This summer Group 18 made its first official hire! I'm excited to have brought on my oldest son.
Before you imagine a months-long “bring your kid to work” day, I’m treating this like any real hire: he got an offer letter, an NDA, a thorough onboarding plan, and three projects I want him to tackle. He's got a fixed daily schedule and works here in the home office with me.
Why so formal? Because I’m building a long-term business with systems to scale, and that means treating every team member (even family) like a pro from day one.
Bringing him onboard forced me to figure out payroll, migrate local files to a shared drive, and start moving my business notes out of Obsidian to Confluence (yes, Atlassian still runs in my veins) so that Group 18 can go from single-player to multi-player.
He'll be learning a lot about business by working directly with me, handling select client deliverables, and prepping our operational back end for new offers at Group 18.
As Group 18 client demand ramps up, I’m preparing to bring more great people into the fold.
Before the end of the year I anticipate opportunities for three types of people to do some contract / fractional work:
1 - Senior strategic operators; folks at my level of seniority that can handle advanced client-facing work. 2 - Analytics experts; people who like to build models and tell stories with data. 3 - Solid generalists; ops folks who love getting things done.
If you (or someone you rate highly) would be a great fit for one of these roles, feel free to reach out or pass my name along. I’m not actively hiring yet, but I’m building relationships now so that I'm ready when opportunities close.
Kevin 🤘
A Quote
“
Remember: We choose how we’ll look at things. We retain the ability to inject perspective into a situation. We can’t change the obstacles themselves—that part of the equation is set—but the power of perspective can change how the obstacles appear. How we approach, view, and contextualize an obstacle, and what we tell ourselves it means, determines how daunting and trying it will be to overcome.
— Ryan Holiday in "The Obstacle is the Way"
Three Things
1 - 📋 n8n for AI-native workflow automation This is the tool I’m using for workflow automation, and so far it’s great. I’m starting simple, but I know entire services companies who do nothing but scale processes using n8n, so there’s a lot of power there. This guide is good.
2 - 🎧 Norman Sann, check out “Mildred” Every once in a while I hear a new artist and it just clicks. Normann Sann did that for me recently. At 209K monthly listeners, he’s still working on breaking out. According to his bio: “With a unique gift for beat making and lyrical wordplay, it isn’t hard to see why everyone believes in Norman’s message. You won’t find 808s or mumbling on tracks. You won’t hear auto-tune or curse words. What you will hear is ‘puro’, music that uplifts communities through truth, raw vocab and grimey beats.”
3 - 🧌 Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein I loved Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s where I learned the word, salubrious, which immediately became one of my favorite words. The trailer is really well done and I can’t wait to see what Guillermo Del Toro does with it. And it’s got Christoph Waltz!
(please enjoy this 6️⃣ minute read)
Deep Dive on Working on What Matters
Why are you in business? Why do you work?
To have impact.
Impact means you’re getting things done that matter. Why are we working, if not to get things done that matter?!
Impact is how you achieve your vision. And more pragmatically, it’s how you get paid.
If you’re not working on what matters, it doesn’t have value - and if your work doesn’t have value, you don’t have value to the business. Not a good place to be.
Here’s good advice for working on what matters:
What’s interesting to your boss should be fascinating to you.
Get on the Agenda
Depending on the size of your organization and its (in)ability to focus, your boss is likely to have a LOT on their plate.
Whatever you’re working on is ostensibly part of their domain, but not all work is equal. In any org their are going to be:
Things that absolutely don’t matter
Things that sort of matter, and finally
A short list of three things that really matter.
These three things are interesting to your boss, so they should be fascinating to you.
Your boss is a human like the rest of us, and they’re just as focused on their own performance as you are on your own. These three things are likely the top three things because that’s what your boss’s boss expects of them.
Optimistically, I’ll assume these three things are also the most important items that your boss could deliver for the company.
And selfishly for you, who do you think is going to be rewarded come annual compensation and promotion time? It’s the people that moved the business forward. The people that helped the boss get a good rating, too.
You can take care of the company, your boss, and yourself, by ensuring that you’re on the agenda.
“In addition to knowing what’s important to their organizations, Impact Players know what’s important to their leaders—and they make it important to themselves.” - Liz Wiseman in “Impact Players”
How to define “interesting”
While the three highest priority items for your boss count as interesting, they’re also quite obvious. There are other, smaller, things your boss may find interesting that you could find fascinating.
In most companies there are more problems to solve than people to solve them. Lots of little things can slip through the cracks while people focus on the big outcomes. Nothing wrong with that, but these little things often improve the quality of life for the team or customer and can be impactful if you solve them.
Listen for opportunities in meetings. Listen for an off-hand remark by your boss. Are they annoyed at some small problem that keeps popping up?
What "fly" is bothering your boss?
