Speaker 1: Will Lucas here in Black Tech, Green Money. I am
Speaker 1: in New York right now and away from the studio,
Speaker 1: so this one's gonna sound a little bit different. I'm
Speaker 1: here for the Afro Tech meet up. We've been going
Speaker 1: all across the country. We've hear Chicago already, We've here
Speaker 1: Atlanta today, We're in New York and Miami, coming up Seattle.
Speaker 2: We're gonna be all over the place this year. But
Speaker 2: I'm so excited to bring you this episode.
Speaker 1: I'm talking to Morgan Debonn who's a founder and CEO
Speaker 1: of Blavity and afro Tech, and she's an author.
Speaker 2: Now Rewrite Your Rules, which is out today, is April first.
Speaker 2: The book is out today, Rewrite Your Rules.
Speaker 1: The Journey of the success in less time, with More Freedom,
Speaker 1: And the book asked this question and it provides an answer.
Speaker 1: What if the path to fulfillment isn't about doing more
Speaker 1: but redefining what matters most?
Speaker 2: Check out the episode.
Speaker 1: So on a recent episode you dropped, you started off saying,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're going to ask for a million dollars,
Speaker 1: are you willing to invest a million dollars into yourself?
Speaker 1: And I think that's kind of like revealing to some
Speaker 1: people when they think about, oh, hey, I need to
Speaker 1: go raise money for this, Like if you have the money,
Speaker 1: would you put your own money in? Like when you
Speaker 1: thought about that? And that to that conversation, what is that,
Speaker 1: you know, trying to get people to think about when
Speaker 1: they think about raising money.
Speaker 3: Most people want to raise money because they don't want
Speaker 3: to be uncomfortable. They want to pay for them, set
Speaker 3: their salary, they want to quit their job, they want
Speaker 3: to have some sort of comfort. Entrepreneurship is not comfortable.
Speaker 3: There's nothing you can do. There's no amount of money
Speaker 3: that's going to make you comfortable when you decide to
Speaker 3: be an entrepreneur. And I think that a lot of
Speaker 3: people have glamorized it because of social media. When you're
Speaker 3: thinking about raising money or you're thinking about growing your business,
Speaker 3: the real question is how much does it cost to
Speaker 3: beating this solution, to bring this solution to the world,
Speaker 3: And not cost because you need to pay yourself, but
Speaker 3: actually the cost of building the product, the cost of
Speaker 3: building a team, the cost of growing this thing for
Speaker 3: a solution to solve a problem. And notice I didn't
Speaker 3: say to bring this product to life or to build
Speaker 3: your brand or do all this soft stuff. You know,
Speaker 3: so many people run around the world with these beautiful
Speaker 3: decks and these beautiful websites, and then you ask them, well,
Speaker 3: how many people are using your product? And the answer
Speaker 3: is zero? Yeah, we got it about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean speaking to that, Like, what does
Speaker 1: momentum look like in the early stages, because I think
Speaker 1: so often we get caught up just doing a bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff and you have you know, it encouraged us
Speaker 1: to have a bias toward action, But like, how do
Speaker 1: we know that we are focusing on the right things.
Speaker 1: What does momentum look like?
Speaker 3: Yeah, momentum has the game has changed. You know, Momentum
Speaker 3: when I was first starting the company is completely different
Speaker 3: than now. You know, people expect if you're going out
Speaker 3: to raise money, people expect your business to be break
Speaker 3: even or profitable. They expect that your product already has traction,
Speaker 3: and traction means you already have users and customers, that
Speaker 3: people are already trends out with you. So gone are
Speaker 3: the days where you could just have a napkin and
Speaker 3: an idea and raise half a million dollars. Yeah that's over, okay,
Speaker 3: And the reason is over is because the cost of
Speaker 3: creating a company is so cheap. Now anybody can make
Speaker 3: a company. Anybody can file for a Delaware ce corp.
Speaker 3: Anybody can use AI to help build an MVP of
Speaker 3: a product. Or you don't even have to be able
Speaker 3: to code anymore to be able to build an app
Speaker 3: or bring a bring a website to life. So the
Speaker 3: barrier to entry is so much lower.
Speaker 1: Was it ever real for us? The napkin idea and
Speaker 1: raise a half a million dollars? A million dollars?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 3: I know one black guy who had a whiteboard and
Speaker 3: was very storytelling with the vibes and raise money. I
Speaker 3: know maybe two people that were able to do that.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it is possible.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And so I think about because I watch a lot
Speaker 1: of your content and if you are not following Morgan
Speaker 1: on Instagram, if you're not a part of her, you
Speaker 1: know channels you need to get in there, especially if
Speaker 1: you are trying to a scale a small business. But
Speaker 1: I think about because I'm asking for a friend here.
Speaker 1: This is one of those asking for a friend questions.
Speaker 1: You know, you talk about as quickly as possible moving
Speaker 1: from operating tasks to CEO task, and you know, I
Speaker 1: get that. It's like working on your business and in
Speaker 1: your business. Is how I translate that. You know, if
Speaker 1: I want to be a crafts person, you know, then
Speaker 1: you're not talking to me. That's that person's they want
Speaker 1: to own a job. But I'm not talking about You're
Speaker 1: not talking about people who want to own a job.
