Building Trust and Authority: A Guide for Change Agents

[00:00:00] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks, welcome to The Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective. And I'm joined of course, as I always am new day means of course, a new camera angle for him. It's Mr. Taylor holiday. He was the CEO here at common thread Taylor.

What's going on today, man?

[00:00:15] Taylor Holiday: Nothing, man. Yeah. I'm, I'm playing around with the Richard. We're playing. We're playing. I got Mickey coming into town today.

We'll probably set up a couple of new angles, new lighting, new background, just try it out. But yeah, I'm excited today to talk through today. You and I are going a little philosophical.

We do a lot of practical, but there's, there's a subset of our listener base that likes it most when we go philosophical.

At least two people I know of. So for you to today's episodes for you. 

[00:00:40] Richard Gaffin: there you go. And it's my favorite place to go to. This was pretty on brand for me, but I mean, one way to set this up is that. There's obviously a full house at the office today. A bunch of employees are in town for a summit. You know, talking about various things in terms of strategy for the upcoming or for the remainder of the year.

And we wanted to talk about today. We're kind of maybe framing it as kind of. In some ways, like a hard pitch for, Hey, here's the reason you should come work at CTC and maybe be at one of these summits in the future. But thinking about it in terms of a larger question about how as an employee, you can affect change within an organization.

So why don't we kick it off and give me some context, Taylor, about how this kind of conversation came up and maybe the context behind it.

[00:01:18] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, okay. So stay with, stay with me on this journey. We're

about to go.

on together. So we were in our company meeting today celebrating that August was the best month in CTC history, which is really cool. And a testament to a lot of people's hard work and effort, but it's been a paradigm shifting Result like the outcome in terms of the efficiency that this organization operates within is sort of outside the bounds of what I thought possible.

Like I didn't ever set this as the standard for us because I didn't in my head have the sense that this was actually a possible result. And we were reflecting on how this is a thing that often when we come into work with a client, we're actually introducing a new mental model into the organization. It's not tactics, it's not software, it's literally a new mental operating model for how to run a business. That's primarily when we get brought in to see, as CTC, we're pulling out one hard drive and inserting a new one that is the entire way in which the organization thinks about itself. And we're able to do that because we have context in terms of what's possible in e commerce. We know that you don't have to sacrifice first order profitability to spend money on advertising and grow. And for some organizations, they've been doing that for so long that that's just like it, that belief doesn't exist within the context of the organization. And they need an external change factor to produce it. And so this morning, Peter, who's one of our longest employees and is in town. For the summit, he and I were just sort of talking of like, why does that happen? And why does it actually so why is it so hard for people to affect change within their own organization? And why does it have to be external?

Why does that have to happen that way in order for it to occur? And so I think that's a little bit of the arena. That we're living in is that CDCs live reality is that we come in to affect change all the time. But what that means is that you, especially our roles as the growth strategists, the primary people who are instituting this new ideology into organizations have to push against a lot of resistance to affect change in a context. And if I were to think about the ultimate career development skill, the one that will make you the most valuable person in the history of your career is that you individually can produce an outcome or change inside of an organization for the positive. Not that you would join an existing organization where there's already a high functioning thing and you become part of that, that can work, that will assign you some value. But if you can be the reason you can be the impetus for the change, you can actually be the X factor, the one who produces the net new result, that's better. That's the most valuable thing you can become as a person who does that everywhere they go. And I actually think that's what we teach people to do is to become that thing.

[00:04:01] Richard Gaffin: So let's talk about like, you began setting this up by talking about a shift within CTC itself. So maybe it'd be helpful to go back and talk about the, your lived experience, let's say of. Actually executing that mindset shift and talk to us a little bit about how that happened.

[00:04:15] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. So there were two things that caused a dramatic change in the way we behaved at CTC. One is about the underlying ownership structure of CTC. CTC was a part of an organization called Dream Labs, which was a group of partners that owned a number of different assets. You've probably heard us talk about four by 400, the company that owns brands. We own a 3PL company called left brain logistics. We owned commercial real estate. We had investments and we held Bitcoin. Like there were all these assets that were held by dream labs, including common thread collected. And at the time, the vision of that hold co was not that CTC was going to be responsible for producing Wealth for the partners.

