#207 - AI, Delegation & Hiring: The Blueprint for Scaling a Business | Adam Spector

Most founders mess up and say, Well, I have to go run the backoffs operations. I have to figure out payroll. I have to figure out finance because that's what a good CEO does. That is BS.

You are stupid if you think that is true. And I will tell you right now, your company will fail. You will drown in all the admin. You will stop doing the thing you love.

Your product quality will go down and your company will fail. Welcome back for another episode. We're going to get into it. Sometimes I start with big energy.

Sometimes I start a little bit low. Today I have to start with big energy because the person on the show and the guest is going to come even bigger than this. So I got to make sure I at least substantiate my role here as the host. Um, but today we have Adam Spectre.

And I looked at my production team and they said, Be careful. His team said you should interview Adam S. And I went, This sounds like that combined with Spectre sounds like a James Bond podcast episode. So Adam Spectrum, he's a co-founder of Chore.

It's a platform focused on simplifying home services and making everyday home maintenance more reliable and accessible. He's building in one of the most fragmented and operationally complex industries, tackling the challenges of trust, quality, and consistency at scale. That's a lot to go in forty five minutes. But Adam, welcome to the necessary entrepreneur.

Thank you. I I apologize to your your your your team there. They the little bit part that we're wrong. We don't do stuff with homes per se.

We do we we run operations for startups. It or really every small business, but we we do the back office operations, right? So the whole thesis for every business in the world is you're a founder who has a superpower. I thought if you're crazy enough to go start a business, you better have a superpower in something.

So why why is it crazy to start a business? A couple entrepreneurs are sitting here talking to each other. There's millions of entrepreneurs in this country. There's a lot of them that I want to get in this.

I don't know if they fail. My mean take is they quit. I think that's pretty much true. Um, a large majority quit.

No one knows just how hard it is. Like, it is really, really difficult to build a business. Like, that is that is hard, right? You need to go out there and convince someone to go buy your pen.

Like, whatever your thing is, like, why is your pen better than anyone else's? How are you gonna market? Even if you build the best pen in the world, how are you gonna market it? That's really hard.

Distribution's really freaking tough. Then you have to get up every day and do it over and over and over and over again, and you cannot stop. And so, like, this isn't. Yes, you can get to a point where it's a path to freedom in some ways.

And certainly you're your own boss, which is amazing. But usually when you're the boss, like let me be clear, when you're the boss, it means it all comes back up to you and you get to deal with all the problems when things break down. There's no one else in the end. So we were talking about you threw out about pens, why your pen's better.

So do you think it's important to develop the best pen or is it to develop one that's just marketable and be better at branding and marketing it? Man, I mean, like if I have to choose, it's the marketing part. Like in the end, like you need to be able to sell something to anyone, and that's more important than building the best. Like if you if you build the best technical pen in the world, but no one knows it exists, like who cares?

So like you need to be able to sell it just as well as it has to be better. Um, in in but I mean, you yeah, you it's the selling and marketing is more important. Doesn't that go back to um the moment where hey, sell me this pin? What what's what are they trying to teach us when the speaker is speaking to a thousand people and he's looking at the audience who came there and learned how to do something better, be a salesperson, run and he said, Sell me this pin, and people keep failing and failing and failing until someone does it right.

What's happening there? What's happening is people don't know how to they they're not reading the room. They don't know how to understand like the psychology of the person they're talking to and actually explain it to them like what what gets that person? What is the thing that makes them excited enough to give it over your hard earned money?

Like, think about the restaurant you ate at for lunch today or the the thing you're gonna go buy on Amazon. Why did you choose that item? Why did you choose that? Like there is a bunch of psychological triggers that are going into those things, many of which you probably don't even understand.

We don't In many ways. But what is making that decision, handing over your hard-earned cash for something is really difficult to do. Right. That's the kind of the beauty of capitalism, is you need to work at it and you need to build something that is superior to get people being willing to do it.

And so why did I buy this pen as a good example? Like I bought this pen because I read about it on some random blog that was talking about really cool pens. I like a little kind of fidget spinner to some extent. I thought this is cool.

It looks cool. And I don't know, I was in the mood for some random purchase on Amazon, so I bought it. And it wasn't crazy expensive. So as busy as you are, um, we're gonna get into a bit later about being an angel investor in multiple startups and um you said reading a blog.

Why read blogs? Man, I read so much. I think the best entrepreneurs in the world read a ton and are deep, heavy consumers of knowledge. Um, many of them read lots and lots of biographies.

I've done a lot of that, although I haven't recently did a read to read a ton of biographies. I listen to a lot of podcasts, by the way, as well. Um, why read blogs? Because I want to learn things every single day.

I need new ideas. I'm always trying to stay at the edge of what the best is that's out there for my industry. And not just my in I mean, obviously you need to be in your industry. We want to pull in ideas from other places.

Like actually, what makes humans really good at things actually why AI, if we ever want if we want to talk about AI at all, but like why AI is still not necessarily as good is humans can synthesize lots of data from places. You're not gonna remember it all, right? You and I forget lots of things every day. But the ability to synthesize data from different sources and then make intuitive leaps or leaps of faith on something like, wow, I just pulled this data from I'm I saw this pen and I had this, you know, water bottle.

And they're both made out of aluminum, probably. And what if I combined them and had like a a pen cup or something? And this is going too crazy with my analogy here. But like but you can start creating cool ideas and make it that can be really useful in this other industry.

