w/christopher choyce on scaling teams

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What's going on everybody good morning good morning is Friday and the sun is shining and I'm just naturally in a good mood because of sun is shining. But I'm even in a better mood this morning. Because I have a now a good friend. Christopher choice Chris thanks for joining me and I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to chat. Yes, absolutely. So as we're getting viewers and listeners and watchers and things, please add us, comment us. Let us know where you're tuning from. Say, say we'd love to hear from you. I know Chris would love to see your beautiful faces. So please let us know.

But before we dive in, Chris, where are you hailing from this morning? I'm coming to you live from my house up in West Oregon to use New York. I moved up here about seven months ago after spending 15 years in Brooklyn. So. Nice. That's awesome. I am in the trees right now. I love it. One of my favorite pizza places, Roberta's, they opened a pop-up shop here, three minutes from my house. Nice. And I have eaten a significant amount of pizza from that place already. Brandon, what's going on, man? Keishore, what's going on? Again, love to hear from you. I know it's Friday. I have a lot of people that go, man, I watch your show, but I never say anything.

Say something. Literally, just comment at me. I will not call you out and make you ask a question, but I would obviously love to hear your face. So let's go ahead and dive in. We got some people watching now, which is pretty exciting. So everyone, they call again, Fortuna Guys Council 2.0. Again, the reason why I do this is I feel like a lot of times people on the job search, they feel like they're alone. They're on an island, they don't know what to do. They're overwhelmed by the job search. And so my goal for this live show is to allow people, safe place to be able to ask questions, to be able to network, right?

And, and, you know, for everybody who is commenting, the reason why I encourage people to comment is so people can network with other people, right? John can network with Katia who can network with Natasha, right? So that's how it all works. And so again, I encourage you all to network with each other. Today, I have a special guest. So today's guest worked obviously at a company that of an individual that obviously I admire from a business perspective. But I think Chris is even cooler than that individual. Chris, don't tell that individual that. I think Chris is cooler because Chris is on the tech side. I get to nerd out with Chris from a tech perspective.

And so for much ado, Chris, introduce yourself, who you are, what you do, obviously where you've worked for most of your career and then we'll dive in. Great. Well, good morning all. I'm excited to be here. My name is Chris Choice, which I was referring to is I'm the former CTO of VaynerMedia. I joined there when they're in the very early stages of growth around 60 people, stayed there full time for about seven years. They're in LF there about 800 people internationally. So it was really fun to scale that. Still, I am good friends with Gary Vaynerchuk in Asia as well and a lot of that crew.

So it was a really interesting time that Vayner I think did a really really good job about sort of setting the blueprint and the roadmap for how you actually do modern social media. I say modern in that if there was like a past social media because there wasn't. And that was the thing. Right. When I joined doing social media for money for brands like it was so early in the game, we had to like get clients, we had clients who didn't pay us any money because they didn't know it was, we launched brands on, we like launched Facebook pages for major brands and this and that.

So very, very interesting world. the see the evolution of that has been awesome. I love it, that's awesome. So, great. So for those of you, so we're gonna talk today, Chris, we're gonna talk, we're gonna dive into scaling teams, interviewing, evaluating talent. I think a lot of people are afraid to make mistakes when it comes to interviewing, when you're part of an organization like Chris was, you scale fast, you have to make mistakes, you gotta move on. And so Chris, the one thing, we obviously got connected to a mutual friend, but you made a comment, we can harp on this for a little bit, but you made a comment on one of my LinkedIn posts about how actually the contract to hire model makes sense sometimes.

And so for me, I wanna dive into that. How did you guys hire at VaynerMedia? How did you guys evaluate talent? What was your interview style like? Just let's go ahead and dive into all that. Okay, yeah, so I'll focus a bit kind of like broad spectrum and also holistically closer to the engineering side of things, which is where I did most of the hiring. But at Vayner, as a company, they scaled super fast. There was one year where I think we hired 400 people in total across the entirety of the year, which is just so hard from a culture standpoint, from an operational standpoint and all of that.

