writing a book at all. And that was sort of the challenges, the process that we were running where it was like the four of us and we would get on, we did the outline and we would do interviews, then we had a team of writers that would write the chapters and we review them and provide the feedback. And after many, many, many cycles of this, we were like, this is still only 90% good and it needs to be 100% good. We will not accept anything less than 100% good. And then eventually had to rewrite the whole thing from the start. And so I think throughout that whole process, the most important thing was expectations. Every time that we sort of had a realization that unblocked things, or there was a frustration that got released or something that was blocked, that wasn't moving forward, that ended up getting moved forward, underneath that was just misalignment, uh, of expectations. What we were expecting from each other, what we were expecting from the book, what we were expecting, uh, from the team that we were working with. And that was what underpinned every issue that we had in that process. And when everyone's really, really busy, um, the clarity around those things is so important.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really good insight. And I want to connect a few dots that. That may or may not be there. But I'm thinking about Parakeeto and the moment where you and Ben decide to, like, put all the sticky notes on the board and be like, we need a new path. And then I'm thinking about software as a science, where the four of you, like, this is not 90% is good, but we need a hundred. And you blow it up and start, like, what are the emotions there? How do you have the courage to choose a new path when this idea of sunken cost, right? You're like, we've already written 90% of the book, or we've already built huge. We spent four years building this product. How do you know when you're willing to switch gears, turn, like, hit the. Make a left turn?

Speaker A: You know, I. I think this is true. And it just sort of manifested itself in different ways in. In both of those examples where, with the book, you know, the thing that we always said to each other was, like, you can't unpublish a book, right? So, like, once this goes out into the world and it's sitting on someone's shelf, like, you can't go and take it back. It's there, and for eternity, someone can go open it up, and your words are there for them to consume. And so, like, are you willing to stamp this for life? That's, like, the reality with the book. Um, and so I think, again, these are four people that care very, very deeply about our integrity and our message and our impact on the world. And, you know, are thinking about legacy. And so we were willing to make great personal sacrifices to make sure that, like, our little stamp on the world was going to be something that we believe that we could be proud of for eternity. And I think in many ways, I viewed Parakeeto, um, throughout these hardest periods of time in that way. Um, the business, but also the story of the business and the story of how we treated customers even when things were challenging or whatever things went wrong, uh, in the same way. And was willing to go to great lengths to make sure that that little stamp, that impression that we were leaving on the world was good.

Speaker B: I love that, Marcel. I think that's really admirable. And I think, um is a good compass for the projects we choose, the companies we build, the personal endeavors we strive for, um, as a reflection of ourselves. The story of it, how we feel about it sometimes matters, not sometimes should probably matter more than how it impacts our bank account. Right. Or how many people like that post. Um, so, okay, so we've been talking about how to shift gears, how to switch paths. I believe once you have the path, then you have to find pace and create velocity. And that's where momentum comes from. So maybe what are you excited about today in any aspect, personal or professional? What are you running toward right now that really gets you going?

Speaker A: It's funny that you asked me this question because we were having a little preamble, um, right before we started the recording. And, uh, this is public information, but, like, a few weeks ago, my co founder, Ben, um, him and I, I parted ways and he moved on from the company and took a great job and we're very excited for him. And, uh, now I'm in this kind of weird position where I have again, removed a lot of constraints from the business that were sort of present when we both had to agree on what the business was going to look like and how it was going to serve the two of us. Now it's just like, totally up to me. And so I don't really have a clear answer for you. I can tell you about things that I'm, like, sort of excited about, but I'm very much at another crossroads. It feels a lot like that moment when I was putting sticky notes up on the board trying to figure out, um, what's next for me and what's next for Parakeeto. So, um, it's an interesting place to be and, uh, it's the paradox of choice where I feel very fortunate to have a lot of great opportunities, uh, in front of me. But that doesn't necessarily make it any easier to figure out which one I want to commit to. So. Something I'm working on.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I'm certain the answer is probably a mixture, but knowing, you know, you're, uh. I love this. The concept of antifragile. You'd be a very resilient person. You would be willing to bet on yourself. So are you full of more excitement of the unknown or a little bit of fear of what to do? Like, what's the mixture of the cocktail of emotions right now on that?

Speaker A: Uh, no, that. That has sort of been, um. I know you're going to ask me this question, right? Of, like, what is one of my superpowers?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's coming next.