Speaker 1: You want to own a business. But I think my
Speaker 1: question is like, what is the mindset shift that has
Speaker 1: to happen when you start something because maybe you're passionate
Speaker 1: about it, maybe saw a market opportunity, but you find
Speaker 1: yourself doing a lot of the work and you would
Speaker 1: love to delegate tasks off, but there's a myriad of
Speaker 1: reasons why you feel like you can't.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You know, when I talk to most people, and when
Speaker 3: you look at small businesses in this country in general,
Speaker 3: the average small business has an employee of one. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so most people are operating like solopreneurs. They don't have
Speaker 3: secondary contractors. They are self employed and they're a solo entrepreneur.
Speaker 3: And the challenge was this is that your income, your
Speaker 3: revenue is completely capped by only what you can do.
Speaker 3: Right if you're in the services industry, it's only how
Speaker 3: much time do you have to deliver that service. If
Speaker 3: you are building a product, it's how much time do
Speaker 3: you have to go and fulfill that product? And that
Speaker 3: at some point can no longer scale. You only have
Speaker 3: twenty four hours in a day. And for people to
Speaker 3: be able to get to the next level in their
Speaker 3: career and also to actually fulfill the dream of entrepreneurship,
Speaker 3: which is freedom, freedom of time, freedom of not having
Speaker 3: to limit the amount of income you can make because
Speaker 3: of what your bosses. The salary band is. If your
Speaker 3: real goal is freedom, then you can't operate and not
Speaker 3: spend time being strategic on how you're going to grow
Speaker 3: your business. So CEO tasks versus operating task is this
Speaker 3: framework that's really important. It basically helps you outline how
Speaker 3: do I identify every single thing that i'm doing that
Speaker 3: technically somebody else could be doing. That's your operating task.
Speaker 3: So you're operating right now. You're filing the invoices, you're
Speaker 3: posting on social media, you're calling all the clients, You're
Speaker 3: doing every single little thing, filing the taxes in your
Speaker 3: work life or your personal life. You're picking up the kids,
Speaker 3: you're making dinner, You're doing all the things you're doing
Speaker 3: your laundry, and then you have your CEO task. What's
Speaker 3: your task that only you can do? Tasks that either
Speaker 3: bring you joy but you never want to give up,
Speaker 3: or tasks that are uniquely your responsibility as the CEO
Speaker 3: of your life or the CEO of your business. And
Speaker 3: so for someone like you, will that might be setting
Speaker 3: up the locations for your new events. That might be
Speaker 3: setting the menu for your business, your rest that might
Speaker 3: be deciding what guests come on this podcast. You're setting
Speaker 3: the strategy. Once you set the strategy, somebody else can
Speaker 3: execute the work. So the real question for small business owners,
Speaker 3: and the real question for people who are listening to
Speaker 3: this is, well, I'm broke. How can I pay for
Speaker 3: somebody else to do the thing? Well, AI, there's so
Speaker 3: many tools, there's so many apps, there's so many systems
Speaker 3: that exist to be able to take away some of
Speaker 3: that automation that you're doing manually and start to make
Speaker 3: it more efficient for you. So what tools can you
Speaker 3: use in order to be able to get that done?
Speaker 3: And then the next thing is, Okay, where's your tribe?
Speaker 3: What are the people around you that you can start
Speaker 3: to delegate to. This might be your partner. This might
Speaker 3: be your husband, this might be your neighbor, this might
Speaker 3: be your mama. I don't really care, but somebody that
Speaker 3: gets somebody else to do it if you can't.
Speaker 4: Afford some else do or you just drop the ball
Speaker 4: and you say we're just not going to do these
Speaker 4: things because here's the thing, You'll never ever be able
Speaker 4: to grow your income and grow your revenue if you
Speaker 4: are the only person doing operating tass just won't happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you've picked up one of them. There's
Speaker 1: three reasons I can think of is why people don't
Speaker 1: do it either you picked up either is I can
Speaker 1: do it cheaper, but there's also I can do it
Speaker 1: better or I can do it faster. Those are like
Speaker 1: three reasons why people don't delegate off those tasks. And
Speaker 1: from your perspective, why doesn't that message seem to resonate
Speaker 1: far enough with our community.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think there's a lot of fear with
Speaker 3: what if they get it wrong, then I've lost money,
Speaker 3: I've lost time because I got to do the work anyways,
Speaker 3: or I lose money because I paid somebody else to
Speaker 3: do something it didn't get done. Now I got to
Speaker 3: do it and have the resources anymore. I messed up
Speaker 3: my cash flow. And I think that fear is what
Speaker 3: holds most people back because they don't want to be uncomfortable.
Speaker 3: They don't want to be in a situation where they're
Speaker 3: doing somebody else's work when they're like, I should have
Speaker 3: designed myself in the first place.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: The challenge with that is that if you always have
Speaker 3: that mentality, if you're not ever willing to be in
Speaker 3: that uncomfortable zone where you are relying on somebody else
Speaker 3: to get something done, then you're never going to get
Speaker 3: to the next level. You're never going to get to
Speaker 3: the next level. So, yeah, you might need to learn
Speaker 3: how to hire better. You might be really bad at hiring.
Speaker 3: I was bad at hiring when I first started this company.
Speaker 3: It was not good at writing job descriptions and setting
Speaker 3: up the right interview structure or setting up the right onboarding.
Speaker 3: You're going to be bad at stuff. So I think
Speaker 3: more people need to get comfortable being bad at things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you make me think about a comment.
Speaker 1: I was talking to a friend of mine who's who
Speaker 1: owns several businesses wildly successful, and you make me think about, like,
Speaker 1: what if you are the secret sauce though in your business,
Speaker 1: like what if people buy partially at least largely because
Speaker 1: of you? And I think about, you know, bringing into
Speaker 1: you know, a home for me, like with toll house.