It was an experiential vehicle. We loved the work of helping our employees grow and helping clients grow. It was very people centric. We had a mission around helping entrepreneurs achieve their dreams and all these things inside of CTC that were built around that as the purpose. Well, the world changed a lot through COVID one is like, we ended up selling off the commercial real estate. A lot of the the brands that we had hopes for inside of four by 400 didn't work out and we're down to one brand there. And so suddenly it became an imperative that the point of CTC was actually to make money. It was actually to generate wealth for the partners. That was like a fundamental shift in the existence of the entity, but get it an existential level.

So that was one thing. The second thing was that like, we went through a near death experience where we grew really, really fast, got really, really big. And then the demand changed suddenly, we lost a couple of really large customers and we had to go through a substantial reorg and a lot of layoffs and almost died ourselves.

And so we had to re imagine how our organization operated from an efficiency standpoint. And so those two things put us into discovery mode where suddenly we had this imperative, which was become more efficient, produce cash, but I didn't know the upper bound of what would be possible within that scenario, because I had never done it that way before. And so I think even now we're living in this reality, which is that are our targets, right? I don't know. We keep beating them. Is our efficiency expectation, right? I don't know. It's better than it's ever been, but it could it actually be better? Like we don't really have good context for how aggressive we should be in terms of setting some of these expectations because we're in discovery mode for ourselves.

[00:06:31] Richard Gaffin: So then obviously like in the context of CTC, There was sort of like a, a yeah, like, like a C change that happened or something kind of dramatic that caused this change to occur, but in some of the, the scenario we were sort of talking about before around being the employee who's able to foment change there and particularly with our growth strategist, maybe when they come in to a client and are coming in to say like, Hey, actually change needs to be made in the system too.

I mean, is it. I may be wrong about this, but it's not necessarily that the client is in some sort of crisis situation or the organization is in some sort of crisis situation. You need to be able to step in and make that change without there necessarily being external forces telling everybody change needs to happen.

[00:07:12] Taylor Holiday: Well, so that's a great, Yeah. ideal. Ideally, you could do it without them, but it's much easier if they exist. And I would say that generally people come to us because there's some modicum of dissatisfaction with their present reality. And that, that runs the spectrum from, I think I'm going to die. I need help too. I wish I was growing more too. I think we could be more efficient, but people don't seek out a new vendor usually, unless there's some impetus for change, unless there's some dissatisfaction that exists. So more often than not, we are being brought into less than ideal scenarios. And that's why we exist.

And so I would say we are partnering with the externality to help drive change. And the, the more conscious the person is of that reality, the easier it is to introduce the change. Sometimes we have to help convince them of it and other times they are bought in entirely.

[00:08:04] Richard Gaffin: Well, okay. So the interesting thing to pull out then is that the externality needs to be partner with. Partnered with in order for something to happen, because a lot of the time, let's say a client comes to us, or an organization is in a situation where they understand that something is wrong, or there is some sort of crisis moment, but they also seem to come in with an attitude.

Let's say that we actually don't think that this can get better. We maybe we feel that it could. So how does that get overcome?

[00:08:28] Taylor Holiday: Well, so inside of the organization, you suffer this local maxima problem, which is that your own data becomes too real. To you, it becomes too big of a part of your understanding of the world. And I watch this for every brand founder. This is why brand founders are horrible at giving advice generally.

And I mean this from like all the people that you listen to in the podcast world, every brand owner suffers from a disproportionate weight. Of their understanding of the world through the lens of their individual business. It's just impossible not to, because they don't see enough things and what their lived experience is too real for them.

It's too much a part of the bigger story and doesn't apply specifically enough to you. And so when that's bad, you just sort of accept that that is the way it has to be. It's very hard unless you have a good reason to, to believe that it could be substantially different. And in many cases, That's the context that people lack is they don't actually know the upper bound of possibility. They don't know that running at 7 percent net profit is not actually necessary that you could run at 20 or 30 or 40. I get that there are businesses where that is possible. If you built an oriented around that desired outcome, but when you're inside of one thing, it's very hard. To have really broad context for the bounds of possibility for every individual action you're taking.