And I think one of the most important things to do when you're looking at that is pick one or two attributes that you think is a metric of success. what is the most important thing you can find in a person and then screen for that. So find the one or two things you want and really think is really helpful, screen for that and then put a process in place after that to teach people what they don't know or to onboard them to your company in a way that isn't like, you don't just like throw them in the fire, right? With like four other people. And be like, oh, I figured it out.

One of the things I've made it did really well was very, very structured onboarding. So we had a full week of onboarding for every new hire, no matter what, no matter what. Senior junior doesn't matter what department you're in full full week of onboarding right every day with different sessions Really a six-inct and to the point of different things about the company Kind of giving a little bit of background a little bit of like cool. This is how like time tracking works Or this is how this process works or here's this team and so everyone was involved in that right? They would pull in people from every different part of the organization that do be part of that onboarding and it would I think that's one of the most important things is like yeah You can hire fast and you can screen for the right people and you can break them in But if you don't have a way to actually set them up for success once they're in the door It's tough.

You can't just like you know some people are great. They thrive in chaos. They can pick it up Right, but those people are probably gonna be your your earlier hires, you know when you're hiring your employer number 600 They're probably not gonna be the person that's just like yes, give me all the chaos that you're probably starting to hire and flush out more either targeted folk, people who are really systemic for one particular role, or people who are probably a little more junior at that point, right? And you don't want your people to not only have to learn what they need to do to succeed, but also figure out the chaos of your company at that point.

So that's one of the things I would definitely point to you there. So Brandon, I'm going to get your question in a second. I want to ask Chris that it's Evan, good morning. Thanks for tuning in, man. What were the key things? What were some of the key things that y'all honed in on, especially on the tech side, scale in the organization? And then the second question is, do you think you're good, your week of onboarding actually helped keep candidates from a retention perspective long term? So I guess first question, what were some values that y'all really honed in on? If you follow Gary, One of the things he really preaches right now is empathy and compassion.

And I think that's just really key. Uh, and I actually had a small Twitter change about this last night, but like the whole hard skill versus soft skills things, like a, those definitions need to change. Uh, I think it's, you're looking at the wrong things. Yeah. You actually kind of want to hire for those quote unquote soft skills. Like those are the things that are harder to learn. It's harder to learn how to actually treat people fairly and like be good to them. But it is, it's you so on how to write a Python script, right? Or how to scale up sort of like a cluster or something like that, right?

You know, like, yeah, Kubernetes is hard. There's people who do just that. But you can do that if you put the time into it. It's sometimes much more difficult to teach someone just to be a good person, right? So how do, so let me ask you this. Why do you think companies don't do that more? I think it's, so my take on this is that people kind of really enjoy the ritual and initiation aspect of things. So if you went through something to prove your worth, you sort of been initiated into that, whatever in the company, the group, your fraternity, your group of friends, your sports team, whatever it happens to be.

And I think there's a lot of social pressure and even work pressure to keep doing that, right? People know this is how things work, this is how we did it. And to change that is hard, right? People don't inherently want to change certain things, especially when they're not quite sure how to change them. So I think you hire a particular way. You go through, you do these technical interviews, you do these whiteboard questions, you do these sort of like math things or whatever you need to do to get in, right? Just to be totally frank, I would probably buy most of them too. Like I can figure my stuff out any way you want to do it, but I'm probably gonna buy my coding exam.

I just haven't done that stuff in years, right? And so there's no teaching. Like you don't get taught how to interview. You get hired in a certain way. That's your frame of reference of how you do it. You're a brand new company. And then you're told, hey, sit down this candidate with 20 minutes, tell me what you think. Or, hey, we're gonna do a technical interview, like help judge this person and how they actually do the whiteboard problem, something like that. So what's your favorite interview question? Do you have a favorite interview question? or I'm just curious. Yeah, so one of the questions I used to always ask a lot.

And for context, I've been consulting on my own for about three years now, so I haven't done it. I've been a little bit out of the hiring game, but one of the things that I used to always ask was, what's an app on your phone that you use all the time? It gave me three things you hate about it. Interesting. And what are you looking for there? Sort of like, if you use something a lot, that means you have some sort of attachment to it. It's a good app. It provides you some sort of value. But there's always gonna be things that annoy you, right?

