Delegate To Grow Fast: Lessons From a Founder and Angel Investor

Intro 0:06

Welcome to the Growth + Exit podcast where owners of privately held middle market companies talk about founding, scaling and exiting their businesses successfully. Learn how to maximize and monetize your business on your own terms. Let’s get started.

Heather Bennett  0:30

Hello, I’m Heather Bennett, your host for the Growth + Exit podcast, a podcast featuring middle market business owners and experts talking about founding, growing, scaling and exiting their businesses on their own terms. Past guests include Whitney Opperman, General Manager of Opperman & Sons, Matt Vuckov, co-founder and CEO of TalentCraft, and Kelly Schrad, founder and chairman of DataVizion This episode is brought to you by Newport LLC, a team of seasoned executives who help CEOs of privately held companies grow de risk and exit their businesses successfully. Newport LLC is a winner of the prestigious Inc. Magazine Power Partner Awards, a list of elite B2B companies from across the globe. To see the entire list, visit inc.com/power-partner-awards to learn more about Newport, visit us at Newportllc.com, or find us on LinkedIn. Before introducing today’s guest, I would like to thank Preeti Suman Mohapatra for introducing me to my guest. Today’s guest is Adam Spector. Adam is the co founder of Chore hirechore.com, the operations partner trusted by fast growing startups to handle administrative and operational work. Chore manages essential but time consuming tasks from HR admin, administration and onboarding to so many other areas and Adam and I will definitely be discussing you know, why, what Chore’s trying to accomplish, and how they’re changing the industry. A seasoned entrepreneur with deep experience in product and operations, Adam has built his career across solving practical problems, designing systems at scale, and helping teams stay focused on what actually drives growth. And given that this is the Growth + Exit podcast, I’m very excited to talk to him about that. Adam, welcome to the show. Heather, thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here. So let’s jump right in and tell me about how you got started building companies. So we could even go back before tour. I’d love to hear about, like, what, what was the impetus for you becoming an entrepreneur?

Adam Spector  2:45

The impetus was probably my grandfather, a long time ago. So he came over from Europe right before World War Two, and he ended up, you know, basically had, like, a few, you know, dollars in his pocket at most, and ended up starting paint company, which is a fairly successful paint company on the East Coast. He ended up selling it before it got massive, but still did well. And like I remember him, kind of keep building businesses. Then my uncle also started a business, a real estate business, and it just was sort of always in our blood, I think, a little bit to be an entrepreneur. And I just and then for me, I always wanted to be in technology, just because it always, it always seemed like that was where the changes, most changes were happening in the most interesting places to be if you wanted to build at the kind of cutting edge. And so after I finished grad school, I got my JD, MBA. I then moved, essentially, not straight away, but pretty much straight away. Moved out to San Francisco from the East Coast. And within 18 months of making it here, the first company I worked for got acquired for 400 million. It was not my company, but got acquired for 400 million. I was like, oh my god, welcome to Silicon Valley. This is amazing. And I then started my first company. And now four companies later, or sort of three companies later, I’m on my fourth company now, kind of being an entrepreneurs in my blood is what I’ve been doing. I’ve had the privilege of investing in over 200 startups as well. So really, sort of a relatively deep, I’m deep in the Silicon Valley tech world for better, for better and worse.

Heather Bennett  4:17

That’s awesome. And I think that’s what I find really interesting about your story is the fact that you’ve been in this world of growing companies and and really understanding, you know, when to invest, when not to invest. So we’ll talk about that maybe a little bit later. So let’s talk about Chore. Where’d the idea come from?