Speaker 1: You know my vision for a toll House, which is
Speaker 1: a private social club. We have five bars, five lounges,
Speaker 1: the coffee house, cigar lounges, jazz club, the whole coworking space,
Speaker 1: all that. And my vision was to build like the
Speaker 1: Soho House for communities that will never get a Sohol house,
Speaker 1: like there was maysent Midwestern communities who had the people
Speaker 1: and probably had the money, but would not be on
Speaker 1: Soho House as radar. And he said, part of the
Speaker 1: reason why this works in Toledo is because it's you
Speaker 1: doing it and you don't necessarily scale to Indianapolis or
Speaker 1: Cincinnati perhaps. And so I think about listening to you
Speaker 1: talk like what if you are the secret sauce, how
Speaker 1: do you then scale?
Speaker 3: Well, if you're the secret sauce, then the question becomes
Speaker 3: how do you save more time so that you're only
Speaker 3: doing the thing that is your secret sauce? So you know,
Speaker 3: what are the other things that will Lucas is doing
Speaker 3: that you ain't got to do. That are your operating tasks,
Speaker 3: but you don't have somebody else doing them. So if
Speaker 3: you were only spending forty hours a week doing your
Speaker 3: secret sauce, you could be traveling to Cincinnati, you could
Speaker 3: be traveling to Chicago, you could be doing all these
Speaker 3: other things, but you can't because you're sitting tied to
Speaker 3: a desk doing all these operating task So I'm just
Speaker 3: saying my perspective is that, like anything that people want
Speaker 3: to do, like you can do whatever you want to do,
Speaker 3: but you have to be willing to delegate. You have
Speaker 3: to be willing to bring other people along in your
Speaker 3: journey because that is what is required to live an
Speaker 3: extraordinary life. Now, you want to be boring, You want
Speaker 3: to not grow, You want to do the same thing
Speaker 3: every single day. You want to be you know, ted
Speaker 3: on cash flow, you want to be trying to ask
Speaker 3: somebody for a two percent raise every six months. Then
Speaker 3: stay where you are. But you're probably aren't going to
Speaker 3: like me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 1: I guess that's a fundamental question, Like who is the
Speaker 1: book for? You know, rewrite your old rules, re write
Speaker 1: your rules.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when I wrote this book, rewrite your rules. Took
Speaker 3: me about five years to write it. And I wrote
Speaker 3: this book because I felt like I was meeting so
Speaker 3: many people who are at a crossroad, so many people
Speaker 3: who are doing really good, like they've got a lot
Speaker 3: going for themselves. They followed all the steps, they went
Speaker 3: to good schools, they got a great first job out
Speaker 3: of college, and now they're in their mid thirties or
Speaker 3: early thirties, and they're kind of like, how did I
Speaker 3: get here? And I can see the path forward and
Speaker 3: I don't like it, Like I don't want to keep
Speaker 3: going down this path that I was set out on,
Speaker 3: whether because I just followed the momentum of what society
Speaker 3: was telling me I was supposed to be doing. But
Speaker 3: they feel like there's more for them, and they're not
Speaker 3: sure how to make decisions to make sure that they
Speaker 3: don't keep going down that path. They're not sure to
Speaker 3: what should happen first. Should I take slow down a
Speaker 3: second and start dating seriously so that I can eventually
Speaker 3: find my match and have a kid. Should I quit
Speaker 3: my job and become a full time entrepreneur, but then
Speaker 3: I take a big income, hit out responsibilities. Or should
Speaker 3: I get rid of my not be a full time
Speaker 3: content creator because it was booming, and now I actually
Speaker 3: have no time. I'm working all the time just to
Speaker 3: make ends meet, and it was easier when I got
Speaker 3: a direct deposit every two weeks. Maybe I should go
Speaker 3: back to work, right, Like, there's just so many decisions
Speaker 3: that we're constantly making, and we don't we're not using
Speaker 3: a system to help ourselves make the best decisions with
Speaker 3: the data and the infrastructure to feel confident with the
Speaker 3: decision that we're making. So this book is a tool
Speaker 3: to help you do that. This book is a tool
Speaker 3: to help you feel confident with the decisions that you're
Speaker 3: making so that you can literally have more joy and
Speaker 3: more freedom and enjoy the process that you're going through
Speaker 3: instead of all this anxiety around am I making the
Speaker 3: right decision? All that's indecision that happens because there are
Speaker 3: a lot of choices in this world today.
Speaker 1: What did you learn differently when you were started building
Speaker 1: your mancha more mancha versus when you're doing the journal
Speaker 1: like that. I imagine there's things that you learned, like,
Speaker 1: I don't want to do that again, so I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do that differently.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I have so many field businesses, you know,
Speaker 3: The thing about field businesses is that nobody ever sees
Speaker 3: them except for like the five customers that you had. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 3: if you if you go to this warehouse. Oh my,
Speaker 3: I've wasted so much money shipping things from warehouse to
Speaker 3: warehouse in this country, just trying to reduce my rent.
Speaker 3: But I've had so many field businesses I can't even
Speaker 3: mention them. So I had one journal company, so we
Speaker 3: were we were. I thought that the world must have
Speaker 3: my journal, which was a mix of like a mole
Speaker 3: skin but a slightly more structure, okay, And I felt
Speaker 3: like you had to have this, so I built it.