And and A doesn't really do that today. It can answer your question specifically, but doesn't doesn't come up with new ideas. Do you think it would entrepreneurs do? Do you think it will?

And the r the important reason for that question is aren't we supposed to interpret what the future's gonna be? That's what the big that's what the big folks, that's what an Elon Musk does, that's what a Jeff Bezos did, right? They're interpreting the future and everybody calls them crazy because they're not operating now. They're operating where it's going.

Correct. Skinny where the point is gonna be, right? Wayne G Wayne Grabsky. And so the challenge is right now is is AI going to be agentic?

I mean a A AI, look, I'm pretty red-pilled. I live in San Francisco. I'm I'm deeply red-pilled on AI. I think AI is going to be able to start coming up with those intuitive ideas and new ideas.

It is probably going to take everyone's jobs. I think there's a lot of things we should be deeply concerned about, but also I also think can be very optimistic about the future in a a massive world of abundance that we're heading into as well. So it's kind of I I personally have a combination of deep fear. And deep excitement.

So if you have that, a lot of people have anxiety now. So you said deep fear, you invoked it. A lot of people have anxiety which causes depression. You're not talking about that.

You're still moving forward. How do you how do you find this distinction in this silver lining between deep fear still causes you to take massive action versus a lot of the world deep fear causes them to have anxiety, depression, and no action? Yeah, no, like that's a great point. And it and it is, I know lots of people certainly have like anxiety and it does stop them.

Um, for me, it it and I do, like I I literally feel like I'm living in two worlds sometimes with AI and what is happening and where it's going. I'm like living in the normal world, taking my kids to school, they go to normal school, all those sorts of things. And then this AI world where I'm like, my gosh, everything is changing in in I'm I'm standing on quicksand right now. The world is changing so fast.

Um, how do I do it? Is like I feel like I don't have a choice. Number one. Like you have to keep moving forward.

I can't just hide in a little hole and and be like uh, you know, put my head it head in the sand and and hope nothing happens. I need to be I might as well be a part of it as best I can and step up and and do that. Then the alternative that wouldn't make my kids proud, it wouldn't make my wife proud, it wouldn't make me proud. So I'm gonna get up every day and keep working hard and hopefully be a small little part of the change that's gonna make the world a better place.

Um I don't I don't know, I just feel like I don't have a choice otherwise. Yeah. Um, it where where do you operate from? You know, a lot of people will have an underlying principle or value or the thing that drives them, right?

Simon Senec, he's You gotta find your why and ever everybody comes up with their thing, but do you have like an underlying purpose? Is that too big of an a question? No, not at all. I I think Peter D.

Mainus called it's like your your it's like your massive something purpose in life or whatever. he has a good statement for that that. You know, I I don't have a I don't probably don't have a great answer. I think my purpose is to my purpose is really like look, I I want to leave the world a little bit better than I than I when I arrived.

I kind of have had that purpose really at every place I've gone. I mean, I was president of the student government in college and um vice president in in law school. And and for me it's always been like, Can I leave the world just a little bit better? Than when I got here, right?

And that goes obviously every single day, but also like picking up trash on the street when I see it just laying there. Um, doing it, and I don't always do that. Sometimes I just walk right over it. And then I think later, I'm like, hmm, I just walked over that pizza trash and I should have just picked it up to make this place a little bit cleaner and nicer.

Um, so I that's probably my purpose. Largely is like I want to make the world a little bit better. And if I can do that, if I can, you know, if I can create a great company, I hope we get to be multi-billions of dollars valuation. But if I can make a company that just employs a lot of people, creates a great job for them, um, and they can achieve their purpose or whatever they want for their families and lives, that's also something to be proud of.

And I'm and I'm good with all this. But in the end, so that's the bigger one. The smaller one is I just want to learn new things every day. And I get to do that.

I'm pulled in a lot of different directions right now. And it is, I was telling my coach last night about this. It is stressful, tiring, but also a lot of fun. Like I think mentally it.

pulls your brain in so many ways to be pulled. I have so many different streams I'm working on right now. And, you know, no one on your team understands that. And that's sort of hard to try to be like, daddy, like I don't have time for this.

There are other bigger things. Um but that's also a that the learning and education and knowledge I get from that is pretty exciting and fun. With everything you've you're doing, you've accomplished, like you you know that you can do it. And that's a big statement, but I'm going somewhere with this.

But you have a coach. Tell me the benefit of that. Having a coach. Having someone who you can reach out to and talk to about different things that go on.

I I've had coaches on and off. Um, I think some people would say they should have a coach all the time. I do think as a founder, especially as a solo founder, but even as a I've I've had, so this is my fourth company, right? I've had co-founders for the first three.

This one I'm a solo founder. So having someone you can talk to about things that you you probably don't even, I love my executive team, but There's some things I probably don't want to talk with them about, or they don't even want to hear me talk about, right? Like like they don't want to hear why I'm like stressed. Like they don't want to hear that.

And in fact, I don't want them to know that I'm stressed because that that might create anxiety in them. Um, and and so uh having a coach is sort of an outlet for some of that. Um, and in being able to just have someone to talk to who's been there, done there before and and understand you. Yeah, so it's more than just a professional therapist.

