The Great Reset

0:00All right, we're going to talk about the Great Reset. So the Great Reset while Neil is drinking, we were just talking about this beforehand. And a couple episodes ago, I talked about how I did this mastermind in Turkey. And the high level there is that all of us as entrepreneurs, it doesn't matter if we're doing well or if we're doing poorly right now. We're all, in a sense, resetting from basically all the changes that happened during the pandemic. And so we are now resetting back to our roots. And we wanted to talk about what that Great Reset actually means and how you can apply that to your business.

0:33Right now, what we're seeing is a lot of companies during COVID expanded quicker than they expected. And the main reason being is no one expected such a big boom in things transforming more digitally or online. So it caused a lot of businesses to hire. Well, a lot of businesses, including ours and many others like the Googles, the Facebooks, etc. None of us understood or knew how long this would last or not last or if we'd keep going or if things would go back to normal. And none of us predicted a high inflation and be the Fed's raising rates so much that it's slowing down certain sectors. It's not necessarily slowing down things like travel.

1:16People are still traveling like crazy. Keep in mind during COVID, a lot of people didn't really travel. So maybe they're making up for it if you want to call it. but a lot of other sectors they're going back and the main reason being is when you have interest rates rising at a very rapid pace a lot of companies use debt to grow a lot of companies are publicly traded their numbers get hit so what do they have to do with higher payments they got to end up cutting fat laying off doing different things in their business to make sure that they're healthy. In other words, people are just adjusting and they're, I wouldn't necessarily say they're downsizing, but they're adjusting their size to be the right fit for the market.

2:00Some of that may not be adjusting your employee count, but that could be reducing tech stacks and using AI, or it could just be getting rid of certain divisions and business models that may not be producing revenue, but just be cost centers and shifting budgets to something else. But we're seeing this across the board, not just with enterprise companies, but Eric and I are seeing it with a lot of SMBs and midsize businesses as well, especially in our friend circle. We have a lot of friends who have quote unquote, multi-billion dollar companies, as well as companies in the a hundred plus million dollar range.

2:34And we say multi-billion, we're not talking about unicorns from a venture standpoint. If someone just has a billion dollar valuation, we're talking about multi-billion dollar companies based on revenue and EBITDA. Yep. So what I'll add here is that it doesn't matter if the company's doing well right now, or again, if the company is doing poorly, if we're all resetting in a sense, because we're going back to what used to work. And so instead of saying, oh, everyone is used to this remote work policy. If what worked for a company before was staying five days in office, go do that. If remote worked really well for you, go do that.

3:11but the point of the reset is hey we're going to reset back to what worked for us and what worked for our culture and screw what everyone else in the public says and if a bunch of people in the company say hey we don't want to work here anymore they don't work here anymore it's okay there are a bunch of other great companies to work for but we need to be us and we need to stop trying to cater and becoming this frankenstein and also worrying a lot of other issues that don't really tie in with the company's mission and the vision here's what our mission is here's what our vision is and this is what we're going to focus on.

3:41All the other stuff, you can worry about it after hours. And so an example of this might be, let's take SingleGrain, my ad agency as an example. So during the pandemic, people would bring up diversity, equity, inclusion, which is important, right? But it wasn't exactly the right fit for us as an organization because you look at me, I'm freaking Asian, right? And our team is extremely diverse. In fact, the majority of the people on the team are women and we have a lot of women leaders as well. And there's many people of color. So that was a non-issue for us, but people wanted to bring up all these things.

4:13And it's like, no, I will say I was guilty of catering to the masses and saying, oh yeah, that sounds really good. We should do it. And so my point of saying all this too is, or one other thing I want to add is a good example is we have a mutual friend that their software costs balloon to eight figures a year on software. So imagine paying for Salesforce, imagine paying for things like Zoom info and things like that. And how did this happen? because people are just like, oh, we need that, we need that, we need that. And then all of a sudden you're paying for Basecamp, you're paying for Asana, you're paying for ClickUp, you're paying for like 10 different project management tools and none of them are being used.

4:49And yet you're spending eight figures a year in software. How did this happen? Because discipline was lost and now it's time to reset that discipline. Yeah, we all have to be more scrappy, whether it's in your marketing or operations, you have to be more scrappy. The ones who aren't scrappy, aren't going to survive. It doesn't matter. Even if you have profit, you still need to be scrappy because A, during times like this, this is where you can use your dry powder money to expand and find better opportunities. And B, if you're not going out there and you're not, if you're not going out there and you're not being smart with your money, what will happen is your competition will and they'll start taking your market share.

5:33And that's what we see is just like, just because your company is doing well, doesn't mean it can't be doing better. And just because things are great, or good for you, and I know that's not the majority of people out there. But you shouldn't have the mentality of, oh, everything's fine and dandy and PG. It's no, it's very few times, you know, in our lifetimes, do we see opportunities where you can pick up companies for cheap, or you can take more market share, or you can do creative deals. And if you're not wise with your cash, you won't be able to seize those opportunities. Yeah. The final thing I'll say is take that immigrant mentality.

6:11And the immigrant mentality is at least for Neil and I are both Asian, where our families are immigrants, at least where we learn how to preserve capital, right? We learn how to be frugal and we learn the value of hard work and those that are willing to power through it during this time of war from a business sense, those are the ones that are able to push through. And if you're able to rally your team around what the mission and vision is, you're going to go a lot further than those that are continuing to cater to the masses. There's just no time for that anymore. It's time to focus in on the business because times are going to get tougher, at least for the foreseeable future.

6:43And that's also a time of opportunity. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, subscribe, and we'll see you later.