Speaker 3: It was printed in India. We've paid all this money
Speaker 3: for this beautiful leather and all this stuff. Then my
Speaker 3: second field business was a skincare company called it Rose Essentials,
Speaker 3: and I felt like, again, this was like seven years ago.
Speaker 3: I felt like skincare was the new frontier. That like,
Speaker 3: in the same way that black girls were spending so
Speaker 3: much time in injury on our hair, that we were
Speaker 3: going to spend so much time and injury on our skin.
Speaker 3: And I wasn't wrong. That trend is true and that
Speaker 3: has definitely come to fruition. I underestimated them out of
Speaker 3: marketing that was attached to me as a person for
Speaker 3: the skincare business, and same thing for the journal. These
Speaker 3: weren't things that I was willing to constantly be on
Speaker 3: social media about. I wasn't gonna wake up every morning
Speaker 3: and be like, look at my skincare routine. And I
Speaker 3: was like, I'm the freaking CEO of a multimillion dollar company,
Speaker 3: Like I don't have time to be on Instagram in
Speaker 3: the morning showing you my skincare routine.
Speaker 2: That makes sense, you know.
Speaker 3: What I'm saying. So so that was the market wasn't
Speaker 3: aligned with how that what works with my life love, right,
Speaker 3: So that was the biggest thing. And then for a
Speaker 3: more macha. Now it's nothing for me to wake up
Speaker 3: in the morning and make a macha, like that's actually
Speaker 3: within my workflow, right, Like it's easy to be like, hey,
Speaker 3: have a morning macha with me and like let's talk
Speaker 3: about whatever, right or like literally, you know, like it's
Speaker 3: just part of my flow in a way that I
Speaker 3: don't mind having a camera on it. And you know,
Speaker 3: one thing when you're building a brand is you want
Speaker 3: it to be you gotta set the company culture and
Speaker 3: the brand equity, but I very quickly put a bunch
Speaker 3: of non black people on the more Macha Instagram page.
Speaker 3: I think back in the day, I was just so black, militant, righteous,
Speaker 3: like black black, black black, It's gonna be a black
Speaker 3: skincare company. It's gonna be a black you know, notebook company.
Speaker 3: Well moremcha. I'm like, I don't care if you're green, blue, tall, short,
Speaker 3: I do not care. We hired a cute little blonde
Speaker 3: girl to be in our videos tutorials, like we're shipping
Speaker 3: it out to influencers all over the country, moms, everybody,
Speaker 3: you know. So I think that was the other thing
Speaker 3: is I changed my go to market and really said
Speaker 3: like let me, let me get out of the way
Speaker 3: because I know myself and I don't want to be
Speaker 3: in front of a camera every day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes that makes total sense. You know.
Speaker 1: I'm like, again, I've been waiting for this episode for
Speaker 1: so long. I've been building up these questions because I
Speaker 1: feel like, there, I'm gonna tell you the problem that
Speaker 1: I have, and I imagine a lot of people have
Speaker 1: this issue. It's like you hear people like you talk
Speaker 1: and solutions and things that you should stop doing.
Speaker 2: Things you should start doing.
Speaker 1: And then what your my brain says is like, but
Speaker 1: there's nuance to my situation that her answer doesn't solve
Speaker 1: for like, there's always like, you know, but they don't
Speaker 1: understand because this thing over here, you know, And so
Speaker 1: I wonder, like, what do you what do you hear
Speaker 1: when I say.
Speaker 3: That, I just hear excuses. I mean, there's always going
Speaker 3: to be something that's special about somebody's scenario. But the
Speaker 3: fundamentals of business are always true, and the fundamentals of
Speaker 3: self development are always true. You're You're your biggest limitation
Speaker 3: for growth. The difference between will looks today and will
Speaker 3: look this, who's got ten million dollars in cash in
Speaker 3: the bank. It's the same with Lucas, so that it's
Speaker 3: your brain. Yeah, it's your ability to think through problem
Speaker 3: solvings at a strategic level. It's your ability to bring
Speaker 3: other people with you so that they become problem solvers
Speaker 3: for it, right, Like that is the limitation. But it
Speaker 3: all starts with you. And that's why I'm in my
Speaker 3: work smart framework. The first module, the first thing that
Speaker 3: we talk about is you. It's like, before we can
Speaker 3: go delegate to everybody else, what are you doing, Like,
Speaker 3: what does your calendar look like? If I looked at
Speaker 3: your calendar today, Will, And I said, you.
Speaker 2: Don't want to look at that, No, I do.
Speaker 3: I said, Will, what do you want to do? How
Speaker 3: much money do you want to make next year?
Speaker 2: This year?
Speaker 3: How much money do you want to make this year?
Speaker 3: And what are your like deliverables for yourself? What are
Speaker 3: the things that you want to get done this year
Speaker 3: to put out into the world. And then I looked
Speaker 3: at your calend under and said, well, how are you
Speaker 3: spending your time? I can guarantee you they do not match.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you're probably right. You're probably right, they don't match.
Speaker 1: What's the biggest rule you had to be write for
Speaker 1: yourself young life?
Speaker 3: I think the biggest rule I had to rewrite for
Speaker 3: myself was when I realized that nobody is grading me.
Speaker 3: Nobody is Like, nobody is waking up in the morning
Speaker 3: and saying you did a good job today. Nobody's waking
Speaker 3: up in the morning and say you did a bad
Speaker 3: job at that today. Like once you move out of college,
Speaker 3: there's no more like scaling grade scale where everybody has
Speaker 3: the same metrics of success. Yeah, And it took me
Speaker 3: a while to stop looking for external metrics of success.