Adam Spector  4:40

Came from a really simple analysis of all these companies that I had invested in, in the ones that I had founded, and saying, what was the biggest waste of my time as a founder and what was one of the biggest things holding me back from success? Now, certainly, you need to have a great product. You need to have a great market to sell into, right? If you don’t have those things, it’s really hard to build a good business. But if you have those elements, and yet you’re still distracted by all these sort of back office operations, which I would call Human Resources, Finance work, compliance work, and even sort of equity work, if you’re distracted by those things, and there’s all the random things that come up every day, you won’t have time to actually build a great product. You won’t have time to really figure out the right market for you, and that’s why most companies fail, historically, not just tech startups, every single business out there, historically, the data shows pretty clearly the large majority of them fail because they work in the business. The founders work in the business, and not on the business, right? It’s a fairly famous saying, and that’s why most businesses fail, and that is what Chore is meant to stop. I think the world is a better place when there are more successful founders and more new businesses, and therefore we want to do everything we can to help make that a reality. And I think standardizing and removing the pain and anxiety of back office operations is a win for literally everyone out there for society, the company is obviously for my company chord as well. But everyone can win in this scenario. And that’s a drive me every day.

Heather Bennett  6:10

Excellent. And I would agree with I mean, the numbers, the data, shows it that the vast majority of people in this country are employed by a small to middle market company. And if we can improve the success rate and the healthiness of those companies that that’s where we’re making an impact, you know, to families, communities, everywhere. So I love your perspective on that excellent. So let’s talk about the beginning of Chore when you were growing it. Tell me about who was involved, how you made decisions about what to do next, as you were going so tour

Adam Spector  6:46

is a pretty unique founding history. So in 2020, right, right before the pandemic. So, so I was doing some part time work as essentially a fractional chief operating officer for an amazing nonprofit, and I was also doing my full time job, was working at Twitter as a product manager, and started talking to people said, Hey, like, how can I standardize this? Like, this is the problem that every company has, not just this nonprofit, but every book company has this sort of back office issue where it’s not, once again, all the stuff I just said, it’s not in the best interest of the founder to spend their time on it, and yet they are it. Started talking to lots of different founders, investors, different people in the industry, just to say, Hey, would this be something you would buy? If I could standardize how to run your business, would you buy this? And a bunch said they were super interested in it. And then one actually said, hey, you need to go meet this guy. His name is Harry. He’s thinking about a really similar idea. So Harry and I met up. Turns out he was thinking about basically automating back office work, just like I was. We started chatting. We essentially did co founder dating. Like, literally, he had actually a really detailed list built out. It’s very impressive. Of like, essentially, like, your how to fall, you know, this sort of joke, and things like how to fall in love with someone in like, 50 questions or something. He basically built that out as a founder. And here’s like, here’s my list. I want you to create your own list. And then let’s go. Let’s date. Basically, we did that. Realized we could work together, joined forces, and then in kind of early 2020 we had our first team meeting. It was myself, Harry, and then two other, two other folks, and then covid happened, and so now we’re suddenly remote, and we kept building. So the short version of all this is we built some great tech. We ended up getting a bunch of good customers. We ended up raising about $10 million from top tier venture capitalists to go make this a reality, to really automate this idea in kind of early 2022 we went to go raise our next round of funding. We had some really good metrics. But 120, 22 was like, great year to raise. And then two, a lot of the VCs were like, Hey, we love you guys. We love the idea, but your metrics look like they’re more sure services, quote, unquote services, which was true, you know, like a lot of startup frankly, like you, you have this tech, but actually, underneath it all, there’s some people doing the real work is, you know, the old joke that happens with a lot of technology companies. And so what we decided to do is we put the company in two so my former company, AbstractOps, went in a different direction. They’ve now pivoted, have a new CEO, and then Chore became a separate entity in late 2022 and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. And I’m the sole founder of Chore, but we spun off and sort of had some kind of, we started off a little bit of revenue in team members from my previous company as well.

Heather Bennett  9:29

Okay, so you started, you’ve got your team. You made the pivot where you you split it into, we’ll say better working companies. When did you know that Chore like, what what happened? What metric happened, or what moment happened when you realized that Chore was going to be successful?