[00:09:49] Richard Gaffin: So let's say, like, 1 quality that you might need is to. Gather context. I suppose that's like part of it, but maybe let's dig in then to the factors that go into becoming an employer, becoming a person that's able to create change within an organization and kind of dig a little deeper on that. So let's yeah, what's 

[00:10:09] Taylor Holiday: So, so you have to embrace conflict. Okay. Change is in many ways, a description. There are words that are synonymous, like change and conflict are the same thing. And if you aren't willing to upend the status quo in some way, or that's a risk to you, or you see it as a risk, you will not be a change agent because one, there are a lot of people for whom the idea of conflict generally is not desirable, is that they would prefer to exist in harmony at all times versus create this constant annoyance that's like this provocation towards something different than the present state. That often takes political capital. It takes emotional energy and that I've seen be enough for people to just. We're made in the same is that it's actually easier to not be argumentative, to not point out things when there's problems, because that might put somebody around you at risk because they made a mistake or that they're not doing a good job, or it might require you to say to your boss that you think they're headed in the wrong direction or their decisions aren't good. Those are hard, hard things to do as an individual employee to stand up and be willing to resist in that way. And you have to have a level of confidence in it. Like, so you, you have to believe in yourself enough to be acting the resist as the resistance to it. So, one of the things that I'll, I feel that has given me like the immense freedom to be that kind of person is that I've just seen enough that I know I'm more right than most people as it relates to this topic. And this is something I tell to our grocers a lot, is that your level of confidence in resisting or Entering into conflict will always have to do with your own preparation is that how much have you spent the time to be really clear about the idea that you're suggesting and how right you are about it?

And it's funny. So I was just up at driveline. We're gonna go on tangents today, but stay with me. So driveline.

I've told you guys have heard me talk about this before. They're run by a guy by the name of Kyle Bodie. And Kyle is this like enigmatic character who's an engineer in the baseball sports world that processes in this way that like he talks very fast and he's like very thoughtful and he's Good at arguing and he's cares a lot about the truth and moving towards things that are accurate and right. He and I got into this long debate when I was up there. And at one point he snapped at me kind of hard. And he said like, I don't care if you say it, just don't be wrong. Like, because he was like correcting me on something and he wasn't mad that I was discussing with him. He was mad that I was wrong about it.

He's like, just be right. If you're going to say it, be right now. So we've got went back and forth on Brown that point. And I think that that is often where people just would bow out of the conversation. They would go, okay, well, I'm not sure I'm right. So I'm going to just be quiet. And so the question is, how do you get confident enough in being right is the first step to being willing to embrace conflict.

And after enough repetitions at CTC, people tend to realize that they're right or that what we're suggesting to them is beneficial to them with more and more confidence over time.

[00:13:17] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Okay. So if the first characteristic is to, well, maybe like, let's unpack the idea of being right, maybe a little bit more, which is, Hey, there's, there's something philosophical for you, but so maybe in the, in the situation with the, your conversation with the guy from driveline, the, the being wrong factor sounds like it was, were you wrong about a number 

[00:13:36] Taylor Holiday: I was, I was, I made a, an assertion about what his people believed,

like what his employees cared about. And, and I think I probably, you know, Was too suggestive without good enough information. And so I was out on a limb in a way that was easy for him to attack my position or to suggest that it would be wrong.

I don't know if I was wrong. I think I actually might be right, but it was easy for him to push back on me because it was clear. I didn't have that data to defend my position. Now, alternatively, what I mean is let's imagine we go into an organization and they have been spending unprofitably on new customer acquisition for years. And their head of growth or whoever says to me, we can't be first order profitable and would say, look at, look at the history of our ad spend. There's no evidence that would suggest that we can be first order profitable. Well, for him or her, that's the totality of their reality. Is that individual dataset, but that's not mine.

I actually have much, much broader context for hundreds of businesses. And so I can assert back, no, you can, and I can be really confident being right because I can show examples where similar businesses in the same category are. And so he's not representing the actual bound of possibility. He's representing him here.

She is representing a very narrow view. That I actually think is the problem that needs to be reconstructed. And so that's an example where the breadth of my context and experience allows me to assert with confidence that I am right about what is possible here in a way that they may not yet understand or believe.

[00:15:14] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. So how about situations where, cause in the workplace, A lot of the time, I think what I find is that nobody can is really sure like there's we sort of all have a maybe an equal pool of experience to pull from and we maybe want to make a specific decision, but the right answer isn't so clear. But at the same time, you want to make an assertion.

You want to back it up. You want to defend it. If the alternative is stasis or inertia, you want to make a choice of some kind, regardless of whether it's right or ends up being wrong, because you can't really know. So, in those situations, or maybe how does that play into this 

[00:15:55] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. So you're describing, so this is so good because the first thing is confidence that you're, that you're right. The second, this though, the second part is willingness to be wrong. So I will often joke that one of the reasons I think Andrew is a good growth strategist is because he's like borderline narcissistic in the sense that like he always thinks he's right and he's willing to be wrong about it and doesn't really care.