Speaker 3: What do I mean by that? Like, when you enter
Speaker 3: Silicon Valley, the metric of success is how much money
Speaker 3: do you raise? Right when you enter into the workplace,
Speaker 3: Especially in the time that I was there, it was
Speaker 3: who's getting the best jobs, who's getting the best internal mentors,
Speaker 3: who's getting the best products to work on, who's getting
Speaker 3: the coolest products to work on? Like it was constantly
Speaker 3: comparing to other people at your level to see am
Speaker 3: I better than these people and my cohort at the
Speaker 3: best Right, It's all arbitrary, it's all bullshit, like it
Speaker 3: doesn't matter. So once I stopped letting go this desire
Speaker 3: to be the best employee, I stopped caring and I
Speaker 3: started to do what I wanted to do. When I decided, wait,
Speaker 3: I don't need to keep raising money just because society
Speaker 3: and Silver Value is saying you got to keep raising money.
Speaker 3: You raise money and then you start raising your next
Speaker 3: round while you're raising your current round, and you're hiring
Speaker 3: all these people and you're burning through it, and then
Speaker 3: you keep going and you keep growing. Once I said,
Speaker 3: ah ah, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm done, I
Speaker 3: did what I needed to do. I protected the company
Speaker 3: I have, we have great investors, I've got the board governance.
Speaker 3: Let's build a good company. Let's build a profitable company,
Speaker 3: a profitable venture backed company five years ago. Yeah, yeah, right,
Speaker 3: which was what was best for me and best with
Speaker 3: my employees, and best for our community and best for
Speaker 3: our audience. Once I made that decision, the level of
Speaker 3: freedom that I had was just revolutionary and transform my
Speaker 3: life because then you start to make decisions differently when
Speaker 3: you're actually going for metrics that you demass the things
Speaker 3: the definition of success, then it completely alleviates all this
Speaker 3: stress that we all carry around with us to perform
Speaker 3: at a level that we don't even care about.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Step, that's deep. You know.
Speaker 1: There's there's a description of the book where I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote this says, we come to see of your life
Speaker 1: with this transformative guide to leaving hustle culture behind and
Speaker 1: creating a more sustainable, balanced definition of success. And I
Speaker 1: think about that because I remember this tweet. I saw
Speaker 1: somebody else was talking about hustle culture and grind culture
Speaker 1: and how that was bad, et cetera. And this tweet said,
Speaker 1: the only people that talk about hustle culture being bad
Speaker 1: and the grind culture being bad as the people who
Speaker 1: already made it. Yeah, and I think about I wanted
Speaker 1: to position that to you is because I've heard you
Speaker 1: talk about you know, like, look, you've got to figure
Speaker 1: out what works for your life and Morgan's made it.
Speaker 2: Like, how do you respond to that?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, I say there's a difference between hustle culture
Speaker 3: and work hard. Hard work is necessary, like putting hours
Speaker 3: in is necessary. Your ten thousand hours principle is a
Speaker 3: principle that I completely agree with. So I think there's
Speaker 3: a difference. Hustle to me is grind. So you can't
Speaker 3: grind anymore, groupe force it, like push harder than everybody
Speaker 3: else around you first and last out. Okay, that's hustle culture.
Speaker 3: Work hard is let me put my best effort in
Speaker 3: and be smart about how I'm doing that. So even
Speaker 3: if I'm able, if I'm able to get the same accomplishment,
Speaker 3: same outcome and deliverable as everybody else, but it took
Speaker 3: me two hours less. I reward myself for that hard
Speaker 3: work and the fact that I was strategic with my
Speaker 3: effort to get the same deliverable for less time. That's
Speaker 3: the challenge that I'm trying to encourage people to reconsider.
Speaker 3: It's not about the amount of hours that you put in.
Speaker 3: It's about the deliverable. Even with my own employees, when
Speaker 3: someone's like, I'm working so hard, you know, I'm staying
Speaker 3: up all nine, I'm doing this, doing that, I'm working
Speaker 3: on the weekends, I'm like, why you shouldn't be? Like, like,
Speaker 3: you shouldn't be That doesn't appeal to me. You don't
Speaker 3: get brownie points for me. There used to be a
Speaker 3: time where I felt differently where I measured my employee's
Speaker 3: success partially.
Speaker 2: By who's in office late, who's.
Speaker 3: Working hard, from like a who's putting it the time
Speaker 3: in Yeah, but I completely said, wait, screw that. I'm okay.
Speaker 3: If Jeremiah over here takes seven hours to do something
Speaker 3: even though it took Susie over here nine hours to
Speaker 3: do that shows me Jeremiah has more potential and capacity.
Speaker 3: So let's reward Jeremiah for that and then ask Jrmiah,
Speaker 3: what else do you want to do? Right? And I
Speaker 3: think I think that is a fundamental shift that we
Speaker 3: all have to make, which is like, there's no brownie
Speaker 3: points for literally burning yourself out and working all night,
Speaker 3: all day, and that's not you don't get a badge
Speaker 3: of honor. That's actually a weakness.
Speaker 1: You know, there was this study Small Business Administration put
Speaker 1: out some time ago, and I remember it vividly because
Speaker 1: it said eighty percent of black owned businesses are in
Speaker 1: the bottom twenty percent of categories for revenue generations. So
Speaker 1: we over index on landscaping, small restaurants.
Speaker 2: Hospitality exact exactly.
