RSS 63: How I'm Running Two Companies In 2026

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0:34I've recently been asked a few times by folks, Ross, how in the world are you running an agency that services enterprise brands while also building a SaaS company from the ground up? And it's a fair question. Running two companies is not something that I would actually recommend to many people. But for me, it's something that I've decided makes sense. So let me break down why I think it's a fair question, but also let me break down why I think I can make it happen. One company is established. One company is just in the beginning. One company is optimizing its systems for scale, one company is experimenting to try to find product market fit.

1:23One company already has like true operational excellence and the other kind of requires a little bit of that scrappiness, that imagination. And honestly, when I show up each day, both companies need completely different versions of me. Today, I want to take you behind the curtain with how I approach these. I want to talk about the mindset. I want to talk about the leadership principles, the lessons that I've learned trying to build two businesses at completely different stages and sizes. Foundations generating multi-millions of dollars on a regular basis. Then we have distribution.ai, early stage company trying to figure it all out, trying to find product market fit, trying to create a product that customers love.

2:14And we've done it. A lot of customers who we are onboarding are loving the work that we do, but we're in that founder stage. While with foundation, I'm kind of in an operator stage, right? Distribution.ai, you're striving to keep the thing alive. With foundation, we're striving to continue to grow, to scale and to achieve excellence with the work that we do and last the long term. With both of these companies, both of these businesses, we're all focused on a simple belief. And that is that if you can create valuable content that adds value to the internet and you spread it, whether that's through YouTube, Reddit, et cetera, through the wonderful world of Foundation, or through Blue Sky mastered on LinkedIn or X through the wonderful world of distribution.ai, that you can win.

3:15If you're someone who is trying to build something that lasts, if you're someone who's playing the long game, you're in the right place. Welcome to the Ross Simmons Show.

3:39You know, I was thinking the other day, both Foundation and Distribution.ai come from the same place, right? But they couldn't be more different. They both come from the place of, we need to make it easier for marketing teams, for brands, for executives, for leaders, for sales teams to achieve their KPIs through us. Foundation works every single day, helping enterprise brands increase their AI visibility in a way that drives pipeline for their business. Every single day, people are logging into distribution.ai, leveraging our tool to take their podcasts and turn them into blog posts, to take those blog posts and turn them into threads, and take those threads and turn them into posts on whatever channel they care about.

4:27But in many ways, these two orgs couldn't be more different. Foundation is like an operating company that is operating with excellence with publicly traded companies. And distribution.ai is a product first company where the focus is not exclusively on the people and how the people show up, but more so how the customers get value out of this interface that we've built. With Foundation, the people are the business. With Distribution, the product is the business. Foundation wakes up every single morning thinking, how can we deliver incredible results? How can we surprise and delight clients? How can we improve our systems to get more efficiencies and to get more scale?

5:17And how can we unlock ideas and opportunities that are creative enough for enterprise clients to say, yeah, these folks are really adding value to us on a regular basis. For distribution.ai, I'm waking up thinking, how do I make it easier? How do I remove friction? How do I attract great talent to be a part of our engineering and development team? How do we simplify this user experience? How do we make it easy for people to understand that when we're talking about a content studio. We're talking about the ways in which we provide insights that can lead to stories that lead to distribution. Both of these are marketing companies, but they have different muscles.

6:00They're providing the market with different services or product. And And from that, we need to constantly be in this state of evolution as a team. So on the foundation side, we have, I would say, a senior leadership team of about six. On the distribution.ai side, we've got a leadership team of about two, right? That is a very different business than foundation. But what I believe is true is that at the core of both of these companies is one simple truth. And that is that if we consistently show up with the intention of delivering value to our clients, if we consistently obsess over the problems that they have, and if we are absolutely 100 % committed to finding ways to get incrementally better every single day, For the long term, we will win.

7:07Now, I've run multiple companies before. At one point, I was running multiple companies, sitting on multiple boards, investing in multiple startups, starting a family, and it was absolute chaos. But today, the calm has arrived. It's arrived because of two simple things. One, surround yourself with the doers, but also embrace AI. Let me speak to both of these. On the surround yourself with the doer side, at Foundation, we've built the muscle in the team that allows me to spend time thinking and doing activities that are exactly where a founder should be. My role at Foundation is not to be inside of Google Analytics and helping a client uncover their referral traffic from ChatGPT.

