All right, all right. Welcome back to The Daily Mastermind. George Wright III here with your daily dose of inspiration, motivation, and education. And today you're in for a treat. We are going to do a special prosperity report edition. We've got an interview with an amazing business guy, a great mind to be able to help you, Dustin. And he is the co-founder of Caffeine Interactive technologies. What they do is they help people solve problems with software and mobile app development. He's got a 20 plus year background in this, but got started as a solopreneur back in 2010. But he manages a remote team, 100% remote team, which is great. It'll be good information for many of you. But he's just out there sharing his personal message of freedom and business and building teams. And so I thought he'd be a great fit for our podcast. So Dustin, welcome to the podcast, man. How are you doing? Awesome to be here. Thank you, George. I'm doing great. Great. Well, listen, one of the things that I really like, and we got a chance to chat kind of before the podcast, but I like, and I've noticed with all the people I've worked with over the years, that there's some common traits of entrepreneurs that have created a level of success and things that drive them and help them to go. So I gave everybody a little bit of background as to what you do, but what I'd really love for you to do is fill in the blanks as to what caused you, what really kind of pushed you to want to become a solopreneur or even an entrepreneur and start your own gig, right? Because for years and years, you were a developer and just one day, did you just wake up and say, man, I got to do this on my own. I hate having a job. Or what pushed you to do that? How much time do we have? Yeah. Okay. At least the highlights, right? Yeah. So, you know, I was working for the semiconductor industry for 10 years. I think I was in that job i was capped unless i was willing to go back maybe work on nba do some other things like that um so that was that was part of it we're also you know there were some other things going on personally i don't always had that itch for entrepreneurship because i kind of ran in the family genes and stuff like that so that aspect and uh you know at the time when i left my full time job my wife and i working on uh trying to grow a family start a family i should say and um And, you know, so it was just a lot of things just lined up and it made more sense to have that flexibility. You know, we were going through, I don't want to get too personal and all this stuff, but, you know, like some fertility issues and things like that. We ended up going through adoption and, you know, that created a lot of chaos and so forth that it was good for me to be able to have to be home and have that flexibility. So, you know, there were a lot of just self-interest, I guess, that really drove that. But I think more than anything, it was just that desire to branch out on my own and chart my own course and not be, you know, dependent on bosses who give me good reviews and promote me and stuff like that. Right. Yeah. Well, you know, everybody kind of ultimately gets into that game for some random reason. It might be money driven or goal driven. It might even be some situation or circumstance in life. They just can't take it anymore. But it sounds like you had a little bit of that seed planted through growing up and family. so i guess i gotta ask you how and by the way i want to mention i think i said that you were you started as a solopreneur but you started your business with your wife right so you weren't a solopreneur we kept that that dividing fence between us for a little while we didn't know it was going to work out yeah so and her you know my background is in software her background is in in product strategy she's working on product manager for a lot of you know big uh uh companies keller williams bae systems right on companies like that um but we never really joined forces until we started i guess when we joined forces when we started the company uh we kind of wanted to keep things uh segregated we didn't know how it would work out and then yeah we didn't really have enough opportunity in front of us in terms of of clients and a pipeline to really know how it worked together yeah well but that that's a very complimentary um set of skills so that's good and i want to circle back around to that when you talk about work uh home life balance but The question I was going to ask you is, so when you decided to finally kind of pull the trigger, and I think like most businesses, it takes a little bit of tiptoeing into the water and then going and some people burn the bridges, but not everybody I know really burns the bridges. But how confident were you when you started your business versus maybe even the confidence that came over time? Did you feel very confident or did you kind of take, was this a little bit of a leap for you and you just wanted to see where it would go? What was your frame of mind when you started into business? Oh, man. I mean, confidence is always, I think I still struggle with it. I think everybody does. There's that imposter syndrome people talk about, you know, and things like that. And that certainly creeps up on me, but just the communal aspect of knowing everybody goes through that maybe, you know, helps you overcome that. Yeah. I mean, I guess I was looking at it when I, when I left my full-time job and went out on my own. The time we didn't have any kids, you know, I was still relatively young. I felt like, you know, I'm a decent person i'm a competent person i know i'll land on my feet i've got options you know there's always something i can figure out i'm not in a situation or if i don't make this work i'm you know going working at mcdonald's or something like that right i knew i had i had uh backup options and that you know being a strong driven person um that i would i would make it work and i guess you know you just kind of try to you know i've never been the type to try to block out