That's fifty percent of it, but isn't fifty percent also the person that knows how to process and give great strategic advice from outside the bubble? Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, my my coach has worked in industries like Chore before. He has good thoughts about where we're going, what we're doing things, how we're going about it.

Um, he gets it. And so that's really worthwhile to have those conversations too, to think through what we're building and how we're building it. Um, and and I appreciate that aspect of him as being someone who's sort of been there, done that. As we jump into chore here and really figure out what the business is and what you guys think you're solving for, um give advice since you've you're actively engaging with a coach, give advice on how someone, what you've learned through your experience for them to find a coach that fits the best for them and that's really beneficial and valuable.

Yeah, I look, you should interview the coaches the same way you would interview an executive team. Um, most coaches are gonna offer like a f a free session of some sort to talk with them and see if there's a vibe. See if you get them, see if you like what they're talking about. Do you feel like this is someone you might want to talk to and l on a regular basis and get advice from on a regular basis?

if the answer is yes, then that might be the right fit. If the answer is like, man, like that feels really I look, most good coaches are gonna be expensive. So you have to be okay with that price. Um, but Once you get over the price, can you feel like, Hey, am I gonna get the value here that's gonna help me move to the next level?

And that's hard to know up front, but everyone should get a coach to start with and then see where it takes you. Yeah. So what do you guys think? Not to go into this big marketing deep dive about the businesses stuff, but what do you you you starting three other businesses having co founders and Angel investing in so many more?

Why chore? Why now? So, I mean, it's to be clear, chore in one version of an or another has been around for six and half years. So that's sort of one thing to point.

So why now? It's been around a long time. Um, although the current version three and a half years. Uh why now?

Pretty simple. The the world is moving into a place where more and more entrepreneurs are starting businesses. More people are starting businesses in general and becoming an entrepreneur. Um, all of those people, as we mentioned right when we started, right?

You have a a purpose in the world. You have a superpower. If you have to spend any of that time doing back office chores, your company will almost certainly fail. Right.

I was talking to you about how I was spending my time today dealing with a bunch of marketing stuff and kind of like updating passwords. Um, that should have happened with other people on the team. It didn't. So I'm doing it now.

That is a bad use of my time. Right. And that is where I should be outsourcing it or delegating it to other people as much as I can. The weird thing about back office work is most people think, I can go figure that, figure that out.

One that's like, okay, yes, I get it. You can go figure out how to run payroll. Cool. Like you can do it, but I can also go figure out how to do my books.

And I can go figure out how to um build a server to run my website on it. And I can do all these things. Always the question you have to ask is that a good use of my time and a good use of my skill set? You're great at real estate, you're great at podcasting.

Are you are you the I you have you have a a team to help you make the podcast great, right? You could be the editor. You could be the editor, you could be the poster, you could do all of those things yourself. You absolutely could.

You don't. So my question to you is like, why don't you do it? It costs you money to hand it give it to other people. Yeah, so I am early in my career, people didn't think I was going to be a good, I don't even like the word delegate, but they didn't think I was gonna hand off things to other folks.

And they had no idea that I was yearning and building something to be able to do it. But here's the challenge that I felt to really build trustworthy, credible, capable people who have a sense of ownership who literally will take the thing and do it better than you would do it. Now you have to build that so you can scale. The challenge is when you're scaling at a hyper speed, Is finding enough capable people that want to be a part of your team that literally have the know-how and they want to.

It's a huge challenge right now. Yep. Y correct. I'm gonna talk about that, but you didn't answer my question.

I'm gonna push you I'm gonna push you right back. Why why why not do this work yourself? Well all know I I can do other things, I can make a lot more per hour. I I I ask that's it.

That's so there's the answer, right? And this is something most founders don't get through their heads. And and no offense to founders, this is where they're really dumb. They they are pennywise and pound foolish in most cases.

And they don't realize if you are a pen maker or a pie or make pies and you make the world's best pies or a great podcaster, right? Like you make more money doing the thing you love. You enjoy it more. You make more money doing it, and your business will be more successful because of it.

And yet most founders mess up and say, well, I have to go run the backoffs operations. I have to figure out payroll. I have to figure out finance because that's what a good CEO does. That is BS.

You are stupid if you think that is true. And I will tell you right now, your company will fail. You will drown in all the admin. You will stop doing the thing you love.

Your product quality will go down and your company will fail. End of story. And that's why Tor exists, by the way. Yes.

So there you go. That's a great that's a good that's a good marketing and sales statement. You need to use it. If you don't use chore, use something else.

That's a great salesman that does that, right? Make sure you're using one of these systems. Go a little bit in depth on your journey and where you can help someone work through the process of turning over the areas of your business that you shouldn't be doing. Because there's this argument, right?

And getting to know Adam a little bit here is that he believes, I I think he believes that you should hire slow and fire fast. Right. And so there's people that there's there's big brands out here that say, hire fast, fire faster. There's there's people that have all these perspectives, right?

You're like, yeah, maybe you'll disagree with it, but but hire slow, fire fast. Take us through that in when we're trying to scale our business and hand over something we shouldn't be doing to someone that it appears they have the expertise to do. Yeah. So I mean a few things.

And it's funny, I'm actually moving more into the world of like higher hire fast and fire fast a little bit more, but it depends a little bit on the role. Um, but what what do you really need to do well? And we have some job openings right now for athor. And so I'm trying to get this we've hired lots of people and we've we've some of really down pat, but other ones we're trying to get better at, which is how do we build a great hiring system?