And I say that jokingly, I think Andrew's a great human, not a narcissist, but, but the idea is right, which is that like, one of the things is that whatever the cost of being wrong is. It, you are able to cross a threshold where you can accept that consequence relative to the percentage likelihood that you are wrong. So it's sort of this like expected value calculation that we do all the time as people, which is like, I'm willing to stick my neck out here if I'm 80 percent sure I'm right, because the expected value of that rightness versus the consequence. And I think that that ratio, which is how confident are you that you're right, is something you can press up.

But there's probably some point at which we're talking about predicting the future. In many cases here, no one's going to get to 100%. So then the other thing is, what if you're wrong? And so one of the things we have to create And any organization has to create is the kind of culture that encourages being wrong in that way. Which is being wrong and accepting of the responsibility. So, so one of the things I'll say a lot is that I am desperate for employees that come to me and say, put my neck on the line for this big outcome and give me the authority to make all the decisions along the way. Great. If you're telling me that you want me to hire or fire you on the basis of this outcome, and you're willing to be responsible, you're now in charge.

You get to make the decisions because you're the person that at the end of it, I know Okay. That person's putting themselves on the line. They're risking their own wellbeing. That person's going to fight for this outcome versus if at the end of it, we're all going to go, well, Mikey's and Stephanie said, and Leslie did this.

It's like, no, no, that person's the worst. So one of the things that you have to be willing to do when I think is CTC, like again, a growth strategist has to walk in and say, the contribution margin result it's on me. If I don't hit it, fire me, but that now means I'm in charge. And I'm going to make the decisions about where we're going to spend the money, what the target's going to be, when the creative goes live, all those things, I'm going to be in charge of those decisions. And if we fail, fire me, that level of assertion of authority comes with the acceptance of the responsibility if you fail. And that's the kind of thing that's required to, to be a change engineer is you need both authority. And then you probably need accountability in both cases to, to become that kind of person.

[00:18:31] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, no, that's interesting. And I think maybe it's important to point out, too, that oftentimes, like, the type of decision that needs to be made to implement change isn't necessarily, like, fireable one way or the other. Right. Either right, like, it's not necessarily like, hey, we're going to miss contribution margin goals.

It could be like that. The consequence of this. And I feel like oftentimes this is the case for me for other people. I've talked to that. The consequence of me being wrong is that people will think I'm dumb and not so much. And 1 thing that you learn and that I've learned through experience. This is just.

An important part of this is like, people thinking you're dumb actually doesn't happen that much. And even if they do, they probably won't say it. And the actual consequence to you is actually very slim, but to be able to separate your identity from the decision, I think is incredibly important as well, regardless of how big or small it is.

[00:19:20] Taylor Holiday: And you might not actually be clear on whether they think you're dumb now or not. So like you're not, you, you might not actually be risking anything. They might already think you're dumb. But, but here's the other thing I found is that the exercise of forecasting And then actualizing against the thing you've stated into the world is actually a really good discipline. Because it forces you to deal with and think critically about why you think that thing's going to occur to reconcile it and guess again and reconcile it and guess again and reconcile it and guess again. And we do this. So every month we do this for hundreds of brands. We guess. And then we guess again, and then we guess again, and then we refine, and we guess again, and we refine, and we guess again, and we refine, and we guess again. And that's actually the most powerful part of the whole process is that we are a thousand guesses ahead of you in order for you to get to the spot. We are, you have to start guessing. And if you start guessing today, the amount of guesses you're going to take, you're never going to catch us because we're widening the margin on you because we're guessing every month.

And so building those kinds of systems where you do become accountable. For an outcome is another part of the process where, again, why is it so valuable to come to CTC? Because you get to guess every month across lots of different things. You get to find out if you're right, and then you get to guess again, find out why you were wrong and get to change it and then you get to fix it.

And then, Ooh, that worked better than I thought. So if I could do those kinds of things, I beat the model. And if I do these kinds of things, I miss the model. How can I do more of those kinds of things? And you get, begin to pattern match in a way that like you can not. You cannot create for yourself that kind of environment inside of one brand. You will get such disproportionately less experience experience doing that in one place. And you actually accrue what I call experience debt,

[00:20:54] Richard Gaffin: hmm.

[00:20:54] Taylor Holiday: which is that you actually extrapolate too much meaning on your individual experience. And it becomes, you, you actually become a person that is way less effective because you assume.

Your individual experience is like too many other places. But in an agency, you learn that that's actually very rarely the case, that there's very rarely the same experience applied broadly that equals the same result. And so you don't suffer that same kind of same thought as you go into your next experience.