It's a software product written by people, by humans, right? There's always gonna be stuff that needs to be improved. And what I'm really looking for is people's ability to like, A, know that off the bat. Like, oh yeah, I use this all the time, but this certain thing is really annoyed as a kind of a thing. It's just, it's a little bit of attention to detail. It's also a little bit of thinking about, all right, you know, it's sort of like the tinker mentality. Like, all right, I have this thing, I'm gonna do it better. I love that. That never really made a break anything.

like I wasn't going to hire not hire so I'm going to say that. But I think it was a really good way to sort of get a peek into someone, how they think about things without having it be like a technical question. Kind of a thing. I love that man. I love that so much. All right. A few questions from a guy Brandon Arvey. So Brandon goes, Gary talks about winning the work first and hiring the people to fulfill it. How do you sell the capability to do the work without the people in place? I mean, can you speak to that at all? And if not, can you speak to the, to try to hire quickly when the work came in?

Yeah, I think it's, it's definitely an interesting model, but like it's, it's not a Gary thing. I can guarantee you almost every company in the world does this, right? They will sell you what they can. And then once they get the work, they'll figure it out. Right. And so yeah, one of the ways to do this is to, to hire quickly and know how to scale up that, like that, right? Have a process in a place where, all right, great. We now, we hire, we brought this in. We need, you know, either another engineer or we need, you know, 15 more account people or we need like three more graphic designers, right?

Right. I'm going to have those pipelines in place to do that, have a process in a place to be able to do that. And have people that are willing to step up at times too. Yeah, which, you know, I'm not going to be advocate for work, life balance, but there are times when you're going to have to ask, Hey, like we just got this huge plan again. We got to dig in a little more work done. So it's over the nature of working, right? It's a capitalistic society at times. People need to need to work. It's absolutely. So what we're, so let's talk about onboarding, right?

Cause I think, I think for me, if we don't want to talk about brand, right? Like, interviewing and onboarding is total brand when it comes to a company. And I think companies, you know, I've talked a lot about this with my podcast, unicorn finders with my guys across the Southeast where it's listed like companies, like, you know, yes, you can put social media ads, yes, you can do LinkedIn ads. But if you treat your people like Crap during the interview stage or the onboarding stage, you're gonna be known as a Crap company. And so I wanna ask you from an onboarding perspective, what are some key things, some tangible things that hiring managers can take away from this conversation and go, ah, they did that well, we need to implement that.

Great question. I think one, just having a plan, right? Start there, know what you're gonna do in the person's first day, know what they're gonna do in their fifth day. You know, I think this is part of the hiring process itself, but I think you can do it on boarding is people should know what they need to do to be successful. Right? So when you hire a person, they should know either during the interview or in the onboarding process, what they need to do to get promoted. Because again, people just don't want to work just to work. Most people want to be able to work and succeed and client kind of that ladder and have more salary, more compensation, potentially more leadership, sometimes not.

just more responsibility in the general sense and learn too. So being able to set people up so that they know what that next step is, I think it's super super important. And then if you know what that is as the hiring manager, you actually know what the screen for and look for it because you said, cool, I know that I'm going to promote people based on X, Y, and Z. So I should look for people who excel in X, Y, and Z already, right? And look and look and look and kind of look that forward. I love that. And the one good way to do that is you take a look at your organization as it stands, find the people that you think are the most successful or excel the most currently, and try to actually analyze what makes them really good people.

You can do that from reviews, you can do it sort of holistically, talk to their managers, talk to the people that they manage, figure out what those skills are that really work for your company and your kind of built-in culture there that makes sense, and then screen backwards for that. If you find that people who maybe your best managers are all the moms in your company, they don't work till eight o'clock at night. They have to come home, something like that. Or working dads, not to just assume all that. But maybe those are your best people because they know they actually need to optimize their time.

They get their stuff done and then they close their laptop and they're offline. Maybe that's the best people because they're there, they're there, they're focused, they get their stuff done. They have empathy towards their employees and they have some compassion. and they know what things come up. Sure. Right? So it's going to be different for every company. And I think as you grow and scale your own, you kind of have to figure out, all right, what does this look like for me? All right, what works for Spotify? What works for Facebook? What works for Google? What works for another digital agency? Isn't necessarily going to work for me?