In other words, like how do you really build a good job description so you understand what what are you hiring for? What what do you really want someone to do? So we talked a little about we're redoing our marketing at chore. And I'm like, what do we really need a person to do?

What are we really looking to hire? And I'm not I I don't know if it's clear. So I might change the job description actually this afternoon on one of those roles. Cause I'm not sure it's totally clear to me.

So if I don't really know what the person's gonna do, give me a break. We can't hire that person's we're not gonna hire the right person. If they come in, that person's probably gonna fail because I won't even know what to manage them towards. So you need to know what you're looking for, number one.

Um, once you do that, have a good process in place. What does it mean to hire like Create, spend a little bit of time. It doesn't take much time with AI, building out a whole plan of like, what does that role look like? How is it going to work?

How am I going to test for it? up be ahead of time. Maybe give someone a test case and pay them a little bit of money. So we actually have a new system in place where we pay, it's actually whole process where we'll we'll pay people to do a small test, a bit of work to show us what they can do.

But part of that is a secret part of the thing, because this is a test for us. so hopefully li people listening might hear this, but like. We want to know if you follow up to make sure you get paid. We'll absolutely pay you, but we're not gonna pay you right off the bat.

I want you to hit me up again, big, hey, like you said you'd pay us. Pay me. Like, I didn't see a a notice about it. What's up?

Big, great, here's here's payment. But I want you to I want I want to know you're proactive and we'll follow up. So you've identified that following up is a massive key metric in accomplishing the tasks of these roles. Can't fake that with AI right now.

I don't you can probably fake the the tests we have you do, but you can't fake the man, like Adam said he was gonna pay me. He didn't. I'm gonna assume best intentions. Like maybe he he didn't forget, like, you know, maybe he forgot.

So I'm just gonna hit him up one more time. Hey, like, is payment coming through? Cool. Um, with I said, when people come on board, we've gotten really good about this at shore, and I'm I'm with some new salespeople have been really good about this.

If within the first week or two you were not hitting certain metrics that I'm expecting around like Proactivity, following up, getting we have a clear check we have a very clear checklist of things to do. If you're not doing that, like I just don't have time for it. And it's done, you're out, we're moving on. No hard feelings.

The fast you if if I know it's not gonna be a fit early on, it probably not gonna it won't be a fit in six or twelve months either. oh Did you have to learn this? Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's hard, it's hard to fire people and it's hard to sort of trust your gut.

And if it's like not working. Um, you know, you know, it w an example with a new sales guy we had. I I gave him a very clear to actually I fired two sales guys very recently, um, both within the first two weeks of being with us. Um, in the hiring email with them, I said, here's the first four weeks, what it's gonna look like and what the expectations are.

Um, one guy asked in in a public forum, which we're all about public stuff. I don't mind it. He Hey, like I would really like to see what the plan is for my first time, my time here. And I wrote him back in a more private channel.

I'm like, hey, like, do you remember the email I sent you with your offer with the full outline of this? He's like, I forgot. It's like, man, like, I'm your C I'm your I'm the CEO and I'm your boss for this role. If you're forgetting that, what are you going to forget with your clients that you're trying to sell to?

So that was issue number one. The other guy, we talked with him a bunch about it. And like, the goal is like you need to start hitting target, like you need to start going do outbound before you fully get our pitch. I get it.

you need to start learning our pitch, which it asks me questions about it. But then two, I want you to start doing a lot of outreach. Just like start understanding how you're doing outreach to people. What does your cadence look like?

Start hitting up a lot of folks. You know, you got 40 hours a week, you got 40 hours a week minimum to get stuff done. We don't do very few calls internally at chore. You're not on sales calls yet.

So you got a lot of time to get good at this stuff and a lot of time to start doing outreach. What do you do in these moments? Two weeks in I was like, Okay, how far have gotten? He'd emailed four people.

And and the other his the other guy in the group had had put a list of twenty thousand people. Yeah. It's probably somewhere in between, right? Yeah, I mean, for sure.

But like you I need to know that you can move fast and follow these instructions. And if you don't, by the way, ask a lot of questions. This is something people mess up all the time. If if it's unclear, you're unsure.

Or even if you know, ask a lot of questions because communication is so we should talk about communication. It's key. uh I'll be here in a second. So you you touched on earlier that you're always looking to learn new things.

You referenced that. So then what do you learn from failures of is it they end up being the type of employee that's commensurate with the way that they're onboarded? Do you do you look back and look at all these these metrics to say, hey, what do we learn and how do we keep this from happening? Because what I've told our team over the past two to three years, I said, guys, you you're thinking about this wrong.

You're thinking it's expensive to let people go and fire people. No, no, no, no. You're late on this. It's really, really expensive to hire them.

Because if they're not hired the right way, it's already going to be really expensive and inefficient, not accomplishing goals. And I'm not talking about expensive from the salary. You better go ahead and look down the road. If we don't do this right and we don't take full responsibility, I can tell you how much it's going to cost us.

So a few answers there. One, yes, it's sure we do very deep, um, we do retros on every single person who leaves and doesn't work out. Um, we try to learn from it and and update and change how we're hiring, what we're looking at, all this stuff. So absolutely we've gotten I think our system is really good now.