Speaker 1: We over index on that. And you know, I'm interested
Speaker 1: in your thoughts on how we can think.
Speaker 2: Differently about that, how do we scale?
Speaker 1: And so I think about even barbershops, you know, like
Speaker 1: there's no black owned Boricks or Supercuts, and I wonder why,
Speaker 1: because we have so many barbers and hairstyles in our community.
Speaker 1: Are what are we missing about that that your message says, like, look, guys,
Speaker 1: there's a bigger opportunity out here.
Speaker 3: I think we have a collaboration problem. You know, I've
Speaker 3: acquired three companies in the last ten years, and one
Speaker 3: of the reasons I was able to do that is
Speaker 3: because I view collaboration as a core like strategic advantage
Speaker 3: that I have to peers. Why do we need three
Speaker 3: different barbershops who all maintain the same overhead of leases
Speaker 3: and payroll and insurance and equipment and HR systems, and
Speaker 3: there's a lot of overhead. Ten to fifteen percent of
Speaker 3: business's costs is just overhead that every single business has
Speaker 3: to have. If you're all one company, then it's it's
Speaker 3: that same HR person for the whole company, right, It's
Speaker 3: the same creative team for the whole company. At Blavity,
Speaker 3: it's the same talent team for the whole company. So
Speaker 3: we're able to get economies of scale because we decided
Speaker 3: to collaborate and bring other businesses in underneath the Blavity
Speaker 3: in portfolio, and that has allowed us to then spend
Speaker 3: more time doing our CEO task and less time doing
Speaker 3: the operating task. So if all those barbershops were able
Speaker 3: to say, you know what, I gonna set my ego aside.
Speaker 3: It doesn't need to be called JoJo's barbershop and Becky
Speaker 3: Q's barbershop and Data da Barbershop. We're gonna just be
Speaker 3: called black barbershop, okay. And we're gonna have three black
Speaker 3: barbershops in this entire city, and each one is gonna
Speaker 3: be run by Jojo and them. But the back end
Speaker 3: administrative work is going to be centralized. How much money,
Speaker 3: more money could they have, how much more cash flow
Speaker 3: could they have? And also time because you don't have
Speaker 3: three barbershops trying to figure out barbers trying to figure
Speaker 3: out how to run a business when they set out
Speaker 3: to be the barbers and that is I think one
Speaker 3: of the challenges is that it requires collaboration. Black folks,
Speaker 3: we love to collaborate on everything else. We collaborate at church,
Speaker 3: We collaborate on carpools, We collaborate on meals, family dinner,
Speaker 3: we collaborate on funerals, we collaborate on weddings. We collaborate
Speaker 3: on so many things. Fraternity sororities. We are good at
Speaker 3: ruling by committee. We are good at coming together. But
Speaker 3: something about business, there's not that many black acquisitions happening
Speaker 3: and black mergers, and I think that has to do
Speaker 3: with ego.
Speaker 2: What do you say to people who have multiple interests?
Speaker 1: They have multiple things going on, you know, when you
Speaker 1: are trying to advise them in how to you know,
Speaker 1: still live a balanced life in some way.
Speaker 2: But I have so many interests.
Speaker 3: I think there's a difference between interests, hobbies, passions, and
Speaker 3: things that make you money, you know. So in the book,
Speaker 3: we have this framework that I live by and I
Speaker 3: encourage people to live by, which is the six pillars
Speaker 3: of life. The six pillars of life, at any given point,
Speaker 3: you can only be optimizing three of them. So the
Speaker 3: six pillars are money, stability, Right, So money is are
Speaker 3: you making enough money to do the things that you
Speaker 3: want to do when you want to do them. Stability
Speaker 3: is do you feel stable? Like, are you in a
Speaker 3: place where you feel grounded? And if not, you need
Speaker 3: to focus on that. These two things are kind of
Speaker 3: your foundational pillars. Yeah, if one of them is off,
Speaker 3: then you got to fix one of them. The next
Speaker 3: one is wellness. Do I feel good doing the things
Speaker 3: that I'm doing every day? Do I mentally, physically, spiritually?
Speaker 3: Do I feel good? The next one's relationships. Do I
Speaker 3: like the people around me? Am I spending time with
Speaker 3: people that I care about? My Do I have a partner?
Speaker 3: Do I have the family that I want? Do I
Speaker 3: have the friends the church community that I want? Okay,
Speaker 3: then there's passions. Am I doing things just for me? Right?
Speaker 3: For me? It's painting. For others, it might be skiing,
Speaker 3: it might be all types of stuff. Okay, And then
Speaker 3: the last one stability, money, relationships, passions, wellness. Who am
Speaker 3: I missing?
Speaker 2: Don't you got to buy the book to get the
Speaker 2: last one? You got to buy book to get.
Speaker 3: The last I like that.
Speaker 2: I like that, that was good.
Speaker 3: I actually I'm like, no, I actually money, stability, freedom,
Speaker 3: passions and wellness, freedom, freedom, freedom. I was like, what
Speaker 3: am I missing? Are you the boss of you or
Speaker 3: somebody else the boss? If you want to pick up
Speaker 3: and travel the world, can you do that? Like? How
Speaker 3: much freedom do you have in your life? Are you
Speaker 3: an independent person? Or are you ruled by the systems,
Speaker 3: the society, the people around you? And freedom is one
Speaker 3: of those things that I think a lot of us
Speaker 3: inherently that's what we're looking for. We're looking to have
Speaker 3: more control over what we say and what we do.
