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Agile Ideas
#152 | Throw Back Episode - #055 Steve Glaveski - Being Time Rich, Entrepreneurship Lessons, Innovating in a Pandemic & the Reverse Side Hustle
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Throw back to one of our favorites, in case you missed it!
In this episode, we sit down with Steve Glaveski—entrepreneur, author, and the dynamic founder of Collective Campus, one of Australia’s fastest-growing companies. Known for his work in corporate innovation and startup acceleration, Steve has helped over 100 startups raise more than $25M and driven innovation programs for companies like Microsoft, NAB, and Village Roadshow.
Steve shares his journey from management consultant to founder, covering the highs and challenges of building multiple successful ventures, including Future Squared, his award-winning podcast, and Lemonade Stand, a platform teaching kids entrepreneurship. We also discuss insights from his books, Employee to Entrepreneur and Time Rich, diving into practical strategies for reclaiming time, focusing on meaningful work, and empowering the next generation of innovators.
Tune in to hear Steve’s inspiring story and actionable tips on navigating the entrepreneurial journey with purpose, agility, and passion.
In this episode we cover:
How he founded NOFilter, a media company during the COVID-19 Pandemic
How to build an innovative organisation and what it means
His best tips on being time rich and his view on the 6-hour workday
How to stay organized as a multi-business owner
And why it is so important to get kids to interact with entrepreneurship at a young age
And much more...
To connect with Steve:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveglaveski/
https://www.collectivecampus.io/
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Learn more about podcast host Fatimah Abbouchi
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Unlocking Potential
Fatimah AbbouchiYou're listening to Agile Ideas , the podcast hosted by Fatima Rabouchi . For anyone listening out there not having a good day , please know there is help out there , Steve . Welcome to the show .
Steve GlaveskiIt's an absolute pleasure to be here , Fatima .
Fatimah AbbouchiExciting to have you . I've been following your career journey since we met a couple of years ago , I think , think and really leveraging everything . You're sharing content , wise learning and applying things so I'm keen to delve into a lot of stuff about that . But first and foremost , um , I've shared a little bit about yourself , but maybe just in your own words , tell us a little bit about who you are and then what you do sure .
Steve Glaveskiso at my core I guess I'm someone who works towards unlocking people's latent potential , whether they are startup entrepreneurs , whether they are corporate executives or whether they are kids . With our Lemonade Stand program , I traditionally was someone who went through the motions , conformed to society's conventions , of what success looked like , and for me that involved working at big four consulting firms , large investment banks , you know , climbing the so-called corporate ladder and getting to a point where I had the six-figure salary , had the business class flights , all that sort of quote-unquote trappings of success . But I found myself miserably comfortable and that was about close to eight years ago now . That's when I made the leap into entrepreneurship and I haven't looked back since .
Steve GlaveskiBut effectively all I do now is around unlocking people's land potential , whether that's around innovation , whether that's around productivity or whether that's just around people's attitudes and mindsets towards life and work and the questions that they ask about where they want to go . And yeah , it's an evolving thing . Oftentimes people say , what's your purpose in life ? And yeah , I might have a purpose right now , but it's malleable and two years from now it's probably going to be something else . And I think just being open to that and being open to the different paths that life can take you on just makes the journey all the more rewarding .
Fatimah AbbouchiAmazing and just taking those opportunities as they come and deciding what's right at that point in time , because we can't control everything around us , as we are currently in the middle midst of a pandemic . Tell me what's you know ? Amongst the pandemic is a lot of obviously negative things happening , but what's the best thing that happened to you last week ?
Steve GlaveskiLast week , the best thing that happened to me . Well , it was my birthday on the 5th of September , so I know this is the 17th . That was 12 days ago , so the week before last week . Now I live just within five kilometers of the beach and I decided to take my surfboard out . Now , being in Melbourne , there are no waves , but you can still take the board out and paddle , and this was at about 6 pm on a Saturday evening in Port Melbourne andI happened to see dolphins . There was about four or five dolphins and they make their way up to the surface and jump out , get some air , and that was perhaps the best thing that happened to me in the last couple of weeks . I would say Completely unexpected and not something you normally see in Melbourne , but I think it's perhaps testament to the fact that there's not much human activity going on in the water right now that all these natural wildlife's coming back , so that was pretty awesome .
