Josh Cantwell: So, hey guys, welcome back to Accelerated Investor. Hey, it’s your host, Josh Cantwell. Today, I’m back with my good friend, Mike Gleba. If you remember about a month ago, we released a podcast about the entrepreneurial cheat code and we started talking about some specific strategies for entrepreneurs, not just in real estate, but in other niches and different things that we’ve done, we’ve tried over the last 20 years. It’s really worked well for me in my business that Mike is using in his businesses. We recorded that episode. We got a lot of great feedback. Mike, I actually had some people call me and be like, “Dude, that was the most transparent, authentic show that we’ve ever heard because you guys just talked about the journey.”

So, Mike and I decided to come back, record another episode. Just to introduce Mike to our audience real quick, Mike owns a seven-figure digital marketing agency focused on e-commerce brands. And some of his clients have been featured on the Joe Rogan show, Shark Tank, and in People Magazine. Mike is also my former chief marketing officer and a proud father and husband.

[INTERVIEW]

Josh Cantwell: So, Mike, welcome back to the show, my friend.

Mike Gleba: Awesome, Josh. It’s funny. I had a couple of people reach out to me too. I wasn’t sure what to expect, right? It’s like a real estate guy and a digital marketing agency owner just kind of talking about business. I had a couple of people reach out to me as far as from India to tell me like, “Oh, I caught that on YouTube. It was great.” So, like, yeah, I’m excited to do this again, for sure.

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, for sure. So, Mike and I have a couple of concepts we want to talk about today that I think will impact every entrepreneur, whether you own real estate, whether you’re in digital marketing, e-commerce, health and fitness. We’re going to talk about some of those things and some things that stuck out during my time where Mike and I worked together. We worked together for almost 10 years. We had years where we were pushing $6 to $8 million of top-line revenue through our coaching and consulting business, through Strategic Real Estate Coach.

Today, we use a lot of these same techniques and strategies in my business in the real estate investments with apartments. Mike is using them and implementing them in his digital marketing agency. And so, we thought we would kind of talk through some of these concepts and how we’ve adopted them in different niches. So, Mike, where did you want to start?

Mike Gleba: Yeah, so in the agency space, it’s very common to just burn your team out, right? It’s like constant churning clients and churning team and just burning the team out. And the second I started my agency, one thing I learned in working with you is just like how important company culture is. And if you interviewed anybody from that team back in our day, like Todd or Jason or Kurt, going all the way back, I think everybody will tell you that that team and that culture during that time was absolutely amazing.

And I know I feel that way, too. We had a lot of fun. Those events that we did were great. And the company culture was always awesome and you led that. And there are a lot of things that I thought that you did really, really well. And the other day you made a post on Facebook, I think it was yesterday or two days ago, you mentioned that, I don’t want to misquote you on this, it was something along the lines of taking care of your team before your customers, not that you want to take care of your customers, but when you posted that, why did you post that? And what did you mean? And then maybe I could tie that back to some of the specifics about our days in SREC. Did that make sense?

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The quote specifically was that most people think that customers are the number one priority, and if you think that, you’ve lost your mind. Employees are the number one priority because they drive all value creation and all growth in a business. So, if you look at like when Mike and I were together, you could say we had all these customers and we did, we had hundreds or thousands of customers and we sold these big giant coaching packages.

But a number of the ideas on what to sell and how to sell it and how to fulfill it came from the team. The ways that we wrote Facebook ads, Google ads, the way we built funnels came from the team, not the customer. We sold it to the customer. But the value creation, the growth in the business was because we worked on building a successful customer journey, but it wasn’t the customer’s fault. The customer just opened their wallet, spent the money, and then we hustled our asses off to fulfill that product and make sure they had a great experience.