[00:21:19] Richard Gaffin: So, I mean, yeah, we give our people the opportunity to have thousands of reps of being wrong, which is equally as important as having 1000 or maybe more important than having thousands of reps of being right. So, but part of the reason that we can do that is that, in a sense, CTC is is pretty safe place to be wrong.

And in fact, that that's been my experience is actively encouraged to take that swing and to go out and. Mm hmm. You know, and obviously like, and fail where it's useful to you. Right. But so how about for people who are not, I mean, and I guess this is partially a pitch to just come work with us because we'll help you do this, but let's say you're in a scenario where that's not necessarily the case, which I feel like is the case in a lot of organizations.

What, how do you change the way you approach that?

[00:22:01] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. So this is where part of part of the delusion that you have to create for yourself is the confidence that it is better to create this binary outcome where you either create change or you are fired than it is to create this. A moderate nothingness. And I don't even mean that just for your short term financial well being.

I mean that for your long term career potential. Being the kind of person that can create positive change that that is assigned to you is the highest upside skill set you can have. So, now again, there's all sorts of like very human context that we're just going to agree that like, if you have a sick parent that you're taking care of, like maybe your risk factor is different.

If you just had a new baby, like, I, let's just, I agree. There's financial individual reasons why risk taking is not valuable in the current present moment. But as a general rule, if you want to make yourself the most valuable employee, you possibly can, or even a founder someday or whatever you want. If you can impose your will on the world such that it produces better positive things, that's going to be the best skill that you can possess.

[00:23:11] Richard Gaffin: Okay. So, I mean, let's keep digging into like the qualities that allow you to impose that well, because it goes. Beyond, I mean, beyond just maybe the will to speak up, there's also like, are you able to communicate that effectively? Will people, are they inclined to listen to you? That type of thing. So 

[00:23:28] Taylor Holiday: So we talked about a willingness for conflict. We talked about you do preparation to get confident in being right. You're not afraid of being wrong. The next thing I would say is that you are emotionally healthy. So what do I mean by this? If you are going to go into places where there is emotional turmoil and you are going to carry that burden alongside someone such that you can become a way in which their weight becomes lighter because you pick it up, you have to have room, you have to have emotional energy available. And this is like, this is now, again, we're in this place where we're talking about soft skills here, but if you are emotionally exhausted and I, one of the places that's an easiest reflection here is like when you have little kids, they tend to drain you a lot emotionally because they, they just take, they don't give back. And so I remember being in that place and just being unavailable to people's problems around, which is like, I, I didn't have anything to offer them because I was sort of poured out and I actually needed someone to help me. And I've had various employees that have had this problem too, where they've come to me, maybe they lost, they had just gone through the death of a parent, they themselves were where their, their life surrounding them was emotionally heavy, such they didn't have a lot to take on from other people. If you're going to go into a distressed environment in particular with CEOs and founders, these are often emotionally unstable, volatile people that are suffering a big ego death or other problem. That, and it's also been good involved laying people off. It may involve vendors having to break up with them in ways that the vendor is going to be mad at them.

It's going to lead to like unhappy reviews on the glass store or whatever it might be that is going to be emotionally heavy. For everybody involved, if you make that feel light, you are an immensely valuable resource to important people. And so you, you, you have to be ready to carry some of that heaviness.

[00:25:23] Richard Gaffin: Okay. So, so what's the, what's the Taylor holiday path to emotional health then? Like what, what steps have you taken to kind of get to that place or what would you recommend?

[00:25:32] Taylor Holiday: So one of it was getting really clear for myself what I was doing. So I was more okay, disappointing more people. I've talked about this before, but I I'm in this window of my life where I really narrowed the scope of who I'm going to hold myself. responsible to into a narrower lens. It's my children, my wife, and, and CTC in this lens, which that means is there's this group of people that include like my siblings that include my close friends that I know I'm not the best version of a brother, best friend. You know, like a rec league softball player that I could be right now. And on any given day, I could pick those things up and feel disappointed, feel failure, take on this weight, but I've gotten very clear for myself that in this moment, that's not what I'm serving. And so I will not assign my emotional wellbeing to those categories. And so I think even just that a rubric for how I assess my wellbeing and then orienting my behavior against it. Has been the, the, the thing that I, that makes it easiest for me to be okay with my own decisions, as long as I can maintain integrity between those goals in my behavior.

