Lessons - The CEO Who Refused to Sell His Company at Any Price | Chris Savage - Wistia Co-Founder & CEO

In this lessons episode, discover how great leaders build scalable businesses by delegating ownership without losing accountability. Learn how creating space for strategic thinking drives better decisions and innovation. Understand why managing personal energy is essential for effective leadership and explore practical habits that prevent burnout while sustaining long-term growth. Well, I think something that you've tweeted about it, you've done videos on it, is about giving that ownership to other people in your organization. And this is just like one very specific example, but this is obviously a very, it's a very impactful thing. And it's very top of mind for you, because I'm assuming like most entrepreneurs, day one, you were doing everything and you had massive issues letting go of shit. And then you were working too hard and burning out. And you're like, I gotta do something better. This doesn't work. When you start to give ownership and you delegate and you start to build a business and not just a job, and then people start to do their thing and they're killing it, that's great. That's the way you should build. But let's pause for a second and just think that what are the things that you have to be aware of so when you give somebody a leash, they don't screw it up? What are the things that you still have to be cognizant of? Even if you delegate 80%, 90% of your day, what are the mission-critical things that you focus on that – Maybe it's something that you do still have to check. You probably have some of those things. I'm a big believer that delegation doesn't mean that you are not involved. Um, so you want to delegate the problems so people can own them completely. That's also how people will step up and grow. You know, if you are early stage, this happens automatically. You know, if everyone's, when people talk about everyone wearing lots of hats, what they mean is there are a lot, so many problems you need to solve that people start doing things outside of the domain that they have specific responsibility for. Um, And they're stepping up and they're growing and they're figuring out things, right? As you get bigger, you have to be more clear about how to do that. You have to be more concrete and say, you own this problem. This is what I expect. The goal setting part of this is important. So what are the OKRs that we're setting? What are the expectations we're setting? And then if you've actually delegated and people are owning these things and you're not in the meetings and you're not sitting there through all the day to day, that can give you the time to actually dig into the specifics. And so for me, that looks like I use the products all the time. And I'm giving tons of feedback all the time because I actually use products. And I'll be like the first person to use a new thing. And they're like, how's Savage doing this? They're like, well, I've delegated a lot to create the space to actually do that. And then sometimes you sit and you work with a team through a very hard problem. It's just not necessarily all the time, every problem. And I think that's a... That's how you're going to know if it's working, too, is if you sit and work with the team and it's not. And you realize, like, oh, I've delegated to the wrong person or the wrong perspective. It becomes obvious real fast. And I'm a big believer, too, that, like, the leaders that you have in your organization, like, If they are also people managers, like obviously can have leaders in any role, but if they are a people manager, you need those people managers to be great at management, you know, coaching people, giving feedback, you know, working through hard problems, planning, blah, blah, blah. You also need them to be great at the IC work, at the individual contributor work. You need them to be able to get down on the ground And understand what's going on and lead by example. And when you have those two things, it makes for everybody in the org, it makes it much easier to delegate pretty completely. And then actually be able to sit next to someone when they're writing code or they're, you know, writing a blog post or they're designing something and give actual feedback. And if there's respect there in that moment, it's not so scary to delegate. Yeah. So now you've optimized, like, I love this. You've optimized a lot of the organization, again, through 17 years of learning. And I'm super curious now, like, how much time do you actually have to put in as an entrepreneur? Because you've set up these systems, you've hired the right people. Like, what is your day in the life of? Because 17 years of building something that your founder, co-founder, CEO of, stress adds up if you're not careful. Yeah, so my day-to-day is, I also learned at one point that you have to put your oxygen mask on yourself first, right? You know this whole thing, you're on the plane, they tell you to put your oxygen mask on you and then your kid. And when I first had kids, I was like... That doesn't seem right. It seems like I should take care of my kid first. The problem is, obviously, let's say I put it on a kid. I don't