Everyone's different. Sure. I'm about it. It didn't quite go super deep in the onboarding, but I think that's like a good point. And I think what you said is important, right? is I think companies and teams need to zero in on their top players, what makes them so good, and let's sit down with those top players and be like, hey, we love you, we want to replicate you. Like, let's talk about it and then transfer that to interview and transfer that to the onboarding. Like, you know, and I think that's huge. So I think you answered that perfectly. So there's a question from Brian. Brian goes, I agree that soft skills are probably the most important thing.

What is a good way to showcase soft skills before you get an interview? Okay. My resume slash LinkedIn is all tech, stack, tech related. Thoughts, Chris? Okay. I think that's a great question. And I agree that I think that could actually be really tough and challenging because I get, again, I think people are bad at sort of measuring those quote unquote soft skills. Sure. A lot of it is like communication, right? How well can you communicate with someone? So I actually think that maybe that's one of the ways to do that is just make sure that your written communication is as well, right? We use, try and be the best you can, be friendly and open.

Don't be cold, don't copy and paste stuff from your other, if you're gonna send a cover letter, like actually write it for the job. I find that cover letters are like, it's hard to know what they're gonna do with them, especially in the world of sort of like, um, ATS and all that. We're going to get my machine, which is a whole other topic, but you know, when I was doing, when I was hiring for people, I would look probably at hundreds upon hundreds of resumes, right? And I looked at all of them and I like, unfortunately just wouldn't always have the chance to get back to every single person, but looking at a cover letter, I could usually look at a cover letter.

I could tell which ones were just copying pasted and one to actually put the effort into it. And so I'd rather just not have someone send a cover letter. then send something that's just generic. So I guess maybe one answer to this is be succinct and friendly with your communication, right? Don't be creepy guys. Yeah, don't stalk people on Twitter or LinkedIn this and that. Do a little research, be friendly with it, and do that. I think that's one way to kind of do that. I think Brian too, and obviously, I mean, Chris comes from working at a company, it's about content creation and listen, I get it.

Not everybody needs to do content creation, right? It's not for everybody. I'm not going to sit here and say, everyone should do it. But I will tell you this, if you are interested in putting out content around a specific topic, I think an easy way, there's this whole thing with Build in Public on Twitter, right? Building an app, documenting it, blogging, like there needs to be like a job seeking in public, right? And it's like, listen, And just if you blog on LinkedIn or Twitter about your interviewing and what's happened and what's gone poorly and how you can fix things, there's been a few junior devs here in Nashville that I posted on LinkedIn that they bombed interviews and they got to do better and they got to study up.

And then a friend of a friend liked it and then a VP of engineering saw it and then boom they got an offer. Right? So Brian, I think one way to showcase your soft skills is actually to start putting out content in written audio, video form. If you love video, you come from video, I would video it up every single day. Video carries a ton of weight right now. That's the reason why I do this live show is because I think it allows people to resonate with you and to build rapport with you without even meeting you. Brian, Chris, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on that.

Yeah, I agree. And it's something that I personally struggle with too. I'm really good about coming up and talking to people and like I don't have a doing that. I'm one of the most social CTOs I've ever met for the record. I've had a side career as a DJ like I really love being like I could be that person like I don't have that sort of in the guy at all. But something about like I just I've always struggled to really like put stuff out of Twitter. I'm always in bad about putting up black post some of that. And some of that I want to think is like just I don't have enough time but like that's just a kind of a bullshit reason because people that are as busy or busier than me do it all the time.

So I think you got to have you got to have a little bit of a plan to do it and you got to make it intentional, right? You like So and I think I think it's tough. I think I have a little bit privileged You know, I'm a bit older so I got in the tech scene on 40 so which is like What is what it is? But when I got in the tech in like the mid 90s It was easier to get in the door almost anywhere because there just was enough people that were there, right? So my background is a little bit untraditional.

I haven't gone through through a big hiring process like I think a lot of people are right now. But I've got another side and I've seen that. I've done a lot of mentoring. I've done a lot of teaching and stuff like that. So it's a different world out there. There was a point in time where you can come up and if you knew anything about computers, you're going to get the job. Now for a junior engineering role, people are like, oh yeah, you need seven years experience with a reaction and redox using whatever data that. It's just like, right? So it's a different world. So things are harder.

