The Hustle Culture Mousetrap: More Isn’t Better

The billion-dollar company destroyed by overwork

00:00Bill Gallagher: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More, is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:29Bill Gallagher: Well, we've heard it so many times we start to believe it. We've heard it: you've got to hustle to make it big. But I want to tell you a story about a CEO who worked so hard he lost about 90% of his business value. So there's this ad tech CEO a few years ago. He was a new CEO. He came in. He'd been working in the company as it had gone up. He'd been an important leader in the company, but the company went public for a billion dollars and he took over. He had all the skills. He had all the promises, that kind of thing. And he just poured himself into it, at great sacrifice to the rest of his life: his work, his family, his health, like everything else. He started flying all over the world, taking meetings, getting involved with every single department, meeting with consultants, doing all kinds of things all over the world, in and out of everybody's business. He would fire off emails at like three in the morning. I don't know why he was up at three in the morning, right? Because he was so busy. He was burning the candle so brightly, people saying, "Hey, I just had this thought, and I think it'd be really great if you'd be prepared to talk about this at the 9 a.m." People wake up—normal people wake up at 6 a.m.—they read that email and suddenly they're in a panic. They've got something to do by 9 a.m. and they've got to get their kids off to school. They've got to get dressed and use the bathroom and take a shower and commute, and, you know, all the things that people have to do, and to get into their meeting. And now they've got a whole new thing to do.

01:55Bill Gallagher: They were going crazy. He was changing directions all the time, hiring consultants, doing all these kinds of things. You'd think it would help, but they got big—they got to a billion-dollar value with one core idea. And then they started to work hard. "Let's lean in, let's hustle." And they started to work hard. They did all kinds of different things and they opened up lots of different fronts and departments and split off things and pushed on everybody to work really hard. People were working all kinds of crazy hours and getting, frankly, kind of burned out. And now their resources—not just their time, but their money, their collective power and intelligence—are now split around four fronts instead of one. He's trying to fill in the gap by being Superman, and things start to unravel, right? Not everybody knows the whole strategy. The things don't add up, so that the way that they're selling each individual thing is maybe profitable, most of them, but cash is now becoming a real problem because it's growing without a lot of thought and coordination. Things start to come apart. The whole company starts to fail, starts to become vulnerable to the competition. People aren't sure who they really are anymore because they're now talking about four different things instead of one. Again, he's trying to fill in. He's running around trying to spin all the plates, except there's only one of him and everybody else has just got their part of it now.

03:30Bill Gallagher: And the company starts to come apart. Eventually, the parts of the company get sold off for almost 90% less than what the peak value of the company was. Real significant cost. Did not reflect well on him and his career. All that hard work for not, and the sacrifice to his family and everything else in the mix of all of that. I don't know the ultimate cost to him personally, but all parts of it suffered. And the company, instead of navigating all of those changes in the marketplace and continuing to be relevant, became irrelevant. The brand name is unknown today. It's been—all the parts of it that still had value have been absorbed into other companies, and that company is no more.

Hustle culture is a lie that costs you perspective

04:12Bill Gallagher: The truth of it is hustle culture is a lie. More work isn't better. And if you're chasing success by grinding yourself into the ground, you're playing a losing game. We want to bust this hustle myth once and for all. If you're hustling and trying to fill all the gaps—and not like the peak, or dealing with an emergency here and there is when you lean in—but if emergencies and leaning in and everything is everywhere all the time and you're pushing yourself and then your team to unreasonable degrees for too long, you're not building a great team. You're not building a great company, and it will cost you. Not just the obvious things—we know it costs us in stress, in weight gain, in our health, in our blood pressure. We know it costs our relationships. We know it costs time with our kids. We know that our fun, our friends, our hobbies are among the first things to go, right? But also we lose our perspective. We stop really empowering other leaders. We get too hands-on with everything, and everything is sacrificed, and things start to come apart. Then we start to get desperate. It doesn't go well.

