When Do I Change Direction?

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So all you gotta do is head over to commonthreadco.com, click the “Hire Us” button to get started, and then let us know in the contact form that you wanna be evaluated and we'll be in touch. Alright, onto the show.

[00:00:44] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks. Welcome to the E-Commerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective. And I'm joined yet again by the CEO of C T C, Mr. Taylor Holiday. Taylor, how you doing today?

[00:00:57] Taylor Holiday: Let's start there. Just in the mix,

[00:01:01] Richard Gaffin: Yep.

[00:01:01] Taylor Holiday: happen. Mix construction zone, the booming voice of podcast guest, Luke Austin. So we're doing the best. The new office is a work in process.

[00:01:09] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, , right? So yet, yet again, you'll hear some sounds in the background, but that is just the sounds of change, which is maybe the segue into our topic today. So last week if you guys tuned in, we talked a little bit about a dramatic change we'd made in terms of thinking about creative and how to generate creative, and then we walked through that process a little bit.

But what that got us thinking about was the general question, the broader organizational question of when do you execute a change like that? So for us, I mean, in some senses it was not so much of a change. It was more leaning into something that we were already planning on doing. But on the other hand, particularly let's say for the flow of the offsite that we had a couple of weeks ago, it was a dramatic change from I think what we had originally expected to do at that.

Meeting. And then in terms of the way that the organization is structured, and you can get into this a little bit, Taylor, in terms of the way our calendars are structured, it was a dramatic sh shift in how we schedule our time and think about our time and think about how an entire team works on a project.

So A C T C, of course is not unfamiliar with change, and we've gone through many in the past. But what we wanted to talk about today, and I wanted to dig into with Taylor a little bit. Is this idea of when do you 180, when do you make a change? For some people, making a change is difficult for others it's a little too easy.

Tell us when does it make sense to make a change in your experience?

[00:02:34] Taylor Holiday: Well, I think first contextually, Richard and I, a lot of times with this podcast are bringing you conversations that he and I would have where we're sort of laxing philosophically about the experiences that we've had working together for many years

[00:02:48] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:02:48] Taylor Holiday: what we see at C T C and this is sort of an output of this, where I was Sort of offering that I have over the last, you know, 18 months, CTCs been through a lot of change. And really the last two years, if you go back to switching from in-person to remote scaling up, scaling down so many different parts of our organization have shifted and the way I've made some decisions that were not the right point of change or caused harm and, you know, all the inputs to that are sometimes hard to sort out.

But I certainly was amid My decision making was amidst that. And so you, there's this danger begin to distrust your intuition towards making a change and that the easier thing to do is to do nothing, or to continue. Which despite maybe a signal inside of you that says, Hey, something's broken and we need to fix it. I think early on that intuition sort of a superpower that drives you forward. And it's an instinct that gets you to evolve and constantly become more and more. And I think as individuals, we sort of move more towards trusting ourselves and less towards trusting ourselves depending on the results of a lot of those

even though. are luck. There's luck related, there's timing, there's other things. It's not always this perfect causality between did you make a good or bad decision. And I was thinking, was, I saw a Twitter thread the other day where someone was quoting Warren Buffet saying basically that he thinks over the course of his however many years doing he's doing, that he's made like a handful of good decisions.

Wow. Like that over 30 years, that most of them have been bad or very average, but there's been a handful of good decisions. And so I was just thinking, man this whole process of, as a leader, making a decision about to make a functional change inside of an organization is really hard. So that's like this, I just wanna set the table for where I'm at emotionally, just am learning, again to trust myself in various ways and Working through my own sets of questioning. 12 years into doing this, still wondering, I have the right instinct for when to do something? Because sometimes I've made the wrong decision and then that's hard. But in terms of the question of when do you make a change, there's a couple of things that I think are really important for leaders to recognize. One is that there are certain changes that only you can make. And this is part of the burden of leadership. It's not just about authority, but it's that the per both the purview of the organization, so how wide you see and what you see, as well as the capacity to alter the directive or KPIs or governing principles of the organization falls on you. And so in many cases, people are functioning under the direction of the system that you've created. if you want the system to move in a different direction. The system itself will not move off the course you have set. And so in many ways, you are the person setting the course, and so only you can redirect it. And so you have to constantly be assessing the movement of the organization towards the thing that you want. And then you have to decide when you believe it's not going to go there anymore. And the second you reach that point, I think this is really the trigger in my mind. The second you have come to believe inside of you. That you are moving away from the thing that you said you were going to do or the target? The goal. The outcome. You have to change the direction because otherwise, if you persist every day in process that you believe is leading you off, of course you are complicit in the problem. Right? And that belief will resonate actually.