But the customer journey was created and implemented by the employee, by the staff. And so, that stood out to me because I was thinking about like, what are our next steps? We’re in the process of trying to buy another– we have almost 2,000 units of apartments that we’re about to buy. And I was at the gym thinking about how we could totally hemorrhage, taking on another 2,000 units of apartments unless the staff and the team had systems in place and certain things to create an amazing culture. And so, that was where the post came from, was really thinking about the old days, but also thinking about some of these growing pains that we might have because the commercial real estate market is starting to unthaw and sellers are getting more realistic and buyers are getting more– everybody’s understanding how to underwrite deals again versus just the euphoria and the hysteria of 2021 and 2022.

Now, it’s getting back to the fundamentals and people are being more realistic. So, I see the opportunity for us to buy a lot of buildings and we’re a leading player in the Cleveland and the Ohio markets. We’re going to get a lot of these buildings if we want them. But that creates the challenge of growth, right? We grow through acquisitions. We don’t grow by creating new funnels like a marketing agency or an e-commerce company. We grow by buying a new building and onboarding 500 more residents. And so, that’s where it came from, was that. And then I started thinking about what about the culture? What about how are we going to make sure that we do this and going to not drop the ball?

Mike Gleba: So, here’s a question for you. So, you want to buy 2,000 new units of apartment complex and you’re the owner, you have an ownership mentality. That gets you really, really excited, right? And then you have this team, and employees and owners are just very different. There’s nothing wrong with either. It’s different. We need each other for sure.

For them, it probably feels stressful and a little less exciting for some of them anyway. So, like, how do you rally the team around that? It’s like, hey, we’re going to buy 2,000 units of apartments. That’s a ton of work. So many other teams probably go sh*t, like, oh my gosh, he’s crazy. How do you get everybody excited around that? And you get what I’m saying?

Josh Cantwell: Yeah. Well, I think part of it starts with, first of all, we’ve had for a number of years now a stated goal that we’re going to buy 950 units of apartments per year. That 950 represents that people understand where that comes from. We make about $1,300 to $1,400 per year per unit of net free distributable cash flow. That’s after expenses, after debt service, after we pay our investors, we make about $1,300 or $1,400 per year per unit. So, 950 units at $1,300 to $1,400 represents $1.2 million of net free distributable cash flow to us, three owners. It’s $100,000 a month.

So, we couldn’t think of a reason other than, hey, adding another $100,000 a month of income for the three of us sounds pretty cool. How do we back into that? We back into, we got to buy 950 units a year, and we might not make that $1,300, $1,400 right away. It might take two years of stabilization, two years of capital improvements. We finally hit stabilization and that it’s throwing off all this cash flow.

So, we came up with this 950. It became one of our company names, 950 Management. We own a company called 950 Laundry. So, the expectation of the employee is we’re going to buy 950 units a year. It starts with that. That’s the brand. That’s the vision that we laid out for the employees. So, when we go say we’re going to buy a thousand units, they’re like, that’s business as usual for us. Okay, so that’s where it starts, number one.

Number two is there’s reasons why we have to buy more buildings. We have a great construction company. If we don’t buy more buildings that need some kind of value-add improvements, I would have to lay off my construction team. That would suck because they’re really good. So, my employees also know, my staff knows if we don’t buy more buildings, every building we buy, there’s a certain metric where we set aside a certain amount of money per unit that then goes into the construction company to pay that staff.

Well, if we just sat on our portfolio and didn’t buy anything, we wouldn’t have those dollars going into Freeland Construction to pay that team. So, we’d literally have to lay them off because there’d be no revenue to pay them. So, that’s the second thing. So, first one is set a vision, an expectation of what we’re going to buy. Second thing is kind of desperation that we have to buy the buildings in order to keep this team.

And so, then it’s like, okay, we also know that there’s a certain amount of units coming off of the CapEx team because we’re hitting stabilization on these other eight or nine buildings. So, the construction team can sense that they’re not quite as busy. So, they actually want us to go buy more building.

So, in a digital marketing agency, an e-commerce company, you can hang your hat on a lot of different things. You can say, I’m going to be really good at Facebook ads, I’m going to be really good at YouTube ads. They’re very different. Or I’m going to be really good at Google ads, very different, or really too good TikTok reels and TikTok shorts, very different. We decided we were going to be really good at construction, then the units would rent themselves out.