Adam Spector  9:49

Yeah, I mean, pretty much almost, almost right away, right? So the big risk we had, so the decision we had, we came to at AbstractOps, is the two co founders, we said, hey, we’ll get rid of, like, we need to. Sort of we can’t have the services business anymore. It’s not making money. The services business is losing money. It’s essentially getting subsidized by venture capital. So we need to remove the venture capital business, or, sorry, the VC funded services business, and move into a into this new industry. So do we get rid of all this revenue just like fire all the customers, fire that team or keep it and do something different. And like, what do you do? So we obviously decided, like, hey. Like, I was like, I’m gonna go see if I can go build this into something real. But it’s scary, because we’re taking, essentially a money losing services business and trying to see if you can make it into something real. So October 2222 take this new business losing money, I immediately tell all of our customers, hey, we’re going to jack up your prices by like 40% um, to break even, they all stayed with us, and I was like, All right, to be clear, I had to make a pretty massive loan to the company to make payroll, right? So we got no money for my former company. We got the we got some revenue and customers and team, but no, no, no, nothing else, right? So I need to make a loan to the company in our customers all stayed with us. They were like, We love what you’re doing. We’ll stick around. Yeah, you were under charging, but we were cool with it, obviously, but we’ll stick with you. And so that was probably the moment, like, we can build something

Heather Bennett  11:17

real here, and that’s such a good it’s a story I hear consistently where it’s like, those crazy things you have to do to make payroll. The, you know, the founders not making money for five straight years, and, like, the point where they’re like, Okay, we’ve been doing this for seven years. Oh my gosh, I can afford to buy a house now. Like, there were just, like, these big, like, Aha, moments when, when that the economic model shifts and changes, but there is a consistency across a lot of founders that they have to do some sacrifice in those early stages to get it off the ground. So speaking of that, what, what’s, what’s the future of Chore look like? And then we’re going to, we’re going to talk about some other areas of your work.

Adam Spector  12:02

Yeah. I mean, so the future of tour is pretty simple. The world is moving into a place where we will have fewer and fewer full time employees on your team. However, the employees that you do have in the CEO and founders need to spend even more of their time being focused on getting, achieving great outcomes. It takes it’s you need to be more focused. Everything’s moving faster, which means fewer distractions, right? Every people don’t really understand the idea of the cost of context switching, but it’s very high. And so if you can reduce your contact switching and move faster, that is the com Those are the companies that will survive this sort of coming wave of AI change that is going to be forced upon us into the future of Chore is one. We need to keep surfing this wave so we’re building more and more AI products to automate our work, to make the outcomes better, right? You really, literally improve outcomes for our customers over time. That’s going to mean reduced prices. We will charge our customers less to achieve the same outcomes as a same march of technology that we’ve always seen in life. As things keep improving, the cost actually goes down. Right? A computer that I have today, I can guess, is cheaper than my computer was 10 years ago, even with in place, even even with inflation, like in raw dollar terms, I think it’s cheaper. So that will keep happening, and we’ll be doing the same thing in but the thesis for us has always been the same, how do we get to a point where every company in the world realizes that they should never have internal operations, maybe very specific role? So if you get to 50 people, maybe you hire a head of HR, 100 you might hire a CFO, but you never need those secondary people. Like, I hate the thesis when companies say, Oh, I have a head of HR and they have someone else who manages payroll. So your HR team is at least two people, and you have one person dedicated to payroll. Like, for all your listeners, that is a joke, please stop wasting your money on that. No offense, that person who runs payroll. It is not a full time job, even at a company of 100 people running payroll is an automated process. There are things that’s not fully automated. It still takes some manual work to make it properly run, but you should not have that person doing that like that is that is your waste if you want to employ someone and waste money on that role, more power to you, but just know you are wasting money to keep them employed. And so the future of Chore is making every Smart Company leaner, more efficient and more effective what they do, so those founders can refocus their time on building a successful company for the future.