It will self perpetuate. It becomes this thing where People can feel in you, the lack of belief and the direction that you're going. This is another thing I realized is that, at least for myself I don't know how to speak for everybody, but I am not great at being this stoic presence with my emotion.

And so people can tell very quickly if I believe or if there's distrust. So I have to first find trust in me and the plan to offer trust into the things that are doing. And if I don't have that, it becomes really obvious. So that to me, when you ask the question when. That moment when you believe this thing is moving towards is no longer moving, going to reach the destination that I set out. It's at that point that you have to make the change.

[00:07:02] Richard Gaffin: So you'd mentioned before, like, well, you referencing the Warren Buffet quote. I mean it's sort of the parallel would be, obviously it's baseball. If you succeed two out of 10 times, you're awful. If you succeed three out of 10 times, you're great. So, you know, within that is obviously like a lot of the decisions to change.

people make end up being the wrong decision in a sense. So talk me through that. If the idea like, so as part of what you're saying, like intuitively you feel you're going in the right direction, making the change was correct, the exact type of change you made was maybe incorrect. Talk through that sort of thought process.

[00:07:35] Taylor Holiday: Okay, so this is so important, right? This is the difference between measuring

is that, I am not saying that you make a decision to change when you are sure that the decision will be right. that piece of information isn't actually available to you versus, I think a much clearer indication is that the present thing you're doing is wrong. It's way to see that. It's backwards

present. You can feel it. The other thing is theoretical, right? The decision to go somewhere new, there's a promised land over there is like, it's unexperienced. You don't know, but you are sitting in the present thing. so for me, let's like the creative production process, c t C, which is a lot of the thing we're seeing it, to me it was it had become, and I reached this sort of light bulb moment.

It was part of a conversation I was having with one of our AEs and Peter who leads our sales organization that we just weren't doing the thing we told people we were gonna do. The promise was broken and we were in a system where if I went again next week, we're gonna break the promise again. And that became acutely obvious to me.

And I believe that the core of the agency thing is like set expectations, meet expectations, or even exceed expectations, and we were making a promise and we were underdelivering on the promise. So I had to say, okay, we immediately need to change course. What I don't know for sure is that the new course will accomplish that end. And that I think is where people get into paralysis is this idea that they can't decide until they know for sure that the thing will work. that is actually, the thing is that is unknowable. You can't actually get to that level of confidence and you have to learn to release that and know that you're allowed to change a gap That's actually a part of the process.

[00:09:11] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, you mentioned before Sort of that intuition towards change being something that served you or maybe generally speaking serves you better in that sort of initial startup phase or whatever. When somebody just has to be making decisions constantly, you constantly have to be shifting directions to survive.

At what point do you feel like it's, you hit a point where that intuition or that maybe that propensity to change often stops serving you and you have to sort of readjust that?

[00:09:39] Taylor Holiday: I've found that it's . When I am unclear on the destination,

When I become ambiguous or uncertain within me about what I'm trying to accomplish, I become subject to a lot more of other people's opinions

doing about. I fall into people pleasing mode where I want people to like me or to be satisfied with me, to affirm me, to praise me. and those become the drivers for my decisions, and those I think are really dangerous. I, one of the most comforting things I've ever found, Mark Zuckerberg, who you know, everybody has lots of opinions. I find him to be one of the most incredible, insightful leaders of our. You know,

And I listened to this interview one time when he was talking about the metaverse and whatever you think about that decision, I think we could all agree that it was certainly contrarian. And I think repeatedly he does this, but one of the things he said is that he's come to train him himself. That when he makes a decision that if all the people who don't have visibility to what he has visibility to with the decision, it's a counter signal.