We could have hung our hat on management or property management or said, we’re only going to turn the commons. We decided we were going to focus on full renovation of these units. And so, you have to pick a platform or pick a swim lane that you can be good at a lot of things, but you have to be great at one or two things. And we decided to be great at construction.

And Glenn, my partner, has taken that swim lane and our VP of Construction, Dave, is really good at it. So, we decided that we have to be great at that swim lane, which means we have to have units to turn. And so, they’re now kind of expecting us to buy more stuff because they want to stay busy, right? So, those are a couple of things, I think, that are floating through my mind is expectation and vision up front. I didn’t always have that vision. We just kind of came up with that about three years ago.

The second thing is the necessity. Now, you know how to feed the beast, feed the machine, which is we got to buy units to keep these people employed. And the third thing is the construction team knows that’s what we’ve decided, the three owners have said we’re going to be great at. And the reason why we decided to be great at it is because we looked at all the other buildings and the owners weren’t great at it. It was the number one thing that everyone else was struggling with.

So, we just, like Mike, you used to say, we’re going to zig when they zag. That stuck with me. You used to say that to me eight years ago. Let’s zig when they zag. If they’re doing this, let’s do something different. That is something that resonated with me that you said that that’s what we’re doing. We don’t see a lot of value-add operators who are really good at this construction, this deep construction, or medium value-add. We hang our hat on that and it’s freaking working for us. So, those are three takeaways I think of kind of why we’ve done it that way.

Mike Gleba: Awesome. During the SREC days, I feel like we were doing the hybrid model, the work-from-home model, like before, was cool, right? This is obviously before COVID when a lot changed. And our team was really well connected. We met in person once a week or every two weeks, and then we all worked from home and it was awesome. What’s your team like now? Are you guys all working from home? Do you have an office?

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, great question. We do have a home office, but there’s only four actual offices there. So, our VP of Construction has an office. Roberdo, our CFO, has an office. Stephanie, who’s our Director of Finance and Accounting, works under Roberdo, has an office. And then Brian, who is our Director of Construction, works under Dave, has an office. We have a kitchen. We have two large conference rooms that are pretty laid out. But that’s it. And the reason why they have offices is because they’re in that construction team that we hang our hat on. So, it leads back to the comment I made before.

The rest of the team, the three owners, me, Glenn, and Tyler, we do not have offices there, but we have the conference rooms we can use. Jen, our Director of Investor Relations and Investor Marketing, she works from home. Sheila works from home. And then our carpenters that are full time, they just show up on a job site and get to work.

So, our home office is really only about 10 people. Four of them have offices. Everybody else works from home. But then underneath that, it’s a little bit different model because we have a ton of 1099 contractors that either do construction roofs, window, siding, plumbing, unit turns, subcontractors. And then the property managers all have an office at our buildings, but they have a leasing office. And the property managers, we have probably 50 people in those property management companies that work for us, but they’re subcontractors. So, each one of those property managers have their own home office, wherever that’s located, but then they have a leasing office onsite at every one of our buildings. So, it’s a super small home office team, a super small W-2 payroll, but a huge contracting 1099 team.

Mike Gleba: For the W-2 home team, how often does everybody get together in person?

Josh Cantwell: Usually, only about once a quarter or sometimes once a month, it depends. Me, Glenn, Tyler, and Roberdo, we make a point to meet every month face to face at the home office, and we go through all the financials of all the apartments. It takes us almost a full day. We go through each building, takes about a half hour per building, but we also have a construction company. We go through the financials of that. That takes almost six to eight hours to get through all the buildings and all the different companies that we own, the laundry company, and all that kind of stuff. And then we’ll see each other throughout the month at various locations, like we’ll go walk units together or maybe we get together to cover something special. But we’re on Teams, we’re on Zoom all the time, every day.

Mike Gleba: Okay, so you have a regular meeting cadence where you guys are meeting regularly on a Zoom call, departmental or whatever?