We hire great people and most, but it's still we still mess up, to be clear. And that goes to the second point that you made, where people today still so I'm a huge believer in the idea of like you want to automate out or outsource basically as many things as possible. Hire as few people as you can. Do not hire new people for roles.

So where I said we're redoing a lot of things in our marketing team. I'm gonna do my best not to hire, rehire from most of those roles. Um, I'm gonna see if we can build it with AI or outsource it to to to outsource specialists. What people mess up and what would a lot of people think it's like, I need to have someone in house with me.

I have that role in in in person. Well, let's pretend going back to this like pen maker. You're a pen maker. If you're a pen maker, what do you focus on?

You probably focus on building the best pens. So should you hire a marketing team like internally that you're gonna manage? You're the world best pen PhD. And now you need to go figure out how to go hire for a marketer.

You've never done that role in your life, you have no idea what to do. Do you actually think, like realistically, think that role is gonna work out for you? No. So guess what?

It's not just the cost at salary. And I there's numbers. I actually posted something about this a few probably a month or two ago. But let's pretend the person's making a hundred K a year in that marketing role, let's say.

The cost actually to you as a business, if you look into the realistic amount of how often they will fail, is something like two two and a half X their base salary. Cause the likelihood is within 12 months they will fail. Maybe that's what I think 18 months. Within 18 months, they will fail.

Either they will leave because they're looking for another job, they won't be doing the work that you expect, the outcomes will suck. Even more likely they might fail within six months. And now you have to start the whole process over again recruiting, training, managing. Hiring, you've lost all this time.

Instead, just hire an outsourced partner. Say, Hey, your job is a great, great marketing for me. I get I'm gonna be paying you probably two X, but in return, you have a team who already knows what they're doing and you're gonna get me great results. And if you don't, I can fire you tomorrow and not have any problem with it.

And I'll fire someone else who jump in. I was just in a conference this past week in Charleston. I actually flew back this morning and I can't believe I'm still awake here. Uh hope I'm I hopefully keeping you awake it is.

Right, which good conversation. Um so he said, Hey, anything any time he touches something three times in his business, he automates it. Smart. He's a right smart man.

So it's like automate and move on. Automate and move on. Smart. And that's and that's the right idea.

And you should be doing that every single time. Once again, people too often say, I've this role is open. I'm going to fill it with another person. Um, even for get AI, that was a bad decision to make.

Having more people, more, you know, where they say more money, more problems. It's actually more people, more problems. More people, more problems every single time. I love working with people.

I love having a team. But man, like peep people are messy. Like people are beautiful in this way, but people are messy, right? They get sick.

They got family issues. They you know, you name it, things come up. Yeah, the re well, it well, it's not just come up, they what what we do as humans, all of us, it's not just them, it's all we prioritize, we reprioritize throughout our lives. And that's almost impossible to solve for as a business.

It's almost impossible. Well we You to carry extra capacity for everything. And so that's that's expensive. Now, the beauty of outsourcing it, and this is a little bit about chore, I suppose, but like, why do people hire us?

Because guess what? My team gets sick too. But what do we do in guarantee to our customers? We have backup for everybody.

Right. Like, so if your teammate, we literally had a teammate on our on our team who was working with a lot of his customers of ours. He literally got hit by a bus. Luckily, I can talk about it.

He's okay, he's back with us and everything, but he got hit by a bus. Guess what happened now? If that person was working for you individually, internally, either as a sole outsource person or internally at your company, you'd be SOL. You'd be like, my God, all the operations now back to me as CEO.

Right? That would suck. With chore, that this guy was backed up the next day. His clients didn't miss a beat.

Right. And that's a cost. Like we we bear that cost to have that backup capacity always ready to go. We don't, so we don't get sick.

We don't go on vacation. Right. Same we don't have take holidays. Now of course our people do, but we back everyone up.

Now, I view the same thing for my vendors. The vendors I work with, I have the same expectation. Just because I'm a I'm going on vacation doesn't mean you get a stop. I don't care how you figure out how your backups are gonna happen or if you as the founder have to work a little bit harder.

You told me you're gonna deliver X by Z timeline. You better do it. It's not my problem how you do it. Get it done.

So I mean this leads us perfectly into you know the topic of communication. We could say, what do we get wrong about communication now? What do we get right? But my question is how important if we had a pie chart and the percentage of importance in your business, what percentage of would you say communication is for the overall success of the business?

We could have marketing, we could have product development, market fit, we have, but communication. man, I like that's I don't know. I I I don't know if it's good, I probably would say like 25%, but I almost wanted to say 50%. I want to Yeah.

It's so important. Like, and this is why I say it's so important. It is for us critical when you're talking to your customers. You need to tell them what you're doing, when you're doing it, why you're doing it, and how.

Don't if if you disappear in our world, like if you if your client says I need help with X, and you don't get X done by like No, and then and you disappear for a week and don't communicate with your client about doing X, the client's gonna be like, what the heck's going on? And then you're creating anxiety. But to be clear, that same thing happens with your manager. If you say, Hey, I'm, you know, I want X to occur and you don't acknowledge your manager, you don't respond, and you don't follow through, or you do follow through but you just don't talk about it, your manager's also gonna be pissed.

By the way, same thing happens with a spouse or a significant other or a friend. If you don't communicate at all, people are gonna be pissed. So communication is so key and yet for some reason people find it so difficult to do. I don't know why.