[00:26:38] Richard Gaffin: So how does that play into like, so when you're walking into Let's say a distressed business and you need to be an emotional rock, basically, when you're going into that situation, like, how does that play out within you?

[00:26:50] Taylor Holiday: It literally is like, am I in right relationship with my wife? Do we have something we need to reconcile? Are my kids doing okay? Are they well? And how is CTC doing? And then in those spaces, if I need to resolve any of those, The resolution of those problems prior to entering into that space would be well off. Here's another one. This is like going to be a little, I'm just going to say this just because it's you.

The other thing that the other thing that's been really helpful is letting go of religion has been created immense emotional capacity where I no longer, that was a huge burden of things I should be doing that I now don't carry.

And so that has been hugely, hugely relieving to my emotional wellbeing. So that's a, that's a, that's, there's probably a longer pod there that maybe me, you and Andrew will do one day, but that's

also been, again, it just comes down to what is the rubric that I evaluate myself against of whether I'm okay or not.

And the smaller that list got, the easier it was to be okay.

[00:27:41] Richard Gaffin: Well, like a part of it is like, it's paring down the number of consequences to your actions. I think it's kind of part of 

[00:27:48] Taylor Holiday: That's, that's right. That's right. 

[00:27:50] Richard Gaffin: yeah, is this going to piss off my wife, my kids or CTC if, and if you have a kind of pared down to those three things, then whether or not it, you know, pisses somebody else off.

Doesn't really matter. 

[00:28:00] Taylor Holiday: that's, right. 

[00:28:01] Richard Gaffin: the religion thing brings that to mind because a lot of behaviors become, is this going to be eternally consequential for what I'm 

[00:28:07] Taylor Holiday: exactly right 

[00:28:08] Richard Gaffin: is a huge emotional weight. So 

[00:28:10] Taylor Holiday: That's exactly right. Yeah. And I, I realized I had all these emotional weights that were like, It just really that every decision went through like 17 checkpoints and inevitably one of them was like bad decision, you know, like inevitably somewhere along the line, it disappointed someone.

It was like, therefore I made no good decisions ever. That's exhausting. That feels like just constant failure. So I think that that's part of it. So again, what I've found is that our best growth strategists are emotionally healthy people. They can go in and, and because the other thing that it requires is that you can like close your laptop at five o'clock and that there's. Somewhere where an organization is firing people and that it's in utter chaos and It might die and you're okay and that like you can, you can go eat dinner and laugh and watch a football game and have fun like that. You don't walk around with that all day long for the seven clients that you're serving, you understand what your role is in that relationship and you've fulfilled it and that you can close it and kind of move forward.

So that's another thing that I think is really important.

[00:29:09] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. No, that's, that's great. I've often thought that, that like emotional health or, or sort of like almost having like a Zen stability is, I mean, there's a reason that that's like, you know, what have Phil Jackson, Steve jobs or whatever, all kind of end up in that same place where they decide that their decisions will no longer, they won't identify with them anymore, basically, or it won't be like, I'm going, I, I'm, I suck.

If this thing goes poorly, it has to be, this thing went poorly and that's external to me in some way, you know?

[00:29:37] Taylor Holiday: Well, I think, I think that like the simplest metaphor is if you think about the number of comments that you get on your Instagram post And it's like the more famous you get, the more attention you get, the more people have an opinion of you is that like, if you applied equal weight to all of those opinions, as you progressively became responsible for more things than you would get, you would crumble. And so what has to happen is each of them have to matter less in order for it to work. Be sustainable. And so as your career grows, as your sphere of influence grows, whether that's as in your career, in terms of the amount of responsibility, the amount of direct reports you have, the amount of clients you impact, whatever it is, you have to create a scale that also decreases any individual nodes impact on you, otherwise it becomes unsustainable. And so I think that's like part of the lesson that you go through as you sort of increase. And I remember like the most obvious part of this was when CDC had almost 200 people, like it was like a small city at that point. And what that means is like, you have every human problem, you have relational issues, you have substance abuse, you have like all sorts of imaginable human issue occurs on any given day when you get to a population of a certain size. If every one of those becomes as weighty as if it was when, where there was three or four employees, if it had happened, like you would just be spend all day in a quagmire of emotion dealing with human problems. Like that's just what would happen.

[00:30:57] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So let's, let's, let's summarize here real quick. At least where we're at so far. So talking about certain an experience and a level of preparation to, to know you're right to be okay with being wrong. What was the 3rd one again?