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, exactly. And we could talk about that kind of free focus, buffer strategy of how we have a certain meeting rhythm. It really starts with me and my schedule that kind of filters down to everybody else, but we have certain meeting rhythms for me personally, for my family, and then for the business that I also think feeds back into the culture that helps us maintain and keep a good culture because people know what to expect.

Mike Gleba: Yeah. So, the buffer focus and free days is something that I learned from you. and I think you learned that from– was that maybe Dan Sullivan that taught that? Tell me about those. What’s a buffer day? What’s a focus day? Free day is obvious. It’s a day free of work totally. I guess my first question before you go into buffer and focus is how good are you at honoring your free days?

Josh Cantwell: Oh, pretty good. Pretty good. Like last week, it was my birthday on Monday, my wife took me out of town for three days, two nights, rented this suite. Actually, it had its own pool in it. Not just a hot tub, but a whole freaking pool. It was awesome. Just me and her.

During those three days, I literally did not check my email. Then I got home on Tuesday. I was home for about four hours. Then I got on a plane and I went to USA volleyball championships in Minnesota and I did not check my email. So, those were all free days for me. It was seven straight days. I did not check my email.

I think part of the challenge with a lot of business owners is they don’t get to scale, they don’t get big enough that they can create swim lanes where they can have other people own and manage an entire swim lane. Well, I’m very fortunate that we’re at scale, 4,500 units, 1,400 units just in the Cleveland area.

And so, Glenn owns the construction swim lane. If I disappeared for three months, that would still happen. Tyler owns the property management and asset management swim lane, leasing, evictions, marketing, property management. He owns that. If I disappeared for three months, that would still run without a hiccup. Might not have some of the new ideas I bring or some of the questions that I ask, but it would still run. Roberdo manages finance and accounting. If I disappeared for three months, it would still get done.

The property managers are third party. They get paid a property management fee. If I disappeared for three months, it would still happen. That wasn’t always the case, though, right? Five, six, eight years ago, I was very involved every day in everything. Sometimes the team would be like, “Dude, go on vacation, Josh. Get out of here.” Yeah, so I’m pretty good at managing it now, but it’s more difficult to honor when you’re in growth mode.

But even when I was in growth mode, a free day is truly a free day. You do not check your email, do not check your social media accounts, do not check your sales stats or your Facebook ads. You do not check your leasing statistics. You are free. And what I found and what I’ve always said, I got this from Dan Sullivan was those were the days I got my best ideas because my mind was totally free and I would just be in my joy, in my fun of hanging out with my kids or at the gym or going for a bike ride, at the beach or hanging out with my kids at one of their sporting games. And all of a sudden, the idea would just pop into my brain out of nowhere. Like, where the hell that come from? But that’s a great idea. That would usually– that’s the benefit for an entrepreneur of a free day is the fact that you’re going to get your best ideas and do your best thinking on those days.

The opposite of a free day is a focus day. It’s a day where you just do nothing but work, head down revenue-producing activities the whole day. And then a buffer day is where you do things you need to do in business, but that do not create revenue or do not create as much revenue. It’s the buffer days used to set up the focus day. So, basic things like meetings, finance and accounting meetings, going to the mailbox, picking up checks, doing some finance and accounting stuff, you do that on a buffer day. A focus day for me is talking to investors, marketing, podcasting, it’s stuff that generates high-level marketing strategies that generates revenue. So, those are the days when I focus on those kind of things. And so, that’s big.

So, for any entrepreneur, you have to think about what’s focus, what is revenue production, and you have to set aside at least three days a week, preferably three and a half to four days a week, but at least three to just focus on your business and execution, especially if you’re in growth mode. Because if you’re the CEO, you’re still helping the company build. Then select your free days, like for me, my Fridays are free days because Fridays, I want to be away from the company, I want to be outside the business, I want to be above the business, I want to play golf, I want to have time to work out. I want it because I know I’m going to end up having some good ideas on those free days. So, I really in my free days are Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.

Then the buffer days for me are Tuesdays and Wednesdays when I am having meetings with my team, property management meetings, CapEx meetings, construction meetings, finance and accounting meetings. I record a lot of podcasts those days. So, those are things that I need to do to be around the team to execute, but that’s not necessarily making money when we’re talking about finance and accounting. We’re not making money when we’re going over KPIs for construction. We’re not making money when we’re talking about our leasing metrics.