the dissenting voices or anything like that but just try to come to terms with them and recognize okay well there's there's risk but there's also risk staying where you are you know and that was a big aspect of it to me is like the risk of what the risk of staying where i was was higher than the reward i would could potentially get if i was able to break out and do this on my own i love that you said that i'll tell you and i want to point this out for the listeners because i know so many people struggle whether you're getting ready to start a business or you're running a business and you're having some posture syndrome or you're you're hitting some obstacles and you're feeling like less confident and normal the key is not the level of confidence. The key is how you approach confidence. And you said a few things and maybe for you, this is just like subliminal now at this point, but the way you viewed it was number one, you did have confidence in your skills, maybe not in whether the business is going to work or whatever, but you felt you were a competent guy. You had some skills. You also mentioned that people fail And so you went into it knowing that people fail and people lack confidence and things like that So I think when you approach things with that attitude your confidence level grows because at the end of the day the only way your confidence level grows is experience and success because otherwise you can like just think your way into confidence so i love that you said that and i love how you approach the business because i'm sure kind of leads me to my next question i'm sure you hit some major roadblocks that maybe made you question your confidence the success failures and i don't know if you can think of maybe off the top of your head in the early days i'm talking in the early days maybe a failure or something that made you kind of question or something that you really felt you had to overcome and and and taught you something about how to keep going on this on this business journey you have yeah i mean there's there's a ton of them uh i'm sure like turn them all down i love the uh book by by founder of Nike, names escaping me. Bill Knight, yeah. Yeah, I think it was autobiography he did, talking about just his success and career growing Nike and all the points where things had just gone south. And it's like just navigating this crazy optical course and making it through. Certainly feel like that with running a business. But the one that comes to mind for me, I guess, when I think back is, you know, in our early days, is basically me and my wife. And I think we maybe brought in like maybe one other employee and we had some some dev needs that were coming up. And, you know, the enticing thing to me was let me go partner with another dev agency, maybe an offshore agency, because it'll be cost effective. I don't have to raise my rates tremendously to be able to offset their costs. I can develop a relationship with a competent group and grow that way. That would be a really good outcome for us. And so that ended in disaster, because I learned pretty quickly that trying to work and partner with an outside agency, particularly one who's offshore, was really difficult. You know, there were problems just with staffing issues that they had. They're, you know, they're trying to balance our projects versus other customers. And, you know, certainly as a business, I mean, I don't necessarily subscribe to this theory myself in my business, but a lot of people do where it's like, well, the customer who's paying you the most is going to get, you know, first pick and, you know, they're going to get priority. You get deprioritized along the way. Yeah, I've had that happen. A lot of that. And so it just, it became pretty clear to me. I think, you know, this is back in like 2013, 2014. It's not like we didn't do a good job trying to vet agencies to work with us. we found people who are competent, but maintaining that level of competency for any period of time was always really difficult. It's like you go through the honeymoon phase and then all the cracks start showing up. But I think that's a great example of you can't go into something knowing the outcome. You just have to know that you'll be able to overcome it. Because I can imagine that your business, you're three, four years in, you're putting a lot of weight into this partnership and they could literally leave you hanging on projects, cost you your business almost at a point, but what did you do to push past it? So severing that relationship or making a decision, this isn't working, let's go to the next level. That's a tough thing for a lot of businesses. They're like, ah, what are we going to do? We can't go a different direction. What did you do in that moment where you had to kind of make a decision to move past it? And did you just decide we're not using this outside group anymore? We're going to do it in-house or what happened at that point? That's essentially what we decided. I remember at the time, going through, we're working on this project for a pretty big client of ours. And remember, I came down with the flu. It was like two or three in the morning and I was sick and my phone was going off because there was something critical on the app we were supposed to get out. And I remember logging in myself, trying to fix that. And I remember thinking, man, this really sucks and being just so down, just depressed and angry at the situation. But in my mind, something clicked and I started thinking, you know what, this is going to make a hell of a story when I come through this, right? Because this is like, you know, one day we'll laugh at this. Exactly. Not today, but one day. Yeah. And so, you know, we, and we did, we persevered, you know, our corrective action there was kind of decided, all right, this isn't the right way to go. We want to work directly with developers. We want to hire own developers. We want them to be more or less exclusive to us. The development world's pretty weird because people, you know, you