It is actually says to him that this is a problem if they can understand it now, because part of my job as the leader is to lead out into the future of the organization to look at things through specific lens, to not an analyze the present situation, but to analyze the future. And I'm the only one living there. So if anybody else actually sees it, it's a problem. It probably means it's too shortsighted. And so you literally, he says, I've literally programmed myself that if I go public with a decision and I don't get a bunch of negative feedback from people, something's wrong. And that is like really hard because that other part of you, the one that wants to be affirmed as a leader and told how smart you are and have all your other leaders go, that's the right thing to do. Is like real. at least for me it is. And so I think though that kind of affirmation, and you hear that from a lot of people, right? And I've heard that, you know, in some version, From other folks, and I've experienced it a lot myself is that you are doing a unique job. You have a unique responsibility inside of the organization, and so the idea that someone at a different level with a different set of responsibilities would understand entirely what you're doing at the moment you do it highly

Your job is to educate and communicate and reiterate over and over, such that you're bringing them into understanding over time. But at the moment of decision, unlikely that they will totally agree or understand.

[00:12:04] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. No, that makes sense. One thing that I was thinking about the whole sort of Metaverse debacle, I guess you could call it, was that in. The history of just any given brand, even the most respected ones included, are all kinds of insane ideas that we have completely forgotten about. And it is, it's sort of a lot of the skill of entrepreneurship is making those crazy decisions and trusting at least on some level that.

One of them are always gonna work out and that's what's important. I was thinking , a random example would be, I don't know if you remember the purple ketchup craze back in the late nineties when I was a kid. You know, I'm sure somebody thought that was gonna be a rocket ship to the top. It lasted for a couple months and then it faded out.

But at the same time, it's like, you know, it was the Heinz Ketchup Corporation. They're doing fine. I guess. So I think, like I was wondering if maybe we can get, oh, hold on. There we go. Maybe we can get a little concrete. About some of these decisions and just maybe talk through some examples with specifics about like what's an example of a time that you felt you didn't go out on a limb sufficiently?

[00:13:06] Taylor Holiday: Cool. That's a good question. Time. I didn't go out on a limb so I think there was a long period of time where. I had a stated mission at C T C that was not something that we were acting in consistently with,

therefore its actual effect very average.

like I was getting a of and connection to the idea that was consistent with the actual belief I was expressing in my behavior relative to that idea.

And specifically around the story is that we had this mission statement that was like, help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams. Okay. Which is like a, one of those really pithy, kind of good sounding ideas. But there was this moment, I think it was like 2017 or something, I, we were in the office and it was towards the end of the year and I was sort of reflecting on the year and I was asking myself this question of like, was it a good year? Like, did we do like Big G? Did we do the mission? Did we accomplish the mission? And so I walked around the office and I sort of asked people like, Hey, how many dreams do you think we achieved this year? And one person was like, I don't know, Another like, I don't know, maybe 50. It was like, it became very clear to me that the idea was ambiguous and no one actually knew if we were doing it. And I think it's because, especially as it relates to mission, there's always this tension between the practicals and the financials and the idea that you say you exist to serve. I don't think that at that moment I was actually out on a limb committed to the mission.

I was using the mission to masquerade for like build a business that makes money. And I think over the next two years we really committed to that idea. In a very real way from T M Y D and the investment we made in that to, like, at one point we were asking every one of our customers what their dream is and putting these and really tracking it. We counted them. One year we celebrate, like, now again, that doesn't mean that was the right mission for the company or that even at the end of it, I would be satisfied, but I wasn't able to evaluate it because I wasn't actually in it. and I think at that point I needed to change that. And that's a moment where I was like partially committed to an idea.

[00:15:15] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay, so let's fast forward then to a couple of weeks ago and the sort of strategic shift that we made. Talk about like how you feel about that, especially in terms of like, so I think overall, and you know, obviously for listeners we discussed the specifics of this last week. To me that makes a lot of sense, which maybe is a warning sign.