[00:31:11] Taylor Holiday: Well, so emotional health was what we just

talked about. 

[00:31:13] Richard Gaffin: health. We just discussed.

[00:31:14] Taylor Holiday: And then the, the first one was context, right? Like, so

you have context for what's possible in the space that you're existing in. So you have a broad data set. In the way. And then I think that you have a healthy relationship to the idea of authority.

So a lot of times our people have to walk in and speak to CEOs and tell them what to do. That's, that's a hard thing for some people to see themselves as having the authority to do that, because maybe you grew up in a very hierarchic structure in your life, such that whoever was on the top, You would never tell them they were wrong or needed to change in any way. And so you have to understand that you're being brought in as the expert, that despite maybe a variation in title or seniority or age, candidly is a very common thing. You have to be willing to be the person that stands up in the room and goes, everyone look at me. I'm going to tell us where we're going. And so that requires a lot of one, a hell again, this relationship to the idea of authority and where it plays out and how it plays out and then how you see yourself as having authority in different spaces.

[00:32:16] Richard Gaffin: Okay. So I'm curious to talk about then, like, in what ways can this type of thing go wrong? Like, being the person who stands up and makes the point and, let's say, doesn't necessarily have the hierarchical sense of authority, whatever the case may be, what are, like, potential pitfalls or things to watch out for?

[00:32:33] Taylor Holiday: Well, so the most common thing is that we capitulate and we just start doing what they ask us to do.

Right? Like, so at its worst, CTC just becomes part of the problem. And like that, this happens all the time, right? Where it's like, all of a sudden we look in the ad account and we're like, Wait, why are we doing that? Like, how did this happen? And it's like, well, the client really wanted us to do X, Y, and Z. And there was this new thing that they wanted us to test and they said it was really important. So all of a sudden you've now just become a part of the preexisting system that wasn't working in the first place.

Right. And that happens in like these very small ways that are just, it's very rarely like malicious on our team side, like, or. Even like very conscious, but it's just like little capitulations that all of a sudden you are part of the broken process and you don't realize it because sometimes maybe you were tired at lunch and you didn't eat that day.

And so having that your 19th conflict of the day, you were just like over it. And so you agreed to launch that testing campaign. You're like, whatever, sure. You know, but it's, and so I think it's, it's like that, that's one of the downfalls that exists. The other is like, You just aren't on the alternative side, like you become a know it all that no one wants to listen to.

And you don't do a good job of developing trust, which is earned and relational equity with somebody such that they feel like listening to you is in their, well, their best interest. Like they don't, they didn't, they didn't actually believe you, you know, Or you created conflict such that they wanted to just disagree because you were kind of an asshole, you know, like there's

all sorts of reasons why you can fail at doing that too,

because you don't actually have authority.

That's the funny part, right? Like they actually still possess the authority. And at the end of the day, they still get to make the decision. So

you have authority by proxy because they've granted you voice, but if you can't convince them to do. What it is that you think is in their best interest, then you didn't do any, you accomplished nothing.

[00:34:23] Richard Gaffin: Well, no, no. So I think that's interesting because it unpacks a whole other thing here, which is that idea of building trust such that like when you raise your voice, it's listened to and obviously a chance still needs to be taken or whatever. But what does it look like to be the person who builds that equity?

Before taking those 

[00:34:44] Taylor Holiday: It's, so, so one of the things, so I, I love to think about this in, in the context of like trust equals consistency times time. And anytime I work with somebody who is an authoritative figure where I don't have a lot of relational equity, I'm going to win all the first micro interactions. So the first meeting, I'm going to make sure I'm on time. When I say I didn't send the message, I send the message. And in particular, in our world, the first week's forecast is so important because when it comes back, because a lot of times these people are coming to us because their forecast has been off for months. And so the idea that they could be right about that feels like, yeah, maybe, but nobody's really shown me that.

So I'm going to be so sure and put a lot of effort into the early expectations of rightness. Where I'm either going to overperform it, but I'm certainly not going to come out of the gates underperforming. Because what I'm really doing in those early days is really about trust development more than anything else.

More than actually generating business outcomes, I'm building authority and trust in me. So that they go, Ooh, that person, I need to listen to them. They're going to tell me what to do. And if, if I follow them, and if we don't have, History together. I have to build history quickly, and I do it in micro interactions where the more I say I'm going to do something and then do it, the faster I speed up that that cycle.