put it on myself. I pass out. Plane lands. We have to go off the plane. Kid's screwed. But I put it on myself, and then they're passing on. I put it on them, and they wake back up, and the plane lands. Get them off the plane. And that's why that... that advice exists. That's why that rule exists. And I think the same thing is true with business. Like if you show up and you're constantly stressed and you can't be even keeled and you can't work through hard problems. If you snap at people, if you're a dick, like all these things, you're going to build the wrong environment. So you need to be able to manage this stuff. And so I look at like managing my own personal stress is actually like a very important thing I spend time with my family. I have coffee. Take the kids to school. I work out every day. I meditate. Not every day, but I meditate with some frequency. I try to sleep really well. And when I have those things in place, like if I'm sleeping well and I'm working out, I usually can manage a lot more stress. And I'm sure you've heard this, but there's a lot of evidence that literally being able to stress it's physical. The difference between stress, it's physical and emotional is very small. And so there's this great book, The Art of Learning, by this guy, Josh Watkins, who is like a chess grandmaster. And he talks about learning. And part of it he talks about is like managing stress. Yeah. and you know these chess grandmasters will sit down for these long matches and lose like six pounds in a day in a tournament it's wild and why they're just sitting there focused and their heart rate's elevated and they're stressing their body trying to come up with like what are what's the right move to make and it turns out that actually exercising and stressing their body in advance like lifting and going for runs swimming whatever it actually helps them manage more stress than the match And the two are linked. And so you have to look at it that way. And I think when you do, it makes it easier. And then the rest of my... So I do that every day. And then I try to have... 40 to 50% of my time be free. Okay. Not in meetings. Some weeks it's a lot better, you know, in planning season, it's worse. And I try to have that time to be free. And in that free time, it's playing with the product is playing with competitive products. It's trying, it's trying to read, it's trying to understand where things are going. It's talking to people on the team. It's like using, using, creating those connections and those opportunities, the understanding from like a bottoms up way. So that I'm not only relying on dashboards and data, because we end up losing sight of what individual human beings are doing and needing and feeling when we do that. And so getting on the ground is like the easiest way for me to have that understanding. I think that's so smart. And you, and you create this room to, to have this relaxed state where you can think creatively and you can, and you can, you can really just dive into your product in a way that isn't from this, is this, this stressed mindset, right? Like when you're, when you're nonstop all the time, if you are jumping in and out of meetings and you really don't create this space, then you try and do it off the side of your desk. And you'll spend 30 minutes here diving into product or you'll spend 30 minutes here going through whatever problem is coming up. And you're not giving it the attention it deserves. But I feel that entrepreneurs and founders, CEOs, like they have to give themselves time away from the day to day to think of like the higher level problems. And I think that that's what you do exceptionally well by sort of forcing yourself to not be in meetings all the time so that you actually do have the bandwidth to do some of this creative higher level thinking. And you have the buffer. Like if something big does come up, you have the space. So it's like, oh, we have this like huge opportunity. How are we going to handle it? You can just jump right into it. I don't have to cancel all these meetings. I don't have to throw everything off course to do that. And I think that's another aspect. And I get that like, that's not how this starts. Yeah. And I think a lot about that because like, that's not how it starts. You feel like you're constantly working, but before you have traction, you are bored. And you're sitting there like, what should I do today? I don't know. And a lot of great ideas come out of that. And I think about that a lot of like, we see these startups, super tiny, no traction, something wildly creative that they come up with and they do it. Then why didn't they do it later? Why weren't they doing really wildly creative stuff later? I think oftentimes it's like they've lost, they've literally lost the time to do it. Yeah. So you architect it. You architect that time to do it. And it's a balance. I mean, you can screw it up in both directions. I think you can have not enough time and not be close enough. You can have too much. And so a lot of it's like really try to be in tune with how you feel. Do I feel good? Do I feel present? Do I understand what's going on? Thanks for tuning in. 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