But on the other hand, a lot of what we were trying to do is win for a client that was already happy with us, which was a little weird. So there, there was a couple elements there that kind of play into what we're talking about here, but maybe talk through your sort of thoughts on making that change.

At that time,

[00:15:50] Taylor Holiday: So the conviction that I think that I have, that everyone doesn't have yet is that I feel like I deeply and intimately understand the connection between the creative strategy we need and the media buying philosophy that we put forward.

[00:16:01] Richard Gaffin: yeah.

[00:16:02] Taylor Holiday: And I think people understand these things in distinction, like our media buyers understand cost caps and our creative strategists understand making ads. But the way that they connect to each other, and even broader than that, like this vision that I have for what we're building at C T C, which is like this operating system that connects marketing and finance, that brings together the marketing calendar with a financial forecast into creative planning, into media buying in this, like I have a vision in my head for this that I don't think anybody understands in totality yet. Like something clicked in this conversation to me that this was the pivot point that if I didn't solve the whole thing would collapse. Like the dis the trust in the whole thing was actually predicated on solving this problem. And so I think people understand and agree with pieces of it, but it like, in that moment became really clear to me that the change that we needed to become the thing that I wanted was centered in this issue.

[00:16:53] Richard Gaffin: So one thing that like, I think came out of that, and so we've talked about like maybe the types of shifts that you can make. And so you talked a little bit about pursuit of the mission, and I think that this, the change we made most recently is more like you've described more.

Distinctly strategic or tactical. And I think one thing I wanted to talk through was a little bit of get your thoughts on or may, maybe your thoughts on this observation of mine that we talked a little bit about a couple of days ago, which is that in some senses, strategy is just choosing to say no to certain things and what we really sort of.

Dived into with both feet, I would say a couple weeks ago, is very definitively saying no to specific things that may in fact have value and saying yes to things that may not always work. However, they're the things that we are saying yes to specifically, and that's part of generating a unique value proposition.

So maybe talk through that a little bit, like the decision to say yes to some things and no to others and how you think about that.

[00:17:54] Taylor Holiday: I, I think no is the strongest reflection of clarity. I think, so I've used this metaphor I think before, but I have a friend, one of our coworkers who is vegan. and I'm always, I always marvel at the ease with which he rejects offers of really good food. Like, we'll be out and it's, you know, something delicious and it's just like, no, that's not. What I do and it doesn't feel weighty to make the clarity is obvious in his identity. And I think that people who have a really strong sense of themselves know is not hard. And it's a really useful tool to the reinforcement of their identity. Whereas I find that people who are. Don't have a diet plan, really don't have a framework to say no to any food, right? Like just not a good reason to say no to anything. And so it's, oh actually like a harder thing to overcome. I think this is true of taking on clients. Like this is a big area where no, I think reflects clarity, is that if you don't a P and there's been time and that's ideal customer profile and there's been lots of times at CTC where that's been really ambiguous.

what that means is you're saying yes to Oh, that's actually like a lead gen clients that's not on Shopify that can't use our tech stack, but like we could, I bet we could do it. You know,

[00:19:05] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:19:05] Taylor Holiday: all of a sudden your systems are breaking, or hell, we got into like B two B clients for a minute, or you know, whatever apps, you know,

times where, and you sort of cause this chaos versus I think right now one of the things we clear on is no, we have this I C P. 10 to a hundred million dollars. It's mid market. It's what we call not yet enterprise or next gen brands. And so it's like, a clarity that enables No, and I think that's where your strategy then gets to be reinforced by the elimination of the distraction.

[00:19:37] Richard Gaffin: So maybe talk a little bit about, so for across maybe D two C businesses that we've seen, 'cause that's a large portion of our listener base. What does it look like to say No, to refocus and to make that kind of organizational change? 

[00:19:50] Taylor Holiday: It is. One is to first acknowledge inside of you. The fear or feeling that you have about what it means. So let's stick with the client thing. 'cause I feel this all the time. My sales, my head of sales comes to me. Here's a client. They wanna pay you money. They're just outside of the I C P. they're not on stat.