And I think you have to work harder now to get that first, second or even third job than you used to. Yeah, and part of that is like, how do you differentiate yourself? And some of that is communication, making content, helping people out, all of that. And it's hard. Yeah, and also think to writing a very concise resume, having your voice come through the cover letter, I think those are very important things as well, especially when you're a hiring major looking at hundreds of resumes. Yeah. If you see something that's visually a busy and simple, easy to consume, you immediately know that person's got some obviously pretty good communication skills.

Devante, soft skills keep you in the door, but technical skills get you in. Yes, absolutely. Then Natasha is in 100% agreeance with content creation. So Chris, I wanna go back to answer a topic that we haven't quite dug in enough with, because I think it's incredibly important. And then I definitely want to talk about you being a business owner going out on your own and talking about that and then we'll wrap up. So contract to hire. Yep. There are arguments for and against. It is one of the most divisive topics as well as resumes. What are your thoughts on contract to hire? Did you leverage it at VaynerMedia?

And why do you think companies should consider hiring contract to hire in some way, shape or form? Cool. So I didn't actually leverage it when I was a vayner. I personally was pro for it, but as an org, it wasn't necessarily the thing where they're at at the moment. But for me, I really think you should be kind of be open to it. Right? Like, it's such a great way to actually figure out if someone is a fit for your company. Right? And something I want to talk about is like, a lot of people say like, are they a culture fit? Right? Like, that's the totally wrong way to to approach it, you should be like, is this person additive, right?

Do they add something to my culture? Do they add something to my team? Right. Do they add to something that like I just don't have there? And in an interview, you can't get that, right? So in a conversation at the higher standpoint, you bring someone in on a fixed term of like two to three months, whatever happens to be, you both have a point where you have to mutually opt in to the hiring, right? Right. And then I think most of the time we feed you a good enough job, you'll find that most people that you contract the hire will actually get hired, right? Great.

Yeah. Not a huge issue there. But every once in a while, maybe it doesn't work out. It could be on the side of that fence. And then if it doesn't work out from the employer standpoint, you don't have to term that employee, right? You don't have to like, it's a term severance or do all that. It's just, it's a very quick, easy kind of thing. It's there. And then, you don't have to worry about like ramping them up on benefits and then ramping them down again and this and that and like in New York, you have Cobra and everything like that. Like, right. So there's, it's tough.

And I think most of the time you won't have to worry about that. No, you're on board and they'll be good. And from the employee standpoint, the job seeking standpoint, if you work somewhere for three months, you realize, you know what, these people suck. I don't want to be out there. You don't have to explain why you only stayed at the company for six months. You can just say, it's contrary to the resume. Oh yeah, I took up consulting aid for three months. Yeah. You know, well, and that's it. You know, because like, unfortunately, the world that we live in is like, if you have a gap in your resume, especially when you're younger, or you only are at a place for like six months, people are going to do that, right?

And if we're not going to be on your side for it. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's a whole not a conversation in of itself. But yeah, I mean, I think when it comes to contract, contract hire and people who follow me, probably like, that gun tailor, like I get it, contract hire, great. I don't want to do it. I get it. I'm not sitting here saying it's the only way. I think if I think of the organization, I think if you do direct hire the right way, AKA, trust your recruiting partner to send you qualified candidates. A very short summer as an interview process, offer the candidate.

I think you can be incredibly successful. I staffed up an e-com company in Raleigh when I was there 15 people in like 45 days. Like it was successful. They did it the right way to interview process, phone, in person done. But that's the exception. That doesn't normally happen. I think contract to hire and again, and you can agree or disagree, I'm fine with the way. I don't think you can truly judge somebody's full potential in an interview, period. I think you're always taking a risk, always. And then the contract to hire lets you, it's essentially a working interview. Yeah, I think it's hard. It's hard to engage someone from a small window.