So, that’s how it’s split up. That’s how every entrepreneur should set it up for sure. And I think the only way you can have these free days is that if you create guardrails for yourself. So, as a CEO, you have to identify what are your focus days going to be and then trickle it down to the rest of your business. You have to identify where your buffer day is going to be and then trickle it down to the rest of the business.

My team knows every Monday is a focus day for me. I’m going to go in the field, I’m going to secret shop our properties, I’m going to show up unannounced, I’m going to walk through the properties and make sure that the top is spinning. And I’m not going to take anybody’s word for it. I’m going to get out the field and I’m going to freaking see it with my own two eyes.

Mike Gleba: Yes.

Josh Cantwell: That is key, right? So, that’s why every Monday for me is a free day. Also, Thursdays is another focus day where I don’t have any podcast, I don’t have any meetings scheduled. I can call investors if I want. I can do a special podcast like this with you if I want. I can go secret shop my buildings again if I want, or go see properties in the field, go look at a new acquisition. So, all of our new acquisitions we try to do on Mondays and Thursdays. That’s focus. That’s revenue production.

So, for me, it’s been about that system I learned from Dan Sullivan in my early 20s. I’m now 46. I’ve implemented that for nearly 25 years and I think I’ve definitely gotten off the rails many times. But I always come back to it, and it always has been working.

Mike Gleba: That’s awesome. I’m getting better, like I’m still in growth mode and I’m getting much, much better honoring free days. For the longest time, free days to me felt like I wasn’t working, I wasn’t doing anything. But I did learn over time that you’re right, those are really important idea days and just recharge days so that way I can come back on the focus days and really get to it and work better and be recharged.

But I did have to install a couple of apps on my devices. Like, I have a Mac. On my Mac, I have something called Focus. It won’t let me check my email or open my social media or my Slack or any of the distra– and you can set what it is, like if ESPN is your thing and you sit down every day and it’s a habit loop and you open ESPN, I’ve got the guardrails in place, I just can’t do it. And it’s on my phone too. And that’s been awesome. And it’s sometimes embarrassing that I have to babysit myself like that. But it comes down to self-awareness. I know that the dopamine loop, like you’ve always talked about that before. Once you get started in that, it’s like a runaway train.

Josh Cantwell: It is. And like social media, email, we used to talk about email, and now, it’s really social where you get a new like, or it used to be I got a new email, my inbox, like, oh my God, it’s like a little gift. I want to check it out. And you totally would get unfocused from what you were doing. And now it takes 10 minutes or 15 minutes to get refocused. So, you actually use an app. I don’t have an app for that. So, you’re saying there’s an app called Focus from some sort of program that actually kind of locks up your computer almost where you can’t check these apps or do any of this stuff?

Mike Gleba: Yeah. And there’s two settings. There’s the, I forgot what it’s called, strict mode, I think. But you can make it, so you can’t even reset your computer. If you say you’re going to focus for this block and you don’t want these things on, you can’t do it. And then for my phone, it’s called AppBlock. But yeah, I love them both. And if anything, it’s a reminder, like when I sit down and I try to procrastinate or go off a little bit and it stops me, it’s just a reminder that like, hey, you’re here to do something, get back to it. And it’s been super useful.

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, that’s awesome, dude. So, one’s called AppBlock for your phone. The other one’s called Focus for your iMac, for your computer?

Mike Gleba: Yeah, exactly.

Josh Cantwell: Oh dude, awesome. Thanks for that. I hope our audience loves those ideas. That’s fantastic. I remember there was a copywriter that I used to follow when I was in War Room with Ryan and Perry. Perry would talk about a copywriter that he followed, and I can’t remember the guy’s name off the top my head, but you got real copy all the time. And he would say, in the mornings, he would work out. He would have this rush of energy, and from 9:30 a.m. till about 12:30, he could just sit and write. He was laser focused. He was fresh from the sleeping. He was fresh from his workout. And then he would take a half-hour to 45-minute break.