It takes no time at all to write an extra sentence, update someone on what's going on, and yet people struggle with it in all walks of life. Yeah, I mean is is that the soft skills of business? Cause we hear about bedside manner in physicians and we talk right, communication is the soft skills and the bedside manner of business. A hundred percent.

I once again, I am shocked by how bad most people are at this. They need they they it is a soft skill. It's like so easy to start just showing up, having conversations, being building a relationship with people. That it that is how you still get things done in today's world.

Like yes, you're influenced by marketing and digital, this or that, but like showing up and talking with people and messaging them, um, in it is how you actually really build build I how you almost do anything. So is it just communication in general or is it the type of communication, right? Are we talking about Slack? Are we talking about email, text, voice over the phone, voice interaction, video interaction, person to person, face to face?

'Cause there's a lot of different types. It is. I would say it's context dependent, right? It really depends on the context of of the kind of conversation you're having with someone and why and when.

So, like, um, you know, we could do this podcast digitally like we are right now, but it might be better in person. Um, and and I wonder about that many times when I'm on podcasts. They always are. They they always are.

Right. And so and and but it costs money and costs time. And so it it has its its drawbacks. Um so yeah, I think it's really depends on the context.

But look, in the end, just starting with communicating in general, right? Like, man, it doesn't take me a lot of time. I'll give you an example of someone. Um, a really well known kind of VC and entrepreneur.

I I know him, I don't know him super well, but no. He he sent me a message. He was with his daughter visiting Vanderbilt where I went to college. He sent me a message, said, I'm at Vanderbilt right now with my daughter.

It's awesome. Blah, blah, blah. And I was like, my gosh, like, how do you even know I went to Vanderbilt? He's like, I just remember it.

I don't believe that he actually remembers that, but he probably has a really good system for it. He always sends me a note on my birthday. And guess what? I noticed that stuff.

And I'm like, man, how do I build a system like that? It's just the ability to follow up, stay in touch, is so impressive. And he made it part of his life. And that's, I'm sure, a huge part of his success.

He probably has it automated. He he probably does, but he might also just say, I'm gonna set aside twenty minutes every day. Like there are tools that do this, right? There are tools that we can can do that.

But he still might go in every day and he's dedicated himself to say, you I'm gonna spend I have a tool that does this too called Clay. Well or they just changed the name because it used they're competing with the the this um data broker Clay. But like that it's sort of like a personal relationship manager. It shows me all the people.

I think it shows me their birthdays. I can put notes in about people. I I don't spend time doing that though. Like what I should do after our our call right now, I should go in and put in information that I learned.

I probably won't. In which case, I might not remember this stuff in the future and I will be bad at following up with you and building a relationship. And that's a loss to me. Yeah.

Maybe loss to you, but a loss to me certainly. Yeah. But I mean, is it important that we try to focus on because you know, business is we can call it what it is. We can call it war, we can call whatever it is, right?

It's very, very, very competitive and hard. And so should we strategically pick out the three, the five people, create those relationships, go deep with them? Because to your point, we don't have time for everything. So should we say who are the influential people that I want to create relationships with that I know I'm gonna have to provide value and show up first?

Should we do that as entrepreneurs? Because you can't do it for everyone. Yeah, of course. I mean, yes, like you should be doing everything to prioritize the relationships with the most important people, right?

Why do people take out their customers to dinner? The customers already paying them. Why do you take them out to dinner anyways and build a relationship? Makes it harder to fire you.

Um, why do you take your spouse out to dinner and those sorts of things and like spend quality time with them? It's important to build those relationships and strengthen them. So yeah, like I think you do have to prioritize. You can't do it with everybody, but you can do the basic stuff.

And this is where once again I I I fail too. This is not a strength of mine. I need to be hitting people up. I need to just say ten minutes a day, I'm gonna just send people a note.

Happy birthday. Hope things are good. It's been a long time. Easy to do, 10 minutes a day.

And but same way I hear people all the time like, I don't have time to work out. I'm like, dude, you literally there's something called a seven minute workout. You can do it in your living room or your hotel room. Get off your phone, get doing that.

What do you do as a hard charging entrepreneur with knowing that you need to give yourself, it's a word I'm gonna impose it here, not from like a faith perspective, but like to give yourself some grace, right? On on acknowledging the things you don't do well, but having the conversation. How do we do that with hard charging entrepreneurs? How do we give that to other people at times?

Without Yeah, w without cannibalizing our businesses. Um I well I I well give me give yours uh re say that you give yourself the grace to like be okay not being good at things or Yeah, and well to acknowledge it and say, Hey, listen, I'm not gonna beat myself up and say it's the end of the day, but to acknowledge it's not okay and say, Hey, it's it's okay that it's not okay, but you still need to do something about it. How d how do we do that? 'Cause then we need to carry that to people we lead as well, it seems.

Yeah, I mean, look, the grace, I guess, that I give myself in those those cases are I I've maybe come to the conclusion as I've gotten until the older or done enough startups or whatever it is, that in some ways don't know if it matters. Like this sounds weird. Like I have an ego. I have things I want to go build and get done.

I've acknowledged in my life I'm I'm not Elon Musk. I'm probably for good and bad, right? He's he's probably not the best parent, definitely not the best spouse. Um, but he's an amazing entrepreneur.