Speaker A: I don't know if you want to call it confidence or naivety, but it's some. Somewhere in between those two things, somewhere on that spectrum where, um, I really do believe that I can kind of figure anything out. And I do bet on myself and I'm very cool under pressure, um, and especially in Very tense situations. And so, uh, it's mostly just excitement. And I think the challenge is really like, I'm looking at all the things that are in front of me and I know that I could be successful in just about any of them. And then the question is just like, yeah, to your point, what's the thing that I feel like I'm going to want to do for the next decade? And that is going to be the stamp I want to leave on the world. And that is, uh, a much more difficult question to answer. And uh, especially when things are very busy right now, so I don't really have a whole lot of head space to sit back and really contemplate.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's a great filter, that line of thinking. Um, and I would agree, I could see that could be your superpower, that you are willing to bet on yourself regardless of scenario or circumstance and lean into that kind of discomfort. Um, so maybe instead, let's end here. Sometimes the different paths and the change happens for external reasons, like my co founder left or uh, I got a divorce or I am moving here. Something that has to force a change. But I think lots of times there's folks listening who might be listening to this, who are feeling more of something in their gut that maybe they think they could change, but maybe aren't willing to be as super powerful as you and embrace the discomfort. So let's end there. How do you, what would you say to someone who thinks that they maybe aren't where they want to be and they have potential for more, but are afraid of that, lean into that change and discomfort.

Speaker A: One of the things that I was afraid of when I first started my first ever business, I had a great job at Apple, um, as an account manager and I had sort of had like a middle class life on a silver platter. I was doing well, I was moving up, you know, like I was sort of a young rising star, um, on that team. And I was terrified of quitting that job and starting my own business, thinking like, if, if that doesn't work out, then like, I'm gonna have given up this incredible opportunity. And I remember I called my dad up one day. He um, had worked for the government for like 20 years. So I was fully expecting him to be like, don't be a dummy and quit this great job that you have. Like, you were lucky to get it in the first place. And I was, I was under qualified for it. Um, but instead what he said was, you know, when I was your age, I had all kinds of ideas and I never gave myself a chance to pursue them and I've regretted it ever since. And so if you got to move back in and sleep on my couch or whatever, like, I'm here to support you. But like, I believe in you and I, you know, you should do what you're drawn to do. And so I did. I left. And what I realized very shortly after taking that risk and betting on myself was that it was impossible to fail. Because as long as I was showing up with integrity and I was doing my best and I was doing right by the people that I was meeting, the speed at which I built a network and connections and valuable experience and self confidence and like a much wider breadth of skills that you sort of, uh, are forced to develop when you're, you know, hunting for what you have to eat. I very quickly realized that, like, I will never need to worry about finding a job ever again.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And that is sort of like, that goes on your personal balance sheet very quickly when you start a business again. As long as you have integrity and you're not ripping people off. And so the, uh, the perception of risk, if you're kind of in that position, um, it's really not real. Like, if you're a good entrepreneur, understand that like, you are the most hireable person on planet earth and give yourself some credit for how big and wide your network is. There's a lot of people that know that about you. And so you really can't fail. The worst case scenario is you get somebody's dream job. And uh, that's not such a bad situation.

Speaker B: I love that story. That's such a good story. And I love the words from your dad and the support, the ability to like, view our parents lives as sort of a time machine to kind of get, uh, you know, it's almost like he saw a redo for him, but through you. Uh, and you're so right about that, right? We both know the saying, no pressure, no diamonds, and what that's created for you by building this business and going through these windy paths, um, gives you this diamond to take on for the rest of your life. So. Well, I appreciate, uh, the time today. We'll have to do another part due in six months to see, uh, which paths you're going down. Uh, but I love the update and thanks so much for coming on here today, Marcel.

Speaker A: I appreciate you having me, John. It's a pleasure and uh, yeah, very excited for the rest of the stories from this show and what that manifests in terms of a book. If I'm allowed to say that, but you can cut it out if I'm not.

Speaker B: All right. I love it. All right, that's our discussion with Marcel from Parakeeto. Thanks, Marcel, for the time, for the honesty, the vulnerability, for sharing your story exactly where you're at today. And I wasn't joking. I'm really excited to have another conversation in, say, six months to see where Marcel's at and where. Which paths he's going down. So, lemore listeners, uh, you can subscribe to the lemore podcast wherever you listen. That's Spotify. That's Apple. Go there, subscribe, leave us a review if you can. That's really helpful and gives us good feedback for future episodes. And also, you can go and watch the show on YouTube. YouTube.com johntmyer underscore to watch the lead more show. As always, friends, take care and be well.