have your primary employer, you may have some side projects you're working on, whether it's, you know, because a lot of software developers like to be entrepreneurs as well. there's that entrepreneurial spirit in a lot of them. So they may have their own project they're working on. They may be contributing to some, you know, third party libraries and things like that, that they're not going to build out. And so you can't, when I say exclusive to us, it's not a hard exclusivity thing, but it's like, you know, I don't want to be dealing with, you know, someone who's working eight hours with us and they're going and, you know, moonlighting, doing another six hour gig with somebody else, you know, and that's- Well, especially overseas, because you have people overseas, so you have no idea really what they're working on. You just have to be almost completely project driven, correct? Yeah, exactly. And I think a lot of that comes, I think, just from, say, intuition. I don't think intuition is something you can just completely 100% trust. But I think, you know, I feel like I'm decent at gauging people's character and understanding them a little bit. And I know the ones that I look back on that didn't work out, there was always something. You noticed the patterns. Yeah, something didn't feel right. but I went for it within any way. So I was desperate. I was like, I've got any other things to do. Let me just hire this person, see how it works out. But you guys are, yeah, you guys are, you guys are experts at managing these remote teams. And that's the other really important thing I wanted to kind of maybe hit for our audience. I wanted to say, you know, like, how do you manage? I mean, as entrepreneurs, we're rare, we're very driven, even business owners or C-level executives have a degree of responsibility for what they're driving and the people they're working with. And when you manage remote, one of the problems I find a lot of people have, and you guys have nailed it with development because that's a really hard one. And so you're the great liaison to help manage that. But what people fear a lot of is what they can't see. And so managing individuals that are remote, do you feel like it's, and I've been kind of working on this myself as well. Do you feel like it's putting systems in place? Is it putting objectives and milestones in place? How do you develop both systems to manage people remote and also a comfort level, right, of knowing things are going to happen? And maybe you just ultimately can't have both. But can you give us some of your strategies and success tips on how to manage and work with a remote team Because you have 100 remote team right now correct Yes Yeah, everyone is distributed. And overseas. And overseas. And overseas in places like the Philippines and Bolivia. What are some tips that you feel like are real keys to that? And how do you develop a level of confidence or comfort? I mean, first off, I mean, it goes without saying hire good people, right? Yeah. A person, it's a lot easier to overcome some of those things. But, I mean, the processes and stuff matter. I mean, fortunately, we're in software development, which, you know, there's been a lot of attention put towards good software development processes, a lot of tools and applications to help facilitate that. We're big on doing things like writing standard operating procedures, SOPs. We're, you know, we've done things in the past, like KPIs and things like that, but we're starting to adopt the objectives and key results kind of framework, OKR framework within our team. and you know i think there's kind of two ways you can go with this i think when you're talking about managing a remote team especially like a a team that's going to be in front of a computer all day um you can go with just trying to set expectations and set goals and being real uh you know on top of making sure people are hitting deadlines or you can go like another route which is like more of a micromanagement route which is not the route we went which you know you can use tools like upwork and there's other third-party tools out there actually monitor your employees and see what doing every second of the day and i always shied away from that because you know one of the things that's key like a key cornerstone of the culture of our business is we want to treat everyone the way we'd like to be treated so if i was working for a company i wouldn't like someone monitoring what i do if i go and check if our best employee who is contributing like you know many times over what you know worst employee may be contributing that may be an exaggeration if they want to go check facebook for five minutes i'm not going to freak out about that i don't i don't really care as long as they're hitting their goals and meeting the expectations doing high quality work that's all that really matters to me i don't i don't want to be in the business of micromanaging a team and so i went the opposite direction of the micromanagement that a lot of a lot of other and also it gives us a differentiator you know we talk about hiring you know we're someone we're trying to recruit someone from another company say we don't have all the micromanagement tools you may have at your company you're you know working 100 remote um you know these are the expectations and we looked at but that is kind of our unfair advantage in terms of trying to recruit employees from other companies. It definitely, well, and from an outside perspective, a couple notes I want to make kind of for the listeners is, I really like that you said, you know, and it does begin with hiring the right people. So you've got to set the right expectation, find the right type of people, because there are people that like to be micromanaged and those that don't. There's people that need you to tell them what to do and people that just will do what it takes. And so hiring is really important. But I love that you said developing these standard operating procedure, these SOPs, for those of you that