Speaker 3: And between those six you can only again focus on three,
Speaker 3: and they change at different seasons of your life. When
Speaker 3: you first maybe are having kids, and then your relationships,
Speaker 3: your stability, and your money, which means you have no freedom.
Speaker 3: You're not leaving the house at seven o'clock to go
Speaker 3: to the bar with the boys. Because you're focused on
Speaker 3: your three things. Maybe you're not able to make it
Speaker 3: to your gym class. You know, will work out like
Speaker 3: you use work out out and do to our workouts
Speaker 3: on a Saturday because you're focused on your family. Right,
Speaker 3: There's going to be other seasons where you're like, I'm
Speaker 3: trying to get this promotion and I'm grinding super hard.
Speaker 3: So you're on money because you really want to get
Speaker 3: to the next level because you want to be your
Speaker 3: own boss, your freedom. And then yeah, maybe that means
Speaker 3: you don't. You are missing a couple of dinners, you
Speaker 3: are missing so and so's birthday party, you are missing
Speaker 3: so and So's wedding because you're really focused on your goal.
Speaker 3: At any given season, these things are going to change,
Speaker 3: and the question is just being able to audit your
Speaker 3: life and say, wait, have my pillars changed and I
Speaker 3: just didn't explicitly change my behavior to match them, which
Speaker 3: is why I'm feeling resentment and I'm feeling frustrated.
Speaker 1: That's super good I'm thinking about.
Speaker 2: No, I'm going to use a.
Speaker 1: Sports analogy, which I shouldn't do, but there is You know,
Speaker 1: you can tell a great athlete by if they make
Speaker 1: the people around them better. Not only are they doing
Speaker 1: great things, but the people around them are, and I
Speaker 1: think about you like you are that person. You've been
Speaker 1: that person for me, You've been that person for other
Speaker 1: people who I know who.
Speaker 2: Are around you.
Speaker 1: And people make more money when they hang around Morgan Debond,
Speaker 1: They have more all these things when they hang around
Speaker 1: Morgan Devon.
Speaker 2: And how should we then audit our circles?
Speaker 1: Because not everybody can hang around Morgan Debond, So how
Speaker 1: can we how should we audit our circle, you know,
Speaker 1: with an unbiased view of like, look, I know I
Speaker 1: like hanging around you, but this is probably not a
Speaker 1: wise investment of my time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there's something. There's a chapter in the book
Speaker 3: around people and the people in your life and the
Speaker 3: difference between mentors and advisors. Right, So I'm a lot
Speaker 3: of people's advisor. I'm your advisor, Right, I want to
Speaker 3: make more money? You call me. For a lot of people,
Speaker 3: I'm their chief revenue officers, Like you want to make
Speaker 3: more money. I'm gonna tell you how. I know. You
Speaker 3: still got to do the work, Okay, So you got
Speaker 3: to surround yourself. If your personal life doesn't have those
Speaker 3: people who are motivating you and helping you get to
Speaker 3: the next level, that's okay, you know, this. I don't
Speaker 3: believe that everybody around you has to be transactional or
Speaker 3: add value to your life in that way. I'm actually
Speaker 3: completely cool with it. So all this social media that's
Speaker 3: like catch you, audit your friends, your friends circle, is
Speaker 3: a reflection of how big I don't believe that. I
Speaker 3: think that's bullshit. Not everybody in your life has to
Speaker 3: be adding value to You can hire and find advisors
Speaker 3: who can help you get to the next level. An
Speaker 3: advisor is someone who's already done it. And your advisors
Speaker 3: may be a podcast, your advisors may be my book,
Speaker 3: your advisor may be YouTube channels. Right, Like, there's so
Speaker 3: many free resources and cheap resources for you to solve
Speaker 3: a problem that you have from experienced people who've already
Speaker 3: done it, experienced people who've already done I'm not talking
Speaker 3: about these people selling online courses or the biggest business
Speaker 3: they've ever run is the business that they're running on you.
Speaker 2: The online course. Yeah, okay, out there.
Speaker 3: So they are out there everywhere. So you really got
Speaker 3: to be careful try to evaluate everybody in your life
Speaker 3: against what do they provide back to me. I think
Speaker 3: that it's important to not make everybody in your life
Speaker 3: responsible for your own development. You're responsible for your development,
Speaker 3: You're responsible for your growth. You're the person who's in
Speaker 3: the driver's seat of your life. So just like when
Speaker 3: I'm the CEO, if I have a deficit because I'm
Speaker 3: a bad people manager, it's not my employee's job to
Speaker 3: make me a better people manager. It's my job to
Speaker 3: go find the resources, to go find the executive coaches,
Speaker 3: to go read the books and become a better people manager.
Speaker 3: It's the same thing in your personal life.
Speaker 1: I'm going to ask an EBC question every day carry
Speaker 1: question like what is Morgan's What is in Morgan's every
Speaker 1: day Carrie? What are the things that you've got to
Speaker 1: have access to? Tools, software, things that you need within
Speaker 1: an arms reach.
Speaker 2: To help you be successful day to day?
Speaker 3: The only thing I need is this my mobile phone.