Heather Bennett  14:34

So thinking about that like your perspective on when to hire, when to like all of that, let’s talk about you as an angel investor. What do you look for when you’re investing like, what you know you talked about, like, some companies should do this, should do this like, what are you looking for when you’re thinking about investing in a company

Adam Spector  14:56

focused founders? I mean literally founders who are obsessed with what they want to go build. In who are laser focused. So I’ll give you an example. I came across a company a few weeks ago, and they had someone internal who was like, almost like a chief of staff doing some of this work. And they were like, Hey, we just don’t. And they were pretty big. They’re growing really fast, getting big all these other things, like, hey, we just want, we think we want to keep doing this stuff internally for ourselves. And I was like, that means a lot of time for the founders who are wasting their time in all these different activities. That they even said, the founders are spending time doing this work. Their chief of staff was doing some of it, but the Chief of Staff was figuring it out. She had never done back office work before, right? She was very smart, but she was figuring it out as she goes. That means they’re never, mean, this is not their core competency. It is not their differentiator. They are never going to build the world’s best systems for how to run HR or how to run accounts payable or accounts receivable or other finance elements. They’re never going to that, because why would they? It is not their business. In they were moving fast, but they also didn’t realize that, like just the same way they outsource their servers to Amazon Web Services, right? Why would they be why not outsource your operations? And so that company, I feel very confident they will fail. I would never go work there personally, but like, they’re moving fast. They’re making a lot of money right now, but their systems will break down, and then the founders can get bogged down with, like, I need to hire a head of HR and all these other people who I’ve never managed before. I’ve never hired people in this role. I don’t know how this role works. So what I look for in founders, to answer your question, are founders who say, Yeah, I have no interest in doing this work. I want to get back to doing the thing that I care about. And maybe one last illustrative example, irrespective of his politics, I think everyone can agree. Elon Musk is kind of a world, world changing entrepreneur, right? He’s a sort of entrepreneur, as an entrepreneur, maybe not as a human, but as an entrepreneur we want to emulate, I think. And imagine if you know, Elon Musk is trying to go, go to Mars, right? And then the head of HR comes in and says, Hey, like, do you think we should use payroll system a or payroll system be Elon Musk is going to tell that he would literally say, you’re fired, like, Get out of my office. Why are you distracting me? I’m trying to get to Mars, and you’re asking me whether I care about what payroll system we use. It is irrelevant to our goal of getting to Mars. Make sure our team gets paid like that needs to be done. But I don’t care. Just make a smart decision, move on. And yet, I come across founders all day long who want to be in the weeds because they feel like that’s what a good CEO does. And I want to tell them basically, like, shake them really hard, like that is what a bad CEO does. You’re guaranteeing yourself failure.

Heather Bennett  17:34

That’s so fascinating. And I think to your point, you have to think about it like, what, what that CEO should be doing or should not be doing, and at what stage the business is at? Who was listening to a podcast yesterday, talking to someone who had created a coffee shop and and his advice to other entrepreneurs who want to create coffee shops, he’s like, if you’re not willing to actually go work in the coffee shop, you’re going to miss out. So I think you know, from what you’re saying is, yes, at some point they need to stop making those decisions. You know, my argument would be, when they’re starting, they need to pay attention to some of the ground level stuff, because, if not later, when they’re doing strategy, strategic decision making, they’re going to miss the boat. So I think it’s like a balance of that. But I think there’s a continuum from like day one to when they can hand things over. So I’ll push back

Adam Spector  18:30

just a little bit on that. Just have some fun, right? So so I think that person is right, we have to be very specific about what you mean by being sort of working in the business and being in there. So yes, I think it’s really important to be on the ground, talking to your customers, understanding what they’re buying, understanding what product they care about, what ambiance they like, for a coffee shop, all of those things are absolutely critical. And yes, you need to be on the ground, and that that goes for coffee shops all the way up to the biggest tech companies in the world. If you aren’t engaging with your customers, you will fail. So in that sense, you’re totally correct. However, I don’t think there is anything that says the founder needs to start to needs to be the one that understand how the payroll system works, or just choose a checkout system right to get people to pay. There’s a bunch of them out there. They’re good products. Go google for five seconds. Big, great. I’m going to choose Option A get it installed. Don’t learn the nuances of it. If you don’t understand the nuances, go hire a contractor to go set up the nuanced pieces for you. Like, so I disagree, in that sense, like you should not be spending time on the little details that are standardized across your industry. So in other words, what makes a coffee shop great? The best beans, the best ambiance, maybe the best music, the best look and feel, the smell of the store. I don’t there’s a million things that probably make a coffee shop great. I guarantee no one goes into a coffee shop and says, I come here because their checkout system is the best. No one cares. So if a founder is spending time on that, they will fail. They are spending they are optimizing the wrong thing.