don't know what that means. And it's just the processes and things that are in place, the path that people take, and KPIs, which are your key performance indicators. But the other thing that I agree with you on is when you get down to how to manage and how to lead an organization, micromanaging versus macro, are you really happy if they hit the goals and they're doing the objectives that you need? this management by objective? Or do you need to micromanage the activity? And I think there are some tasks in a business you've got to micromanage activity so that you know you get the result. But more often than not, I'm with you, more often than not, managing the objectives and the goals and knowing that they're going to do whatever it takes, I think that freedom and flexibility gives people a little bit more autonomy to not only be creative, but feel like they've got a little bit of freedom, right? And freedom, you know, it really goes a long way. Now, with that type of management, I think you probably would agree, it takes being able to have the hard messages if they're not hitting the goals and they're not hitting the track and they're not doing what they need to do. So I love that you said that. I think those are some powerful words for those of you that heard that, you know, hire right, set up your SOPs and KPIs, you know, give the targets that if you've got the right people, you can give them the targets. So with With that all said, Dustin, I wanted to kind of shift gears for a second and just ask you, how do you, and maybe those things that you put in place help you to do this, but how do you maintain kind of a personal home life relationship, work-life balance? Because you're working from home and you are remote. Do you walk into an office and you're like blocked off doing that from nine to three, and then from three to five with the family? Or do you compartmentalize it like that? Or is your life really fluid? And I found people operate differently. But as an engineer and a business owner, like how do you manage your work life balance? And what are some tips that you have for that? yeah i mean it's tough i can't say i perfected it um i do try to compartmentalize also try to do a lot of just uh i've started journaling uh the last year and i think that helps me with being able to track uh and think be more intentional about my blind spots like you know relationships and the other things that are important to me making sure i i cover all my bases that if you know i was uh talking to someone once uh actually as a therapist i was i was talking to this is going through some things and you know one of the things that came up i had some some crazy project stuff going on and trying to figure out how to how to manage that and navigate that and uh we're talking about it's like you know like a lot of people sit there and think well you need to like time slice everything out and say i'm gonna spend you know extra time on work and this amount of time on family but it doesn't mean like a balanced life doesn't necessarily mean that every day you figure out what buckets you care about and put an equal amount of time or divvy your time up so those so you have time to shoot all those buckets and maybe some days you ignore one bucket because another bucket needs more attention other days the other bucket so that situation i was going through a little bit of a crisis with work and you know talking through it with them it was like you know it's kind of a therapist slash coach and just saying you know give yourself permission if you need to take a step away from your family say look i'm going to be tied up the next three or four days i got this crazy project going on when it's all done i'm gonna take some time off from work and i'm gonna come back and you know because you know our family we can be pretty flexible on that and so yeah i think that's that's one thing that that uh came across to me but i really i've really enjoyed doing the the journaling thing because i've really been able to think about the buckets that i care about and how to how to fill those and you know i mean it sounds weird like saying okay well i'm going to put down a task here to say i going to go spend some time with my son i spent some time my daughter i mean that kind of kind of weird to think you have to you have to think that way but at least it gives It gives me a chance to go and look back at what have I done Where have I not spent enough time What are the things I feel like I missing out on and start to balance that out And so there's other things in my life besides just relationships. That's obviously a big, important one thing about this is making sure I've got your priority. But there's hobbies and other interests and just taking time out for myself that I've had to try to be real intentional on. And I think by coming up with sort of a framework for that through journaling and the way I do that, it's really enabled me to be more intentional about some of those things and not have as many blind spots, not have the awkward situation. My wife's like, you haven't talked to me for two weeks. It comes up after you realize it's happening. You said some things I really like and I want to kind of just double down on. One is awareness, right? You're journaling. You do journaling. Some people have a coach, mentor. Other people just sit and take time. But awareness of where you're spending your time and things coming up. Most people are so busy, they don't slow down to see the forest through the trees. But when you're journaling, I think that's a great way to be more aware of what's happening. And then you also said intention. And I think that's huge. I think when you're living your life with intention and you know what your priorities are and you know what's going on, then you're better at your awareness because you have something to compare it to other than like, how's my life going? I'm busy all the time, or my kids don't have time with me. When you have intention, your awareness is even more productive. And