And then the afternoons were totally different because he had this big burst of energy, this big burst of productivity that in the afternoon, he knew he was not going to be as productive. So, he would take a half hour on and a half hour off. He would write copy for a half hour. It could even go to 45 minutes if he was in a zone. But then he would get up and he would literally go outside and walk in his yard or walk his dogs for 15 minutes. And he would come back, he would sit down, he would write half-hour to 45 minutes, he’d create a timer. And if he was in a zone, he would keep going.

But if he knew that he was not in the zone and he was feeling distracted or feeling tired, he would give himself permission to just get up and go do something else. Go get a sandwich, go take a phone call from your mom, go for a walk with your dog, go whatever, take a drive in your car, and then come back. We’re humans, man. We have to learn what is our rhythm that works for us.

And although you have hacks, Mike and I have hacks, it’s not going to work for everybody. We’re all built different. So, I have the same problem with these guardrails. We have a lot of social media out there and I’m getting dings and likes and comments all day, every day, I could spend all day effing around with that. And it has a purpose for me. We do generate a lot of leads and a lot of investor leads and a lot of money from those media. So, you could get just engulfed in it, like drowning in it all day if you don’t have some guardrails.

Mike Gleba: Yeah. You and I have talked a couple of times about perspective, right? When I worked for you, maybe I didn’t agree with some of your decisions or saw things differently because I didn’t have the CEO perspective. And now that I do, there’s a lot of things that I think of and I’m just like, oh, I totally see what he’s saying. One of those, this is just kind of a funny one, but I remember, I ran your social media for a while at the beginning, and I would go into your Facebook account and you would have like, I don’t know, 700 friend requests, right? And I didn’t have an audience or a following, so I had zero friend requests. And I was always thinking like, what kind of person has 700 unanswered friend requests in their Facebook account?

And well, now, I have probably 500 unanswered friend requests in my Facebook account. So, I get it now. It’s like you just don’t have time for that avalanche and it’s crazy, it’s just insane how much email and DMs and LinkedIn requests. It’s just madness all of the time. And yeah, it’s such a distraction.

Josh Cantwell: No doubt. Going back, I think, one of the best decisions I ever made was to always focus on having a marketing assistant or a marketing director or a marketing executive above all else because marketing– like Joe Polish used to say, marketing a sales imprint. If you have great marketing, you don’t even need to sell. And it’s such a huge focus where people get bogged down with fulfillment, so they get bogged down with strategy, they get bogged down with creating funnels, and just these different kind of things. They get bogged down with the operation of the business.

I mean, you can have a real crappy back end and still make tons of money if you really have a front-end person focused on marketing and strategy. So, even though my marketing now is totally different, we’re not really focused as much on creating a big publishing company and selling products. We’re just really focused on our portfolio and our mastermind, still having someone that leads the charge for marketing to basically manage the managers.

Now, we have a bunch of experts doing the marketing. And Jen, who’s not a marketing person at all, just manages them and make sure they stay on track on the calendar. She’s kind of like a marketing director, if you will, but then she has all these experts that she just massages that and makes sure that it keeps working. And so, we’re constantly getting all these Facebook requests, constantly getting all the stuff. But I don’t have to communicate with all those people. I communicate with Jen. And Jen says, “Well, here’s what the Internet marketing nerds are doing. Here’s what PodPost Media is doing. Here’s what Julie, the VA, is doing. Here’s what Akron Systems is doing for email marketing.”

And so, the other way I think that’s really important as you grow your business is to continue to only have three or four or a max of five people, a max of five that can directly get in touch with you, that are direct reports to the CEO, direct reports to the entrepreneur. Greg and I, when we first built our real estate wholesaling business, it was like me and Greg at the top, and then 27 employees that all have the same title and the same ranking, but they all just came to us with every question, we were so stupid.