But I'm not gonna I'm I'm not gonna be someone who's you know, gonna be the world's richest man. Um, so I give myself the grace that that is okay. Um, I give myself the grace that every day, as long as I'm trying as hard as I can and doing the things that I believe are right and learning a little bit every day, that's good enough. And it might it it might mean the company doesn't totally work out, but it but I don't want to look back and say, Man, I didn't I didn't work hard enough and give it my all.

And I wasn't proud of that. And and I can go to sleep every night feeling like, you know what? I worked hard today. I mean, to be clear, like, I work basically six like six days a week and I've done that for about fifteen or sixteen years straight.

So like I'm already at that level, but I need to set time aside set time aside for my kids and family. So you've invested in these two hundred plus startup investments. And I look at something like that, right? As an active angel investor.

I look at that, and that's such a big number. And I joke with people and stuff. And I mentioned before I'm like, what's he doing? Open eliminate stands on every quarter.

Is that is that what it is? Is it two hundred corners of limited stands? And you have little kids that are underage, you're giving them fifty fifty like, how do you invest in two hundred plus startups for an age as an angel investor? Few answers.

One, I and some of you I wish they were lemonade stands, because a lot of those companies are out of business now. So maybe lemonade stands would actually make more money. but but um the way you do it is a few things. As with all things in life, look, I I'm I'm a huge believer in what Warren Buffett talks about being the eighth wonder of the world, compounding.

Um, if you can let things compound, you get good at things and things build. So look, I've been at Angel Investing for I've been in Silicon Valley for 16 years. I started about a year after that. So about 15 years, I've been investing now.

Um It builds up. You start, you start seeing a lot of deals. You get on a lot of deal lists. Not all of those deals are massive investments.

Some of those are like pretty small. Maybe I put $2,500 in, which is a recognize for a lot of people, that's a lot of money. But like they're small checks relatively speaking. Um, some of the other investments I've done have also I can, they're on my list of 200 plus investments, but they're via a fund where I was a partner.

So I was doing, I was doing those deals actively with my partner. So it was both of us, but the fund was the investor, not me individually. Um And through those, the way you do it is you just meet a lot of startups um and you start having conversations with them and be like, This makes sense. This is cool.

This is different. You seem like a different sort of founder who thinks in a new way. So th I'll answer it, I'll stop there and I can tell you kind of my philosophy's changed a little bit in angel investing recently over the past few years, but that's the high level of how how do I do it? The same way you do everything else in life, good job.

One foot after the n the next, day after day, and try to learn a little bit more. So what's changed? Because if if we talk about your change philosophy, if people are also trying to stand up businesses and they're trying to have exits, if there's things you've learned, it's also something that founders could also take away and utilize what you've learned. How do you build something?

So what have what's transitioned, what's evolved in your mind when you're when you're angel investing? Well, I mean, for angel investing, what's evolved for me personally is I don't do a lot of I I'm doing much less early stage angel investing. So before I would meet lots of early stage founders and I would do lots of early stage investing. And if I had a crystal ball ever, which I have a good track record.

So I probably had some sort of a um crystal ball for a while. Um I don't know if I have that anymore. Now, I don't know if that's because I've gotten older or because I don't go to as many events anymore. I used to go to events nonstop in San Francisco and was just talking to tons of people and learning a lot.

maybe that's part of it. I also think a lot of it though is because of AI. I just I think the AI is sh flipping the world around in so many new ways where what seems like a great good idea six months ago gets crushed by the new launch, new chat GPT or Claude launch. And it's like, I just don't know anymore.

So what's changed is I just don't do as much early stage investing. I'm doing later stage investing now. it's a little bit more safe. Obviously the returns might be less, but not even, right?

And you could have invested in anthropic three months ago. In three extra money on paper. Like, so the world is also crazy. Um, that's probably the biggest one that's changed, but also the ability for founders to build amazing things has changed.

So when when I talk to founders a like, hey, like what would get you to invest? I'm like, look, you got to prove out now that you can get things done for very little money, because you can. Like AI enables you to build an amazing website, to build an amazing MVP, to getting early customers for a relatively low cost. If you were unable to do most of those things and you're like, I need a million dollars to make that happen, you're not gonna get anywhere.

That's a joke at this point in today's world. So there's some very some highly successful um seed investors and early stage investors that I've gotten to know well. Not friends, but you know, as we build these networks, we get to know people and you spend a lot of time around them. Um they've had huge exit, hundreds of millions of dollars in exits, probably actually at a time, probably over a billion now.

And they're investing at a high level. They're very connected throughout the country. And I had an event three weeks ago, my first event I've ever put on, and had some High quality people that came in, sold some high ticket numbers, but they keynoted it in the end because you have to pay them 150 grand to show up. I've developed a relationship, but they did this no fee, no charge, but they did it virtually on an LED wall that I just built in this new theater I built in my headquarters.

And we were talking about growth of business and really the effect of AI since you brought up AI. They said anybody who talks about their next hire. You need to change your mindset. It's a very definitive statement.

The only person that you need to hire for every role now is an engineer of AI. You wanna hire sales role? No. You wanna hire an HR role?

No. You don't hire anybody else. Your next hire. And what they said was the reason why is all the billionaires and multimillionaires that they know, this is exactly what they're doing.

They're hiring an engineer of the AI to AI their businesses for those things you thought you needed to hire an employee for before. Yep. I I and Mark, I totally agree with that in every single way. I mean, like we are anybody in my team who is showing signs of being good at AI, I'm pushing them to see where they can get to, giving them opportunities to do a lot more, hopefully spread their wings and keep building as quick as they can.