And yeah, there's risk either way. And I think really working with someone digging in with them on something is like kind of how you can really start to measure, right? We'll come back to the quote unquote soft skills, right? Like, are they a good person to work with? Are they helpful? Like, is there a senior hire? Are they actually helping your junior engineers, right? If they're a junior hire, are they like learning? Are they doing things quickly? Like, right, do they mesh? Are they like, you know, maybe they have too much ego about something, you know, who knows what the thing is? And that'll kind of come out in the first couple months of putting real work into it.

And another thing, interviews are often like, cool, do this like seven hour take home test, right? Like, if you're not going to contact the hire, like at least give someone a day wage for doing that, right? Hey, well. That. That. All right. It's just, sorry. Yeah, it's just like, literally my hands all around and like smashing my wedding ring and like my desk. Yeah, it's just, it comes back to having like a little bit of understanding like, things are hard sometimes. And like, I get it. Like if you're a Google, you can demand people do whatever they want. And I'm like, sure, sure. But if you're a smaller company and you're really trying to like get a gauge of somebody, like, if you want to do more tech stuff, like hire them for a day.

Give them a day contract. Be like, cool. Come shout out for a day. We'll pay you for whatever the day it is. or come shout out to us for a week or a month, right? Okay, and then if it works great, you hire them. If it doesn't work, cool. It was a consulting gig, move on. Yep. So there's a question from Brandon. Brandon goes voice to tech sucks. So that means this is gonna have some issues. What situation does it make sense to do contract to hire? And what situation does it make sense to just hire somebody for a permanent position and not play the 90 day game?

Honestly, Brandon, I thought that, I think that makes sense. There's a whole sense. I think, I'm gonna use this first Chris obviously hear your thoughts. I think it makes sense from a contract to hire perspective. If you're an organization trying to scale fast, right? Like if you're in a position where you got to get bodies in the door, because on the contract to hire side I tweeted about this yesterday and my LinkedIn post yesterday was around recruiting companies can provide laptops for the consultants. We can do onboarding, we can do I9W to all of that. And then Chris, if Chris engaged me and Vaco on a search, which hopefully we eventually does.

Chris goes, I need five people to start June 15th. And I'm like, great, we'll get them all rolling. And then do that. I think the only time you contract to hire, if it's not that, is if you are unsure about somebody. If you're unsure about something that could be fixed in coach, like they may not have the deepest react experience or the deepest AWS Lambda experience. Go ahead and get them started, country hire and let's see and then convert them. Chris, interest you, that's a great question, Brandon. So yeah, I think it can be difficult, especially if you're just starting to do it. I think it's one of those things where you can, if you put it in place as your whole company policy where everyone's contact to hire, I think it actually starts to make it a little bit more sense.

I think that's way tougher to convince a company to do. But I'm pretty sure it was Buffer that did that. You either used to do that or still does do that. I thought it was a really great crash course and how to run a successful tech company. But I'm pretty sure they do and if I'm misquoting them, I'm sorry, it was somebody else. But they would do that for every employee. And they were saying their success rate for that was something like maybe every 19 out of 20 people they hire goes on to be full time and it works out great. But everyone else while there isn't somebody and then they're able to beat it out.

They're able to catch more and they'll catch that interview and they get it there. And it was sometimes usually it's mutual, really. Like the person who was like, it's not the right fit. And he's like, yeah, it sounds the right fit. Cool. You know, I think people should actually be, if you open to more in the senior level too, and it has to play both ways. But often people are like, no, I need a CTO or I need this VP of engine. I need like a two year commitment and like we're gonna grow the company together this and that like it's it may not make the most sense to contradar there.

Yeah, right. And the J And then, so let's talk about consulting. Cool. And then we'll wrap it up here. Again, thank you all for tuning in. This has been great. Thank you all the questions. Brian, Devontae, Natasha, Brandon, thank you, thank you, John, Kathy. Thank you so much, y'all, for tuning in. If you have any more questions for Chris, now is the time where you get a CTO. You get someone, you get a CTO's attention and you can ask them questions. So please keep the questions coming if you have them. Chris, when it comes to doing your own thing, right? The individual watching this kind of can vary from entrepreneurs to developers to individuals wanting to go on their own.