They can't upload the stat list. They're on some other cart. Whatever. I, before I say no, I am afraid.

Okay. I am afraid that we won't make our new customer revenue number for the month, that we'll miss our target, we won't achieve the outcome we want. And I have to like look at it. I have to like name that in myself in order to then not allow it to make the decision for me, and I have to step back and sort of dance with that emotion for a second and go, okay, what do I want to be more of? The person that like does anything to achieve the financial target or the person who does what I say I want, I do. And it's actually about the process of developing trust in myself to

what I want to become is to be able to do the thing I said I was gonna do. And so I think one is like just to this ability as leaders to acknowledge the feeling that you have. Because I think a lot of times to admit I'm afraid in that moment, even to say that to my sales guy or my ops leader is like, A weird thing to do,

[00:21:13] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, totally

[00:21:14] Taylor Holiday: I, but I am like that's what I'm feeling. Like uhoh. What if I say no? Do we lose money? Do I have to fire somebody?

But I've walked now enough, the other path to know that the consequences worse. So that's actually helpful in this case. But, so that could, like, if you play that out, I saw today Twitter, and I think I'm not gonna call them out individually, but somebody was saying, I just got this amazing offer from a, you know, a incredible license or, and I don't have the money for the deal, but how could I get it?

And. It's funny that Sean Frank from Ridge is like the first comment and response and he's like, you should say no. And it was like this perfect illustration of, and he was like sort of listening out how these deals usually aren't what they want, but like if you don't have the money yet, it's probably a distraction.

Like it might be too soon. And it was like a season, somebody who had probably made a ton of mistakes around chasing those kinds of things. And somebody who felt like it was like really exciting, it could change their business. And he was like, right now you should probably say no.

[00:22:07] Richard Gaffin: yeah.

[00:22:08] Taylor Holiday: should probably focus on achieving the next level.

Like, if you don't have the money, it's probably a signal that it's not the right deal at the right

know? Versus how do I go find the money to get the thing? And it's like, well, no, you just aren't ready for it yet.

And I think that experience of like, I. You can't, you don't wanna fast forward the thing into a level that'll break you or die from indigestion, and that you need to be clear on the goal for this year and then the goal for next year.

And then at whatever point that thing becomes on that roadmap, you make that action.

then, you don't get distracted by it, no matter how good it seems. It's about, again, it goes back to this clarity of purpose, the clarity of vision and being able to act within that. So I think that those are some things that I think about and what I've seen as effective. Ways to get better at No, is to acknowledge the emotion of it and then to not feel rushed to become more than you set out to be and be committed to the length of the vision for the journey that you're on.

[00:23:00] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Well, I do think it's useful to highlight one thing that you mentioned just now, which is . That we have gotten much better at this recently after having years of experience of understanding the long tail consequences of not saying no to the right or saying yes to the wrong things, rather. And that is, it's really hard to see that until.

A lot of time has passed and I feel too, for me anyway, that you have to get a lot of reps with that failing before you can fully understand how it will definitely fail. And so you 'cause even after, let's say you get five clients that don't really fit and they all kind of collapse in a similarly spectacular way, and a sixth client comes along, they're still offering you a bunch of money right now.

And that is still always going to be difficult to say. And I think we've just gotten to a point where, We viscerally know now that this is going to be a bad thing for us in the future. And we felt the consequences of that. And so that's, you know, from that experience comes a lot of change, I think. 

[00:24:02] Taylor Holiday: And it's important to acknowledge the spaces where you're more prone to it. So like money is a really

[00:24:07] Richard Gaffin: yeah.

[00:24:08] Taylor Holiday: If you know that if there's money involved, you're more likely to compromise, then you should add an additional layer of review to anything that involves money. So I think about this.

Another one is like sponsorship. So, we, we, even with this podcast or anything else,

question of right now of like, what, or people coming to me for Twitter feeds or whatever, it's like, will you pay if I offer you $10,000? Will you tweet this? And you're like,

[00:24:34] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:24:34] Taylor Holiday: I'd say a lot things for $10,000.