Heather Bennett  19:59

You. But to your point, when we were talking about what you who you look to invest in, and it’s not, it’s not which companies you look to invest which is a question I asked, but you’re you immediately went to. And I think this is consistent as well with venture and angel funding, is you’re investing in the person. I mean, there’s a reason why those pitch shows work and why it is having that person, but the reason you invest in them is because they’re passionate about the purpose of the company. So if it’s creating a great coffee experience, they’re in that but to your point, who cares what payment system they use long as they have one that’s, you know has good ratings and will work with their accounting system. Awesome, great. So I think it’s that that figuring out, like you said, what work in your you know, work on your business, and step in your business, like, where’s that line, and how do you delegate? So what do you think is the best way to go about delegating as as a business is growing

Adam Spector  21:01

everything you do, you should see if you can automate it or outsource it or hand it off. That’s essentially the key things, right? I mean, a bunch of butcher it, but my executive coach, art talks about AOA. I think automate, outsource, and I forget what the last A is, but, but the key thing in really that world is saying, I’m going to hand off as much as possible, and you have to give yourself a year to try to just hand it all off. So how can you get yourself out of the weeds every day and say, Look, you, you are someone I’m going to trust on this team, to own this piece of work. I’m going to give it to you and just get it done. Don’t come back to me. So to my team on the all the time, they’ll send me notes like, Hey, do you approve this? And I say, I don’t care. Does it need my opinion? Do you think you’re making the right decision? That’s what I said. Do you feel like you’re making the right decision for the company? If you do, you know it better than I do. Go ahead. I don’t need to make a decision. The only times I feel like I need to get involved are when it is a one way door. So this sort of a famous Jeff Bezos thing from Amazon, or sort of one way doors and two way doors, right? One way door, you walk through it, you can’t go back. So that’s a big decision, right? So selling your company, that is a one way door that a founder should be deeply involved in making the decision about whether to sell, right? You can’t go back from that decision. On the other hand, a two way door is saying, like, Hey, I’m even hire employee. I mean, that’s a two way door, right? If it doesn’t work out, you can fire them and let them go. You obviously don’t want to have that happen until they don’t have that happen often, but it’s a two way door, and most decisions are two way doors. If it’s a two way door, I want the person who’s closest to decision, who’s going to be most impacted by that decision, make the decision, and then I want to be focused on things that only I can do. So that’s, that’s where I try to delegate all the time. And I think

Heather Bennett  22:51

that’s the key is, is, when you’re in the hiring process, understanding what that person brings to the party, so that you can have the confidence in delegating to them. You know, having that strong management team, that’s another theory I see consistently. You take the time to hire the right people, you can move to this model much, much faster. So let’s talk about exiting. Tell me about your experience with com, with selling companies.

Adam Spector  23:19

Yeah, so, I run through one exit myself a company, two companies ago, we exited, and it was an interesting experience, right? So you end up getting acquired. You end up going through that. You have the discussion actually, I guess when you think about my very first one, when I first moved to Silicon Valley, was also an acquisition. I was not the founder. And you know that company we got acquired by semantic, big company, I had to stay for at least 12 months, all those other key things, and sort of the golden handcuffs to some extent, and to build those pieces out. And I think it can go really well, but obviously it can also be sort of a failure, where it’s coming on board, maybe it’s just an Acqui hire, things like that. And also, I’ve walked away from a deal, from an acquisition, where we should have said yes to the deal, and we didn’t, and that was a big mistake. So there are, there are always lots of different options and things that can happen on that front.

Heather Bennett  24:20

Okay, so you’re not the first person I’ve talked to has walked away from a deal. So tell me, like, in one sense, why did you walk away? What was, what was the thing, or what was happening that you were like, we have to walk away. And then tell me now, you know after that, why? Why you were like, We shouldn’t have, like, what were the the key, the key flags that should have said, You know what? This was a good deal. We should have done it. What? What did you see there?