Again, optimistically, your boss got promoted into that position because they have good judgment. If they’re pointing out a problem, likely that’s a real problem that needs to be solved.
Maybe something is misaligned between two metrics.
Maybe there’s a hypothesis they’ve been wanting to test.
Maybe the internal review documents are consistently missing information.
Those are really cool nuggets of “interesting” for you to go after!
They aren’t as flashy as the “top three” and they can be hard to prioritize amongst everything else that’s going on, but they’re a really great way for you to find something of value to fix for your boss.
When you’re not on the agenda
I’ve seen colleagues and employees lament that their boss doesn’t care about what they’re working on.
In response they wish their boss would get interested. If only the boss knew how interesting and important this project was!
Wrong conclusion!
It’s very likely that your boss knows what you’re working on. If they don’t care, that’s a clue that you’re working on the wrong thing, not that they don't get it.
Don’t make your boss move to you. Assume they’re right and you move to them.
Find out what’s interesting to them, make it fascinating to you, and crush it.
A customer is also a boss
For me, as a solopreneur (not counting my intern!), I don’t have a boss in the classic sense.
Instead, what I have are customers. They’re just like a boss (except you get to pick them - a critical distinction 😁). You can replace “boss” with “customer” and approach everything the same way.
What’s interesting to your customer should be fascinating to you.
To be successful I have to be an active listener in meetings. Maybe my client and I have aligned on three big things that need to happen. Inevitably, three becomes six becomes ten (there will always be problems to solve). If those are the big rocks, then there are also the pebbles and sand that come up, too.
I listen for opportunities to make offers to my clients for small things that are interesting to them in addition to delivering the big stuff.
It doesn’t mean I get distracted - the big stuff is the big stuff for a reason and needs to get done - but I pay attention to how the attention of my client might be shifting.
It’s a way of building trust in the relationship. If I can stay aligned to what’s interesting to my client, then we’re consistently on the same page.
If instead my client felt like they had to snap me out of whatever path I was on and reorient to them, they won't keep me around very long. That’s too much work on their part. They’re paying me to be a partner, and partners stay aligned.
Like a lot of the things we discuss in this newsletter, there’s nuance. We don’t deal with a lot of black and white, all or nothing thinking.
There are a lot of merits to this concept, but there are a few pitfalls we need to avoid to ensure this stays healthy. I’ve alluded to some of these above, but I’ll point them out clearly in the summary below.
The merits of approaching work this way
Increased Relevance and Impact - By aligning your interests with your boss or client, you naturally produce more valuable work, fostering appreciation and loyalty.
Enhanced Relationship - Demonstrating genuine curiosity builds trust. It signals that you care about their priorities and are invested in their success.
Professional Growth - Understanding what interests your boss or clients expands your knowledge and skillset, increasing your value and versatility.
Improved Communication - Being attuned to what others find compelling can sharpen your communication, making you better able to influence and engage your audience.
Opportunity Identification - Deep interest in what matters to your stakeholders helps you anticipate needs, opening avenues for innovation and new business opportunities.
The pitfalls of approaching work this way
Losing Authenticity - Over-emphasis can risk feeling disingenuous or insincere. Genuine curiosity should guide your fascination, not merely selfish strategy.
Narrowed Perspective - Excessively focusing on your boss or client’s interests might lead to neglecting broader trends, or items that improve your own professional development.
Burnout Risk - Continuous adaptation to another’s interests can drain your energy if it doesn’t align with your own passions and professional values.
Ethical Deterioration - Working to please one person, without considering the broader implications, has been known to lead to a loss of ethics.
Echo Chambers - Excessive focus on one stakeholder’s viewpoint could inadvertently reinforce biases, creating blind spots and hindering critical feedback.
By all means look at your boss, but don't focus too narrowly.
Bringing it all together
With great power comes great responsibility! This is a powerful framing and can bring great success to your company, your boss, and you - but overdone it can create the exact opposite outcome.
In a book I just finished they talked about the downfall of Arthur Anderson, Enron, and other companies where the internal systems were so oriented to keeping the boss happy, then unethical behavior flourished. You don’t want that to be you!
The healthiest way to leverage this concept requires maintaining your authenticity and aligning with long-term personal and organizational growth. Use genuine curiosity as your guiding principle rather than mere compliance. Keep using your judgment throughout the process.
So use this power for good. Find what’s interesting to your boss and make it fascinating to you - just don’t leave your ethics at the door 🙂
Call to Action
Are you on the agenda at work? Is your primary focus one of the top three things your boss cares about?
If not, don’t just drop it, but you should investigate. Should you stop what you’re working on to pivot? Should you reduce scope and get it across the line earlier?
Practice listening for areas of interest in meetings this week. What are the little things that are not owned by someone? Could you take on one of those and get it solved?
Share your learnings with me as you audit this week! What’s something of interest that you’re going to find fascinating. Just send a quick note in reply and let me know!