05:27Bill Gallagher: It's time to change it. There are lots of reasons why you've done it. I've talked about those things before. I'll talk about them again. Why do we do what we do? Right. And the obvious costs are to us personally. The hidden costs to our business are less obvious. We think if we just work a little harder—we're one of the smartest, most dedicated people on the team—maybe if we just work harder, it'd go better. But it doesn't. It has diminishing returns. Remember that a company a thousand times bigger than yours is still generally led by one primary leader with a lot of other leaders in some kind of structure, and that person doesn't have any more time in the day than you have. They also have family and friends and health and relationships and all kinds of other interests and things like that that they're attending to, either well or not so well. But fundamentally, like, you could run a company a thousand times bigger and still be a real human, right? Still not be superhuman.

Get clear on a breakthrough goal and strategy

06:27Bill Gallagher: So if that's the case, there are some things to shift, and it's time to start to shift your approach to things. First of all, get clear. Create a powerful, inspiring goal long out in the future that requires a breakthrough that's transformational in nature. Create a big goal that lights you up, that scares you a little, scares your team in a good way, and then build a rich vision around that. Get clear about who the customer is and who you are for them and what you provide and how you're different from competitors—like, basic things in the world of strategy. And then start to build your team out, right? As you go, you'll upgrade. People come on and off the team, and people will level up or they won't, or that kind of thing. But you'll build in a culture rooted in values with clear accountability for specific functions and roles. You'll coach your people instead of directing them, of telling them what to do and solving every problem. You'll coach people to solve problems on their own and therefore develop initiative with them. And then, like, you know, put in good execution habits. Set priorities on the regular, quarterly. Set annual strategy updates. Have some effective dashboards with a few numbers, not a million numbers. Put in a series of well-run meetings, a good cadence of meetings, and then go get a life, right? Get a life. Give some time back to the things that you love to do, that you used to spend time on.

Build culture and coach people to solve problems

07:50Bill Gallagher: Real-time with. And these are the things that are the key, right? So get a life, right? And what allows you to have a life is having been clear about what business you're in, what your fundamental strategy is, building people around it who can do the job, who are willing, but then letting them do the job, setting up the structure of the people in the culture so they can do the job, helping them level up to win at their game for whatever matters to them in life. Embracing and empowering execution. Don't resist having Daily Huddles. Don't resist a good weekly meeting or dashboards. Stop resisting or reinventing all this stuff. It's basic, right? That's basic stuff you could put in. Get an execution coach, or get any one of a number of folks to help you, like get all these things done and give some time back. Right? Put the date night back in. Spend time. Get away to be with the kids. Right? Take them on vacation or like whoever it was in your life. Put the hobbies back in that you gave up some years ago when you started working on the business. Have some fun. Those things will actually give you perspective.

Integration beats sacrifice for work and life

09:00Bill Gallagher: They will enrich you. And if you respect them for you, you'll respect them for your team. Everybody's going to be healthier, have lower blood pressure, more ability to navigate the stress, the chaos of the world that we live in, and go through all of those kinds of things together. All of that helps. Those things are symbiotic, right? When you and your team leave home, you don't leave at home. You bring all of that with you as you go to work. And when you leave work, you don't leave work behind and go home free of all of that stuff in whatever dad, husband, wife mode. You go home still the same person carrying all that. But if you integrate all those things, so there's time for everything and they work together well, then they all work better. Right? You manage the stress, you think through the problems better, like all of that starts to work better.

09:57Bill Gallagher: Most business owners work too hard, but still feel stuck. You feel stuck when things are stagnant because the strategy isn't working. You feel terrified stuck when business is retracting and you don't know how to reduce the cost fast enough. When business though really ticks up as well, you also feel a little stuck, stuck with having to find the people, having to fulfill the products or services that you've sold, stuck with executing, collecting, funding at all. Like every place along that way, it is a challenge. Right? But if you build a strong team, right, and you put in these things, you start to scale with ease. And that's the work that we do. Helping you build a strong team scale with ease. It's rooted in these ideas. Go start them on your own. And if we or another coach can help you, give us a ring, find somebody like that to help you grow your business without sacrificing your life. We got one life to live, right? Let's do a great job of it. Let's do it in a way that we can hold our heads up high that we're really proud of. I hope that's helpful for you. I hope it leads you to a little bit more. Until we talk to you again, keep scaling.

11:08Bill Gallagher: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.