[00:24:36] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:24:37] Taylor Holiday: what is the actual willingness I have to, to slang

For that amount of money. And so that becomes an area where it's like, it's probably a good for an additional set of review to give yourself, to not respond quickly for that one. Another one is like, you know, if someone is like I have one That if a lower level employee meaning there's levels between me and them, just organ hierarchically comes to me and asks for things, I recognize that I have a disposition to want to be helpful be the c e o with an open door policy. And I've had to become aware of how my desire to be seen as a certain kind of person. It has a negative consequence on the leaders that are, I'm trying to empower underneath me. And so I have to be take a step back in those moments and go, okay, is this a thing? I need to say no to this meeting or this time with this person? Actually for the sake of the leaders that I'm trying to develop and their relationship that I want between that person and their manager, or whatever it might be, and I have to, I know that's an area where I have like, I'm prone to making a decision that's about a short term feeling. so I think just being able to identify, and that's what you're talking about, is that over time find the things that are harmful. You find how you learn what you emotionally respond to fastest, you start to be able to then build up the surrounding circumstance to make better decisions.

[00:25:56] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:25:57] Taylor Holiday: and sometimes it's okay to like acknowledge that you're not gonna make the decision naturally.

the example for me is if I don't have people to work out with in the morning, I won't show

like for myself. And so I hate that about myself. I wish was this incredibly David Goggins disciplined person, I also have decided that like rather than trying to white knuckle be that person and just become it, I found people to work out with.

do? I work out every day. And so, but acknowledging that weakness or that vulnerability allows me to build the system to actually get to the thing that I want. And so I think these things are like that, where you recognize the areas where saying no is

you maybe build a more secure system to protect you in it.

[00:26:39] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. There's almost like a s call it sort of like a positive machiavellianism, which is that the ends justify the means and even if the means don't look exactly right, oftentimes for us, like for me too, that's, it's the same thing with me working out, which is that the energy to get myself to go to the gym with when nobody's there is actually greater than the energy it takes to work out and that feels bad to me.

It feels a morally. Bad character thing, but if you just sort of acknowledge that like, really nobody cares. And if I don't care either, and I'm willing to accept that, I just need other people to be there to like shame me. If I don't show up to work out then the end outcome is going, I'm gonna work out.

And that's ultimately what I really want.

[00:27:20] Taylor Holiday: Yeah

I, and I think that's a really powerful thing to, to be able to acknowledge about ourselves versus I think it's easy to look around and go, but it seems easy for that person, or they just do it so well or like, and so you're like, I have to be, It has to be easy. Not only do I have to do it, but it actually has to seem easy for me, know? That's really dangerous. The other thing I would say is like we wrap up and sort of trying to make this practical back to e-commerce and managers, is that we're like sort of halfway through the year, right? We're coming into, we're, you know, starting month eight and there's a chance you're meaningfully off course

[00:27:50] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.. 

[00:27:51] Taylor Holiday: direction or you're staring out at Q four and you're like, it's, I just don't think it's gonna happen. there's something missing, right? And so, By the time you get to November, it's probably too late to change. Right? And so this is a moment to sort of check your gut and go, do I believe in the course?

Like, am I convicted such that I can lead other people into a belief in something? Like do I have that level of conviction in the path right now? And if not, would need to change such that I would believe, think this is another thing that is, that if I find myself that I can't believe I'm the leader, I have to, if I don't believe, it will ooze into

[00:28:30] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm. 

[00:28:31] Taylor Holiday: And so your own conviction is a part of this that's worth checking on. Pull up the forecast, look at the number that you have written down at the end of the year. here's the thing if you don't believe it's the right one, change it. if you don't believe the strategy to get there is the right one. Change it. something to correct course because there's still time and your conviction in that issue matters.

[00:28:51] Richard Gaffin: Cool. All right folks. Well, I think that about does it for us. Appreciate it, Taylor. Good advice as always. And remember. . When you wanna make a change, the change needs to be towards focusing, not necessarily towards expansion, I think is a good way to go to summarize that. But alright folks, we'll we'll see you next week.

Take care.