Adam Spector  24:45

Yeah. So the reason we didn’t say yes, the deal. So the company was my first company. We were kind of just getting right. We actually stumbled upon, I mean, not stumbled. We thought about it. Was kind of a pivot in a business. We were starting to make money. We were essentially doing background checks for companies. We had pivoted from two. Of using data off of Facebook and Twitter and other sources where you could get that data back in the day to using we were using that almost like a way to verify people, to trust them. We pivoted into doing background checks. It was working like people were starting to kind of the rise of background checks, but all the background check companies then sucked. They’re terrible. We were kind of putting a fancy interface on top of them. And we had kind of a cool business going, but we kind of just got tired. We were like, do we want to keep building this? We want to raise our next round? We should have, but we didn’t, but during that so like, let’s explore apposition. We ended up talking to a blank in the name of the company right now, but they’re a pretty big name. Oh man, big name. Big, name, big, big company. Now we talked to them, and they essentially offered us an Acqui hire, right? So would have been wiped out. All of our investors, my team and I would have gotten, essentially good jobs in good equity, but not like nothing crazy wasn’t like, some massive amount of money, but like, kind of better than if we were just getting hired for those roles off the street sort of thing. So better, and we should have said yes. And here’s why we said no, the reason we said no, actually, the reason we said no, is because we sat down and said, Hey, would we want to go? Want to work for this company, just if we were applying normally, and we’re all Yeah, like, it’s not, wasn’t that cool of a company. We didn’t know where it was going. It wasn’t like a cool technology. It’s like, no, not really, was kind of our conclusion and our mistake in the what I tell all founders is, you want to get that exit on your resume, essentially. So no one says you have to stay there for a long time. No one says it has to be a billion dollar exit, but you at least get the exit and then it then it sets you up for the next big thing, and you might end up loving it, for all you know, too. So for us, we should have said yes, got taken the jobs, maybe ended up loving it, or said, Hey, like, this isn’t for us, okay, too. And that’s where we kind of made a mistake, and that’s why we but we said no, because we just didn’t feel it was things. So we shut down the company, gave money back to investors and then moved on to do things,

Heather Bennett  27:04

yeah, but there’s a lot of learnings there, I think even even my backgrounds as a scientist. So failure is never a failure, because it just means that that one option is gone, and that’s okay, because that simplifies things. So there’s a lot to learn from succeeding, but a lot to learn from failure, failure as well. So we’re talking about, you know, you’re talking about workforce development, like basically hiring people, firing what you’re looking and technology. What do you see changing when it comes especially as you’re looking as an investor, what is going to change about the workforce and how people work going forward?

Adam Spector  27:47

I mean, look, I think AI is changing. I think AI has changed everything about our lives right now. It is going to dramatically shape how we work, what we get done, how fast we get it done in the pace of things? So any employee today who is still doing the same job they were doing a year ago or two years ago and doing it this and by the same job, I don’t mean you’re in the same role, I mean doing it the same way. So if you’re doing the job that you did same job two years ago and doing it the exact same way you were two years ago. You are going to get left behind. I don’t know how to say that in a nicer way, but you will fail. You will not have a plea. You will not have a job in the economy of the future if you don’t quickly upskill yourself and learn how to use AI every day, imagine having essentially like dozens of interns with you all the time who are actually like way better than interns, the way smarter than most interns helping you all the time, building things, getting things done, understanding your data, all of that gives you more time to focus on other parts of your job. And so every company needs to be considering that. Every team member needs to be considering that, and if they don’t, once again, you’re setting yourself up for a really dangerous future, essentially, where you will be unemployable.

Heather Bennett  29:09

Okay, so let’s talk about those interns now that we don’t need interns anymore. What? What do all of the kids in high school and college? Do you know what I do with these, these amazing students who are coming out with degrees right now that they’re, I don’t even know how to use them.