[00:35:58] Richard Gaffin: So I was going to, and this, this kind of plays into then like the types of advice that you could give to somebody who's like, maybe at the, more of the beginning of their career, because like the first couple of points that we made around understanding context, being prepared, those types of things, a lot of them come from experience.

A lot of these lessons that you're sharing right now are hard one from having a lot of tries and failures and whatever, and obviously that can't be avoided, but for like. Let's say somebody who's like, just in the 1st, maybe 5 years of their career. How do you start to build this without necessarily having the context to know that you're to truly know that you're right.

[00:36:34] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, it's a great, it's a great question. I think it's to be around people who have a pattern for being right. I think is one thing is to try and find people who have been and to show that the same thing I would say is in, And one of the ways that you can test that is obviously like the business success in some way, but also I would say that it has to do with their consistency of their word to you.

Like do they do what they say they're gonna do all the way to the interview process? Like did, when you said you were gonna send me an offer, did I get an offer? Was that offer consistent with what you told me? Was the interaction as you said it was going to be, was did you show up on top? Like all those little things that are just. Micro elements of trust to evaluate the environments that you occupy. And then I think there's about like, how much context do you get to sort out for yourself? What's true. So I think, again, the reason I think an agency is the place you should start and really spend most of your career is because you will get more information. So I would have like a high preference towards access to information. Where are places where you get to look at a thousand businesses to try and sort out, you Why they're working or not. So you can build some of your own consensus and conclusion. So they're your own truths, not just something you've read or received, but also your own live reality.

And how do you do that quickly? So, like, another great example, like, is this idea that, like, repetitions really matter. I think, you know, Is so obvious in like a sports context, but not as obvious in a business context, but the, but the principles remain the same is that if you want to get really good at managing an ad account, like manage a thousand ad accounts, right?

Like the, and the, the, the question is like, well, how do you, how do you get access to doing that? And I think that this is one of the unique things about this kind of environment is it's just so good at creating repetitions in ways that you just can't simply cannot replicate. Yeah,

[00:38:16] Richard Gaffin: So, I mean, I think that that's partially creates a good summary of, like, the thing we're talking about overall here, which is why, why is it great to work at CTC, which is that you get, it's an agency. So you get that context. You get thousands of reps. You get thousands of opportunities to be wrong and you're encouraged to be wrong.

And yeah, and you're in an environment where failure is considered sort of part of the process and you can kind of learn to grow that way. Any other 

[00:38:39] Taylor Holiday: I would just say like in its simplest form, if the goal is to become someone who can actually create change, clients come to us when their trend line is this, and the expectation is that it creates an inflection point and goes the opposite direction. If you join something that's like this and you join here, and it just keeps going like that, you will be assigned none of that value. You may participate in the value, and that's cool. I listened to Shane Puri and Sam Parr do a whole episode on basically like how to ride coattails in your career, which I think is terrible advice, candidly. Like, it may be a good way to bank a bunch of money, but if, if the goal is actually to be the kind of person who's impactful and creates value, Real skill. I think you want to figure out like if something was going like this, what would make it go the opposite direction? Is a really, really powerful, or if it was going this and how you made it go like that, like it doesn't have to be negative to positive. It could be positive to more positive. The point is that there's an inflection where there's a causal relationship between your behavior and an outcome that is the most valuable thing you can be. And that's, that's, it's a high standard. To hold yourself to but I think that is the expectation that we're under all the time is that people come to us and there's a before and after there's a before CDC and an after CTC that we should be able to illustrate and make reference to in a way that is tangible shows up in data and is is, is unequivocally assigned to the things that we brought to the enterprise.

You know, that's the hope.

[00:40:02] Richard Gaffin: for sure? Cool. All right. Anything else that you want to leave the folks with here?

[00:40:07] Taylor Holiday: No, one, one of the things I'm empathetic to is if you're inside an organization and you feel like you are conscious of the things going off the tracks and you're trying to figure out how to create change. I'd love to talk to you. I think that's a thing that we can be really helpful in being a voice. That gives you authority to get to where you're going. And so if you're inside of a, in particular, a medium to large e commerce business, and you're like, Hey, I see something that if we don't make a change, it's going to be a problem, whether you're the CFO, the CEO, a marketing manager, those are often the people that reach out to us and say, Hey, I see a problem.

But I don't know how to build the case for it. That's what we're here to do is to help you create the impetus for that change, and we'd love to connect.

[00:40:48] Richard Gaffin: That's right. All right, folks. I think that'll do it for us for this week. Appreciate y'all listening. Take care. We'll see you next week. Goodbye.