then the other thing I think you hit on, and we've talked about on this podcast, is that there's seasons and there's cycles in life. Sometimes you're in springtime and you got a plan and you just need to tell your family, listen, man, I got to go down and do this for a couple of days. And other times you're going to reap the reward and you're going to be harvesting and you can spend more time with family because projects are going smooth or you closed a big deal. And I think as entrepreneurs, people listening to this, you got to realize that that is just part of business and part of life. There are seasons and cycles as to where you're spending. It isn't about having equal buckets of everything. I tried that. That don't work. But Dustin, you're right. You hit it. And that is if you can have your intentions of what you want, you create that awareness through whatever daily ritual practice you have and understand their seasons, give yourself a break. I think people can learn a lot from that. So those are powerful. I really appreciate you bringing those up because you've had to deal with it. And these remote teams, they can try you. Sometimes you got to really be on them and sometimes you can let things go because things are going smoothly, right? Exactly. Yeah. A hundred percent. Cool. Cool. Well, listen, I know we're short on time, but generally we want to keep it tight for the individuals that are listening, but I think we're based on our previous conversation to this, I think we're going to probably have some follow-ups, everyone to this. So before we go, I just want to kind of throw it out to you. Is there anything, Dustin, that you feel like would be tips or strategies with today's marketplace or with your current experience? Anything you'd want to leave our listeners with when it comes to business and success mindset? Anything else that you would like to kind of leave out there as well? you know i guess just it kind of goes with the context we've been discussing already which is you know talking about sops and some of those things like i think when i when i look at failures i tend to want to go back and not just blame the individual but but really look at the process and so that can be everything from you know another employee did something wrong why did that wrong thing happen was it because they were trying to do something malicious probably not it's probably because there was a break in our process they didn't know what to do and they they are revised right so fixing processes then for myself uh yeah same thing just being aware of what what i'm doing and uh analyzing myself uh you don't know how many times i have things on my plate my to-do list each day and it sits there and i'm dragging over the next day and it sits there that day and i drag over the day after that at some point a little light bulb goes off my head i'm like you know i could delegate this to so and so why don't i love my list and i hate that i mean i love the that i've figured that out but i hate when i get in that situation like i could have gotten this off my plate five days ago if it would have just would have just taken the time to think who can i give this to rather than trying to do it myself because when you're a business owner you really want to do you want to be strategic and you want to think you want to spend your every hour of your day doing what's going to generate the most revenue and most value for your company and there's so many times we don't as business owners so trying to find ways to do that and assess yourself you know look at what you spend your time on each day and what can you outsource uh what can you pay someone you know ten dollars an hour even a hundred dollars an hour to go do for you yeah i love i love the idea of just trying to systematize create those standard operating procedures for everything you do because then it is easier for you to step back and analyze what's working and what's not and then tweak the system tweak the processes um and because at the end of the day look i mean most people get in business to have the freedom and that's the last thing they ever get right but if we truly want to build and scale and grow a business we've got to develop processes to do that. So I do love that. Well, I'm going to put some links in the show notes to your company because I know there's people that are going to want to reach out to you as well, whether it be for business or some feedback, things like that. Where's the best way for individuals to be able to connect with you, connect with you online or social media? What's the best way? Yeah, the best way, probably just go to our website, caffeineinteractive.com. My email address is Dustin at caffeineinteractive.com. You can always reach out to me there if there's anything you want to talk about, if you're starting a business, growing a business, and maybe you have some of the same problems I've dealt with, I'm happy to chat with your audience about it. I love communicating with people and just growing my network. That's the easiest way. Yeah. And you know what? That's the common message I learned is that successful people want to help people be successful. So many people are wrapped up in the criticism of others. And And one thing I've found is I've never found someone who's successful or success mindset that isn't willing to help and willing to be positive. So I appreciate you doing that. I'll make sure I put the show notes in here. And listen, for those of you that's your first time listening, make sure you hit that like and subscribe. Share this episode, but tag me, The Daily Mastermind on Facebook or Instagram. Tag me so I can see what you're doing. I'd love to be able to give you some feedback. Another powerful message. I appreciate you being here, Dustin. I'm going to put the links in the show notes and hopefully have you on again. So everybody have an amazing day. Once again, this is George Wright III with The Daily Mastermind. Look forward to talking with you again tomorrow. Have a great day.