Now, it’s like, I just got me, Glenn, and Tyler, Roberdo, and then I talk to Jen. That’s it. And Sheila kind of works with us in fulfillment, but really, Sheila kind of partners up with Jen. But on a daily basis, I really only talk to four or five people. And I think, for entrepreneurs, that’s huge. You can’t be taking arrows from every department and from every employee all the time. It’s impossible. You can’t scale that way.

Mike Gleba: Yeah, I definitely agree. It’s crazy, man, Jen’s been with you forever since I was there, I remember. I don’t remember what her initial role was. But Sheila’s been there forever. Roberdo’s been there forever. The team that I was with, I was there for 10 years. I don’t know how long Jason was there. But I think that’s something that is pretty amazing, dude. You have a pretty significant longevity in your team, so great job on that.

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, thank you. We can get into culture, maybe we’ll do it on another podcast, but I think there’s a few things. Man, let’s just plan it. Let’s plan on recording another podcast about culture. And I think they’re one of the reasons why I’ve been able to keep these folks and have them feel like this is home and they’ve been producing at such a high level for so long is that one is the meeting rhythms we talked about. So, we can do a deeper dive into that maybe on the next show. But they know what to expect. They know certain days that we’re going to do certain things.

Number two is I understand their personal reasons of why they’re working here. I know that Jen has had better offers from other companies, but she wants to work from home. And the fact that I can respect that and she’s got personal reasons to work from home that works within her family structure is huge. So, a CEO needs to understand for as many of employees as you can, what are their personal reasons and try to create a culture that honors those personal reasons.

The third thing we can talk about again, but I’ll touch base on it now is email is evil. I hate email. It’s the worst form of communication ever. People are like, well, I just send you an email. But then the email ping-pong happens back and forth. And that took longer than if you just called me.

Mike Gleba: That’s right.

Josh Cantwell: Right?

Mike Gleba: Yeah.

Josh Cantwell: And then the last one is that a CEO has to be outside and above the business so that they can look down upon the business and create and find the holes, the gaps, the challenges, and be able to project the future. You can only do that when you’re at scale, when you have enough size, and then it becomes your job as a CEO to make everybody’s job easier by creating checklists or by creating rhythms, by creating systems that they can follow that makes their job easier.

So, those are some of the things I think we can do a deeper dive on next time that will help kind of specifically identify some of the things, I think, that have created a great culture for us on why, like you and I worked together for 10 years, and Jason was with us for six, and Roberdo’s been with me for 15, and Jen has been with me for eight and a half, and Sheila’s been with me for 16 years. A lot of that has to do with some of those bullet points I just ripped off.

Mike Gleba: Awesome, man. Well, I know we’re getting tight on time. So, I still have a ton of other stuff that I’d love to ask you about, and then even took some notes myself that I’m going to immediately tie to my business. So, if the audience is listening and there’s something that they would like me to interview you about on Part 3 or something like that, like, I don’t know how they can get in contact with you if they leave comments in the YouTube channel or whatever, but…

Josh Cantwell: They can do that. Mike, do you want to give out your social media handle of yours? Or do you have a company handle? Well, here’s what I’ll do, just email, if people have questions, me. We have an email handle that they can email questions and that Jen will check.

Mike Gleba: Yeah. I’ll send over my socials that Jen can put in the show notes or whatever and then we can go from there. But yeah, I’d love to do it again. It was a lot of fun.

Josh Cantwell: Oh, yeah, for sure, man. So, email AIPodcast@FreelandVentures.com, AI, Accelerated Investor, AIPodcast@FreelandVentures.com. Jen will check that. She’ll grab questions, comments from the audience, and then we’ll set it up for another show. Mike, listen, this is so much fun, dude. Next time we get together, I want to start asking you some more questions. I appreciate you asking me.

Mike Gleba: Awesome, dude.

Josh Cantwell: Hopefully, it’s impactful for everybody. But thanks for joining us on another episode of Accelerated Investor. Guys, always like, subscribe, rate, review. Appreciate all of you guys being here. Mike, thanks so much, man. Appreciate you being here.

Mike Gleba: Josh, see you soon, man.

Josh Cantwell: All right. Take care.