Speaker 3: That's the only thing I need. And the reason for
Speaker 3: that is there's literally times where I'm like, I don't
Speaker 3: even want to see a computer today. Like I used
Speaker 3: to date a guy who literally I don't even think
Speaker 3: he owned a computer, but he ran probably like two
Speaker 3: or three multimillion dollar businesses, a huge venture fund, and
Speaker 3: I just was fascinated. I was like, you don't make decks,
Speaker 3: like you don't look at Excel spreadsheets, like you don't
Speaker 3: need to get in there and chase some numbers or
Speaker 3: something like. He was like, I have an iPad, Like
Speaker 3: if I need to do something like, I'll do on
Speaker 3: an iPad. But there's somebody else who's like doing the
Speaker 3: grunt work and then I am tweaking the things, and
Speaker 3: I was, I mean, this was very early on in
Speaker 3: my career, so I wasn't at a point where I
Speaker 3: had that much freedom. Right, our freedom was not one
Speaker 3: of my pillars at the time, but it was aspirational
Speaker 3: for me to say, Wow, I have that much freedom
Speaker 3: that I'm no longer dictated by a device to get
Speaker 3: my work done, to be able to produce content, produce value,
Speaker 3: to be able to talk to my employees. And so
Speaker 3: I've really created a systement at Blavity where I'm like,
Speaker 3: if you work for me, you don't send me emails
Speaker 3: like like slack me or nothing. That's right, Okay, don't
Speaker 3: call me, don't text me. You're not gonna get texts
Speaker 3: from Morgan Debon. You're not gonna get phone calls from
Speaker 3: Morgan Debon, slack me bro even when we have vendors.
Speaker 3: Our partners like the gathering Spot and Glavity are working
Speaker 3: on something. I'm like, Ryan, you guys slack Okay, so
Speaker 3: joint slack channel. Now there's a gallery spot, Blavity, joint
Speaker 3: slack channel. Okay, Slack is my headquarters. We're fully remote,
Speaker 3: but I can do everything from my phone, so that
Speaker 3: is the biggest that's the only tool I need. This
Speaker 3: could make you a millionaire right here, straight on your phone.
Speaker 3: You don't have to have all this crazy equipment. And
Speaker 3: that's that's just going back to fundraising. That is the
Speaker 3: reason why just making money is now a new requirement
Speaker 3: for raising money because it's so easy.
Speaker 2: What does success look like for you now? And now?
Speaker 2: Has that definition changed for you over time?
Speaker 3: You know, I think it's tough to talk about success
Speaker 3: for me now because I really have hit every dream
Speaker 3: that I've ever wanted for myself in a lot of
Speaker 3: different ways. And so there's actually a part of me
Speaker 3: that's going through an exercise of pushing myself to take
Speaker 3: more risk because I am so comfortable and I am
Speaker 3: so happy and I am so fulfilled. I wake up
Speaker 3: every day and I say, ooh, oh, it feels good
Speaker 3: to be me. Okay, it feels so good to be me,
Speaker 3: and I like that. For everybody listening to that, that
Speaker 3: you have that level of contentment in your life, we're like,
Speaker 3: ooh yeah, no, I do not want to trade with
Speaker 3: anybody else. I feel good. I like the choices that
Speaker 3: I make every day. I like I like the things
Speaker 3: I stress about. The things I stress about, they're not
Speaker 3: that big of a deal. Right. I'm not saying I
Speaker 3: don't have days. I'm not saying there's not times when
Speaker 3: I look at Blavity's P and L and I say, oh, man,
Speaker 3: we made some mistakes here, we overspent here, we could
Speaker 3: have pushed this harder, we could have hit these different goals.
Speaker 3: I have all of those things. But I feel really
Speaker 3: good about how we operate. I feel good about my
Speaker 3: leadership team. I feel good about the fact that everybody's
Speaker 3: marching towards a mission that matters. I feel good about
Speaker 3: the fact that I wake up every day and I
Speaker 3: can decide what I want to wear or not because
Speaker 3: of how people are gonna judge me as a black
Speaker 3: founder or black female CEO, but because of what I
Speaker 3: want to wear today and how I want to present myself. Right,
Speaker 3: I feel good about the things I think about, And
Speaker 3: I think that is the truest definition of success for anyone.
Speaker 3: How do you get there? For some people listening to
Speaker 3: this that's so far away from where they are. They're
Speaker 3: waking up every day dreading going into work that day.
Speaker 3: They're waking up today feeling like, I'm so freaking cold.
Speaker 3: Why do I live here? You're waking up in the
Speaker 3: morning and you're just like, I'm exhausted. Did I even
Speaker 3: sleep like I'm mentally exhausted and I just woke up.
Speaker 3: You got to fix that. You got to like lean
Speaker 3: into that tension and fix whatever the root is the issue,
Speaker 3: whatever that root issue is, you got to fix that.
Speaker 3: You don't have to live that way.
Speaker 2: April.
Speaker 1: First, we write your rules, The Journey to Success in
Speaker 1: Less Time with More Freedom, Morgan Debond, Such a pleasure.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me. Well everybody, I look forward to
Speaker 3: hearing how this book transforms your life and you know
Speaker 3: what things you discover about yourself along the way. My
Speaker 3: hope is that you use this as a tool to
Speaker 3: be able to make these decisions and to move quickly
Speaker 3: so that you can have more joy.
Speaker 1: And more free Black Tech Green One is a production
Speaker 1: to Blavity afro Tech, the Black Effect podcast.
Speaker 2: Network in Night High Media. It's produced by Morgan Debon
Speaker 2: and me Well Lucas, with the digital production.
Speaker 1: Support by Kate McDonald say and Jada McGee. Special thank
Speaker 1: you to Michael Davis in Love Beach More about my
Speaker 1: guess at other tech this stuff it's an innovators at
Speaker 1: afrotech dot Com.
Speaker 2: Video version of this episode will.
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Speaker 2: Decent love