Adam Spector  29:26

Heather, I know you have some kids who are in that age range. The this is a bigger macro political question that I will opine on, even though I will say I’m not actually qualified to do so. The short answer is, I think they need to be building every single day, like, if they are not spending two hours, if they’re sitting at home, coming out of school, and they’re not spending two hours or three hours a day, just building with AI, which two or three hours a day, just, you know, it’s not very much in the grand scheme of like a full day of your like being awake, like two or three hours is really not that much time. They need to be spending two or three. Hours like playing with AI building new things like, Oh, I dreamt of this. All right, I solve this problem today, and want to go build this product. If they aren’t doing that, then, then they won’t have a job, right? So I’ll give you an example. I’m about to sign a contract working with a kid who’s 14 years old. He is amazing at AI stuff, incredibly well spoken, but amazing at AI stuff. Knows how to build it, knows how to move quickly, and he’s 14 years old into like, I’m gonna hire him, but I don’t care what age a person is, I hire somebody who they’re 80 years old and also can move quickly and get this stuff done. It doesn’t matter to me, but that goes to show like, but if you’re in the middle and you’re like, well, like, you know, yeah, I went into high school and AI didn’t exist, and I came out of college, and now AI is everywhere. And, like, I like, ask Chachi p1 or two questions here, and every week, like, you don’t deserve a job. Like, I don’t. No one deserves a job. So, like, Why? Why do you think you do just because you have a college degree? Now, sorry,

Heather Bennett  30:59

absolutely, I think that agility and ability to to learn and to be willing to change the way you think about the world is is absolutely key. That growth mindset is so, so important right now. So let’s talk about advice. Then I am presuming you have some amazing mentors, giving your your success. What, what is some of the best advice you’ve got from them?

Adam Spector  31:25

I mean, probably the best advice from from from them in general, has been around just work hard every day. So I am a really big believer. It’s really rare. We all want to talk about those, those people who like Mark Zuckerberg or something, or who have, like, these amazing one off exits that, like just they suddenly they have one idea, and it gets huge, and they’re multi billionaires. The simple fact is, the large majority of people who are successful in the world have worked really hard day in and day out. They do an excellent job in their job every single day. They get recognized for that every single day, and those are the people who are the most successful. On top of that, the second piece of advice is actually around compounding, and compounding also applies to working hard. If you start off in your first job and you work hard and you do good work, then one thing leads to the next in all of that compounds. And so you get better and better at your job, to get more and more recognized in the work that you do. And all that builds up. And so people don’t remember or realize like compounding is sort of the eighth wonder of the world, not just in your finance finances, but also in life. And so you build you compound with your friends, you compound with your family, you compound with your work. And so maybe an example there with me, specifically in my first job that I when I came out to Silicon Valley, I was doing good work. So I kind of got recognized in a lot of different ways. Actually, my very first job, I also got, I won all these awards my first job, right? I was a super straight out of grad school, started a whole new program to do basically environmental related things for the company. They were a tech company, they were a tech company, but getting sort of awards for that, so boom, out of the blue, got the COO to give me a big budget to go build this whole thing. And people like, Who is this kid, right? Like I was a kid. They’re, Who is this kid? I then get a job, an amazing job, in Silicon Valley. That company also does do well, there was a moment where we were going through an acquisition that company. I noticed that all of the HR data for everyone in the team was exposed publicly. I immediately contacted the CEO and said, Hey, this is available. FYI. They locked it down. They gave me an award. But guess what? They also checked out. They said, Hey, we they had full audits of everyone who looked at the data, and they asked me, like, Hey, what did you look at? I said, Look. I looked at the first page. I noticed that I should not be seeing this, and I turned it off immediately and contacted the CEO. They’re like, thank you. We had a lot of people who look through it. We saw who looked through it and what they looked at. Thank you for doing that. And of course, and so that CEO has been a friend of mine ever since then, and it’s been helpful in different ways. And look, people still wonder, I mean, I’m, you know, I’m in my mid 40s, and I have a family, and I still work six days a week, and people wonder, why do you do that? Or you have all this quote, unquote success. And I said, it’s because this is how you This is how you compound and make worthwhile things happen that you can be proud of. And so I know it’s a long winded way of saying, essentially, hard work and compounding are the two most important pieces of advice I’ve ever received.