8:09My job at Foundation is not to log into a client's HubSpot account and make sure that their deals are set up correctly. My job at Foundation is to ensure that we are attracting the right people, to ensure that we're attracting the right clients, to ensure that our values are being lived to articulate the vision and to help empower the team with the resources they need to execute on that. On the distribution side, my job is very similar, except my hands do need to get a little bit more dirty. I need to be a part of the roadmapping process. I need to be involved with the sales process. I need to be involved with the SEO efforts that we're doing for our own site, as well as learning about the problems that our customers have so we can guide the roadmap down a certain way.

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10:06Right. And because I have such a strong team on both sides, distribution and foundation, I've been able to do that. We built these things called RACES, where you are able to clearly go into this document and see who's responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed on different decisions that take place within the organization. And by having this RACES, it is very clear to the team who owns what. Now, let me share with you that second piece that allows for this to happen today, and that is AI. Claude has become an operating system. Claude is able to connect to Fathoms. It's able to connect to Slack.

10:54It's able to connect to my inbox. It's able to connect to my calendar to help me be the most efficient human possible. It allows me to reduce my cognitive load by constantly giving me updates on a weekly or monthly basis that states these are your priorities, make sure you tackle them. It helps me know when there are requests for my time and we have a feedback loop built into Claude that helps me understand when I'm doing things that I probably could be delegating or training the team to do so the responsibility no longer fits for me. If I had to do all of the things across all orcs, I'd probably burn out.

11:40I probably would, right? But by having Claude, I'm able to constantly be on top of the game. And I believe truly, folks, that there has never been a better time to embrace both of these two things. Great talent, great people, and AI systems that allow you to move and operate at a faster pace. Here's something that I think a lot of founders get wrong. Recruitment never stops. You always need to be thinking about who you can bring onto your team to take things off of your plate. You want to be constantly upgrading your team to be able to do things that you can't do. I was talking to a Reddit specialist on our team literally this morning, and I was asking him about a project that he had worked on.

12:36And as I read through the SOPs in the report that he put together, I quickly looked in the mirror and said, this was a great hire. Why? Because I couldn't do anything that that individual showed me. My brain would have not gotten there. I just wouldn't have. But the work that he did to analyze and understand the state of a certain situation associated with a brand and a client that is executing well on Reddit was absolutely mind -blowing. Folks, this type of unlock happens when you are steadily, consistently producing content and stories that attract the right people to your org. when you do the right thing as a leader to have your team interested and excited about referring their friends in.

13:33These things compound in a real way. So many foundationites, that's what we call ourselves internally on the foundation side, on the distribution side, I think we call ourselves the distributioners, I don't know. But when we look at this, we have a function within our team and in our culture where we want you to refer your friends back in. We've had past foundationites come back to foundation multiple times, right? Because we are striving to build a culture that rewards people who are growth-driven, growth-minded, and are committed to taking accountability and ownership of the things that they do.

14:15And that's the next piece. Ownership always beats activity. ownership beats activity. Activity and ownership are not the same thing. Being busy, having a calendar that is full is not a signal that you are doing good work. Creating a bunch of things and sharing a bunch of things and doing things don't mean you're doing good work. Having clarity around the metric and the KPI that matters to you and then doing things that allow for that metric to come to life is ownership. Taking ownership of the outcome and saying, I'm going to do everything in my control to make that outcome happen. That is the type of people that we want.

15:08Those are the types of people that allow me to run two companies. That is the type of people that you want surrounding you, right? And you want people who get excited about your company's values. Your company values can't just live on a poster. They can't just live in Slack. They need to live inside of your DNA. That is the key. And when you do this, folks, when you embrace great people who live by your values, who lean into ownership, when you embrace AI systems that give you feedback as a leader, that provide you with insights around what your priorities are, if you use AI to write emails faster, if you use AI to think faster, to think sharper, that's how you win.

15:53Look, I don't know what the end story will be for Foundation. I don't know what the end story will be for distribution.ai. But I do know this. I have never been more excited about the team that we've built. I've never been more excited about the solutions that we are bringing to the market, whether it's distribution, whether it's the actual offering that we built around AEO, GEO, AISEO, EIEIO. I have never been more excited about the things that we are doing in my life. and if this is the game that I get to play for the rest of my life, then I think this will have been a game worth playing. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

16:45I hope that if you might even be on the fence of learning more about foundation or learning more about distribution.ai, that this is the sign that you should probably go and check it out. And if you're looking for your next role, we're always hiring. Maybe you know a founder. Maybe you are a founder. I hope you got something from this or you can share it with an operator or a founder that needs to hear something that I said today. Until next time, keep creating, keep researching, keep optimizing and keep distributing and keep playing the long game. I'm Ross Simmons and I'll see you on the internet.

17:30Gotta hustle with the business.