Because that is exactly right. Um, I'm talking to some other another person about being another AI person on our team. And those are exactly the right questions, Mark, in every single way. Like, because a lot of this stuff can be replaced with AI.

Not all of it. With agents, right? With agents, with agents or various part types of A. I you call it agents or not, but like, yes, with with so many different things.

And that is changing dramatically and changes what you do and how you do it. And so I mean, yes, at a high level, yes, yes, that that is what the smart people are doing. I like to think I'm a smart person. That is exactly what we're doing at my company.

Um, I and in I uh this is the excuse everyone's gonna make. If you have the time, you should be c trying to build things yourself as well. Um, in in thinking through how do I so I have a wonderful EA. I've told her though, when I get the time, I'm gonna try to rebuild some of the work that she does.

Now, to me from my view, that does not mean I fire her. It means I retask her to the things that I can't build. Um, and have her do the things that that I don't need a human to that I need a human to do versus outsourcing the kind of automating the rest. So where does chore integrate with what we just said?

For for all the businesses that we're saying, hey, this engineering of AI for your business is very important. And so where does chore come and interact with the businesses for us now? Yeah, I mean, look, the so the the key thing though is you yes, you should hire AA engineers to build everything you can. With that said, there's a lot of things that you this is where I think the narrative on AI is a little bit messed up.

And there was a few, probably a month ago, month and a half ago, there was sort of the SaaS pocalypse, right? A lot of these SaaS companies got really hit stock wise. Um the one thing that I think is wrong with that narrative in many cases is like you're not gonna really rebuild, I'm not gonna rebuild Salesforce. Like, could I build a CRM with AI for sure.

But I'm but is that a good use of my time to rebuild Salesforce and then maintain my own version of Salesforce? Salesforce has a lot of features. Some of those features I don't need, so I don't probably need to rebuild all the pieces. But that's a that's that's a lot of work and time.

And for like the you know, $100 per seat I pay, probably not. Even for so $300 a month, like yeah, like get a clawed code, you know, account for a hundred bucks a month. So maybe. But like once again, I think this is where most companies, if you're great at what you do and the price point is fair, it doesn't make sense to rebuild it because that is still that's more work you're taking on.

Yeah. Yeah, we don't whoever's using Salesforce doesn't need just a replacement for Salesforce. You have to be thinking, what are they going to need in three years and build that? Right.

I which once again, like it's hard now. If you're building it for yourself, you can go do that. But also, like, once again, you have to now maintain that. There's all these things you need to maintain.

I'm like, I don't I don't want to go do that. So, you know, I mentioned like we're we're revamping a lot of our marketing. This is an opportunity for us to rethink things. So I'm talking with three different groups right now about AIing a large majority of our marketing.

And so we're gonna find out if that's possible. It may not be fully. and we might not want to maintain it or build it. But like I I've looked at other tools.

I'd rather hire other tools. We're gonna hire some contractors to do some work, but it still might make sense for us to just build our own version. Cause no, I've not this is a free idea for the world. I've not seen a great marketing orchestrator out there that can kind of be the run your marketing each way.

All right, so as we wrap up here, um, what are you excited about? Like right now? It it can be around what but what do you what do you what is Adam Specter of James Bond Spell spelled differently, not the way they do it on James Bond, but I guess I'm happy to be an Ebo villain any time. I probably am to someone.

What are you excited about though? We're sitting here mid two thousand twenty six. Things are going so fast. I'm I'm make I'm excited that we're gonna be living in a sci fi future in the very near term.

So like literally I I I will tell you some crazy things to end this on. I think we are getting to longevity escape velocity where for every day that I live, I'll be r aging in reverse or at least staying still age wise. We're getting the longevity escape velocity. You're gonna cure every single disease.

We're gonna have like the holodeck from Star Trek. We're gonna have replicators so I can get any food I want, full abundance on everything. I'm ecstatic for that world. But I'm also very scared for the hardship it's gonna take to get there because we're also gonna go through 50% white collar job loss and restructuring of what it means to live in a society where you have some haves and a lot of have nots.

Like we already are in that world to some extent, but at least people can still get jobs. That scares me as well. But I'm ecstatic for what that f the future holds because and once again, I read a lot in all the sci-fi things. You can read some dystopian sci-fi stuff, but a lot of the the the more positive sci-fi, like Star Trek or something.

is pretty mind blowing and amazing. This the stars are out there for us to explore. Let's go let's go do it. Yeah.

Right on. Hey, to to wrap this up, what's your call to action for people to engage with you? It could be as simple as just follow me on LinkedIn. It could be go to a website.

What what's your call to action? Yeah, follow follow me at LinkedIn for sure. just I think it's just Adam Specter, maybe Adam Spector too on LinkedIn, but you can find me pretty easily. Uh hire chore.

com, H I R E chore, C H O R E dot com. So hire chore dot com. You can find more information about us there. Um, and just stay in touch.

Like if I can be helpful to every entrepreneur in general, you don't have to pay me money for it. I just want to be helpful and make everyone a success. That that is a win for the world when there are more successful entrepreneurs. So I hope this was helpful and valuable them.

Awesome. Thank you. Me. Yeah.

Thank you, man. Thanks for giving us forty five minutes. time's valuable these days and we appreciate it. Sure.

My pleasure.