You've made the leap to kind of go out on your own. What are just some high level words of encouragement, things people need to think about before they go out on their own? I'd say the biggest thing to think about is understand how taxes and sort of business works from that perspective. It's really easy to mess that up. So and I even kind of messed it up this year too. So yeah, and I've done it. I did my own consulting before coming to Vayner and then I did afterwards too. So I've had a couple experiences doing it. And it's so hard. And so I think like if you're going to do it, like just get some advice from somebody, start up your company the right way, form an LLC.

Understand that LLC gives you basically just legal protection. If you're like, it doesn't change your tax status necessarily, you just give you legal protects and if someone suits you for something, they're suing your LLC and not you personally. So it just gives you that little bit of a wrapper there. If you can, if you actually make, you know, if you, as you have money coming to the door, I would recommend getting a CPA or an accountant to kind of help you with that part of it again. I really think that's the hardest part of it. So unless you have a background in business, like there's certain things you've got to figure out there.

Other than that, it's about, you know, what are you going to try and do, right? Are you going to try and just be like a contract developer, which is, I think, a way to go about doing it. And, but then you have to figure out, well, how do I find people that are going to hire me? Sure. Right. So that's really the biggest thing is I wouldn't, unless you think you have an idea or have like a first client already, it can be really tough to kind of go out on your own. So that's one of the bigger things there is like, all right, where is your, your cash load going to come from?

Yeah. Right. What do you offer that's a little bit different than somebody else? Or what are you going to do better? There's a lot of people out there who started out doing Shopify development, and then now they run their own full companies based around doing full-time Shopify Dev. That's really successful. There's people who will do nothing but optimize your Amazon stores. So maybe that started out as a contract gig. Now they run full-time companies around doing that. So I think some of the sort of like, I don't know what the best word for it is maybe secondary markets. So when you have a product that's strong, already in the market, there's always a secondary market that comes up around that.

You see it with almost any major system, any SAS system, that comes in the play. So a lot of the work that I do now from a consulting standpoint is actually going into medium sized businesses and really analyzing their SAS products, what they have either in the door or what they might need, and help through the procurement implementation and then integration of all those. which is not something I ever thought I would be doing. I have a background running software. I love running code. I love building out teams. It's like what I've done for most of my life. And now I find myself making money, consulting in a very sort of niche space.

But I find the more people I work with, like I just picked up new clients this week and they're like, you're the only person that I've talked to that understands what we need. Every time I go to ask someone about this, they're like, oh, so you need a, you want us to build you a custom project management tool? like, no, we just need help buying the right one and we need help implementing it across our organization and building that into our day-to-day process. So I think trying to figure out what that dishes is important. I started out thinking, cool, I'm going to be an house for a CTO.

I'm going to go into small companies and help them build a tech stack out, help them build a product out, hire their teams, it'll be great. And I did that for a little bit, but you know, early stage companies are hard. It's for a lot of things. They don't have a lot of money, right? So like, you're like, cool, I'm going to do this. And like, come in. I can't actually charge what I thought was going to be able to charge for this because, you know, an angel funding company only has maybe like 5k to spare or something like that. So, right. So trying to figure out how do you actually do the work and then get properly pitched for it.

I think it's really one of the most important things to figure out from the consulting standpoint. That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, Chris, thank you again for coming on, man. I appreciate it. This was a blast. I typically like to go like 15 minutes. But I knew today was going to be awesome. So again, thank y'all again for all the questions. I appreciate it. Chris appreciates it. Chris, if somebody wants to connect with you, what's the best medium for them to connect with you? Yeah, I think Twitter linked in. My handle is the right choice with the Y like my last name. So, hit me up on there.

I'm very happy to talk. I have a lot of opinions on things. So yeah, give me a shout out. Awesome. Well, thank y'all I'm so excited to have him on. Chris, thank you again, brother. You have a good weekend. Appreciate it. Appreciate you all. Thanks for tuning in. It's a guy who counts for 2.0 today on this beautiful Friday. You all have a wonderful weekend. And Monday, very excited for those of you who are still watching. Monday, I'm having Nate Taylor. He's an engineer at Plurals site. We're going to talk about leadership within technology organizations. So very excited to have him on. Chris, thank you again, brother.

You have a good weekend. I appreciate it. Appreciate you all. Thanks for tuning in.