Heather Bennett  34:30

Excellent good advice. Very good advice. I have one last question, but before I ask it, I want to point people to your website, at hirechore.com, or, of course, to find you on LinkedIn. And then I we didn’t even talk about your podcast. So do you want to share with our audience what your podcast is and what you guys are trying to accomplish with it?

Adam Spector  34:54

Absolutely, it’s called Entrepreneurial Excellence, and the focus is pretty simple. We talk to lots and lots of entrepreneurs. About what made them successful, right? I To your point of being a lifelong learner. I want to keep learning how I can be a better entrepreneur. I think I’m a good entrepreneur. I don’t think I’m a great entrepreneur. And so how do I get to that great level? Is I keep learning every single day and trying to learn from the people who’ve done it well before, and that’s what the podcast is focused on,

Heather Bennett  35:18

excellent, excellent. So last question, and I honestly, I think we could probably talk for another three hours. I have so many more questions I want to ask you. But what is a hard lesson that you learned in growing the companies and building the companies that you’ve built, that you learned while starting out that you would love to share with future CEOs to help them avoid what the issues you’ve had? I mean,

Adam Spector  35:45

I’m gonna give you an answer that I don’t know. I hope it’s not offensive to my team. But people are really messy. People are wonderful in so many different ways, and you couldn’t build companies without people and without people buying your products, right? But people are also really messy, and so my my best advice is, try to build a company as lean as you possibly can. So many, so many founders do not realize the costs of hiring new people. So so for every there’s some stat out there that I posted recently, but it’s about like, I think let’s say, for somebody who has $100,000 salary that you hire, the actual cost for that person is something like two and a half X that Amount total. So you take into account, so that includes things like, okay, all the time, to recruit the person all the time, to train the person all the time, to manage the person day to day or month to month, whatever your management style is, when they go on vacation, what if they leave after six months? Because a lot of people leave after a short period of time, so they leave after a certain period of time, all these things go into it, and you start saying, wait a second, every employee is really expensive. On top of it, the rise of global kind of due to covid, right? But because we can work globally. Now you can hire amazing contractors anywhere in the world. And the beautiful thing and look tour, we are a contractor to our customers. The beautiful thing of contractors is they say, I’m going to do X. If they fail to accomplish X, you can not only sue them, you probably can get your money back, in many cases, from them, and then move on and find a better contractor. So it’s not always going to work with every contractor and every vendor you use, right? You’re not always, you know, if you buy a Coca Cola and you like Pepsi, you might not like the Coke, right? Like, that’s fine. You go get a different one, you move on. The beautiful thing of contractors is you can do that, whereas, if you want to hire employee, man, like, it might take you six months to realize they’re not a fit, and how you put all this time and energy into that. Energy into them, you have to now go restart the entire process. And the fact is, like, it’s probably gonna be 50% hit rate for most jobs, even jobs, you know, well, like, in other words, if I really know how to hire lots of people in the HR space, I still might fail 50% of the time. If I’m a CEO who’s never hired anyone in HR I might fail 75% of the time. So, so kind of my biggest piece of advice is like, just hire, hire fewer people, hire fewer full time people, hire more contractors with a defined, clear plan, I’m hiring you to achieve X. If you don’t achieve x, we will move on and get competitive quotes for that. I mean, one sort of, I keep going, but like, we just, I carry example we just did right now. But like, I just hire fewer people. See if you can outsource it, delegate it, or, frankly, at this point, build AI to do it too.

Heather Bennett  38:35

Excellent advice. And part of that is, is, you know, being able to have that overarching, strategic mindset of when and where to make those decisions. This has been great. I’ve been talking with Adam Spector, founder of Chore Adam, thank you so much for sharing your experience, your stories. I will definitely be following to see what you’re doing next, because I have a feeling it’s going to be pretty, pretty exciting.

Adam Spector  39:02

Well, Heather, that is nice of you to say every day is hard and learning new things every day too, but I’ll do my best to keep it interesting and fun.

Outro 39:14

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