Fatimah AbbouchiWell , first of all , happy birthday for your uh couple of weeks ago and uh , I agree , I've been melvin , never seen dolphins in the water . I had to fly , you know , to the outside the world to see dolphins sometimes yeah , exactly that's amazing .
Fatimah AbbouchiI'm very exciting . So so at the moment , obviously I mentioned , there's a lot of things going on with the pandemic and and I know that you've set up a business in the midst of pandemic . So tell us , tell us a little bit about that , because I want people listening to realize that you know , even amongst crises like this , that there are opportunities out there , and I'd love to learn more about whether you had the idea before COVID or came up with the idea during COVID . Tell us a little bit more about that sure .
Steve GlaveskiSo the business I set up is called no Filter Media , so it's's a media company , and some people might say what kind of crazy person sets up a media company in this day and age where you know channel 10 network and nine network and various media outlets is just culling hundreds , if not thousands , of people ? So for us firstly , we like a lot of businesses out there , with Collective Campus being a corporate innovation accelerator took a small hit at the start of the pandemic . A lot of our engagements were either cancelled or postponed , and we've been running that business for about six years now and organically during that time , what we did to really differentiate ourselves from our competitors in that sort of corporate innovation consultancy space was content . Like we have published about 400 blog posts , 25 eBooks , 390 podcast episodes , countless webinars , you name it and it's something that we've learned to really streamline . Like we're huge on automation , we're huge on outsourcing and we're just huge on eliminating waste're huge on outsourcing and we're just huge on eliminating waste and focusing on the high value activities that can move the needle the furthest . So on the back of that , me as an individual , I've evolved into an author I've published five books now and podcaster , and during the pandemic .
Steve GlaveskiWe kind of took that time out to reflect on where do we want to go in the future . Do we want to continue to focus solely on collective campus or do we want to do something else ? And for me , as much as I love working with corporates on innovation like where my heart is really taking me is content is media is really taking me , is content is media . And so we developed no Filter Media based on our strengths , like what I was saying around automation , around achieving things at scale , and we , in the space of three months , when no Filter was just an idea , it is now a full-blown media site with six podcasts , about close to 1,000 articles on there already . Like we're already monetizing it through various channels content syndication , licensing , ad revenue and what we're ultimately looking to do is use a unique business model . That I think is somewhat innovative and that's perhaps testament to our work with corporates around innovation , around around business model innovation , we were able to come up with something new that can help us to generate perhaps 10 times more content than a typical media agency or company with one-tenth the amount of effort , and so far it's working really well .
Steve GlaveskiOur goal in the next 12 months is to sign up about 50 podcasts across different topics . Our goal in the next 12 months is to sign up about 50 podcasts across different topics and we've been able to do this with three people working on this side project . That's still a side project for about one and a half to two days a week for just three months , and that is just testament to different ways of working , because you could spend three years trying to get to the same point with the same amount of people . If you over pontificate about every little decision and try and get things absolutely perfect before getting them out of the building and all that sort of stuff , that just can be really debilitating . So it's kind of been a case study that I can point to when talking to people about Time Rich and all the lessons that people get inside that book .
Fatimah AbbouchiWow , it sounds like an amazing effort , and especially with such little effort to get there . I mean , obviously there's been a lot of hard work but you've been able , like you said , do it at a much less cost and resource wise . I'm interested to know how did you go about testing the market with this idea and seeing whether it's going to fit , or did you just kind of come up with the idea and just the actual execution of it is the test ?
Steve GlaveskiYeah well , I'm a massive proponent of testing your assumptions before taking things to market . Now , in this case , our core business model was one where we thought , hey , can we sign up 50 podcasters , people with big audiences , people with reputations , and do some kind of a 50-50 revenue split ? And then , when we have this aggregate of 50 big names on our label , pumping out content that we don't have to write , we just produce it , promote it and monetize it , we think that model makes sense if we can pull it off . But the assumption there wasn't necessarily on the demand side , it was also on the supply side , which was can we actually get people with existing audiences to sign up to something where they're not getting paid up front but they're sharing in the revenue and we do all the other work ? So initially it was a matter of reaching out to , uh , personalities and influencers in the sporting domain , in the music domain , in the journalism domain , and seeing if they'd be up for it , and so we'd send out about 50 emails , have about 20 conversations in the back of those emails , and then we've signed up a number of people , including um andrew gaze , who is a huge basketball personality here in Australia . We've signed up Mick Wall , who is perhaps one of the world's biggest rock music journalists . He's been in the game since 1975 , and he's written about 35 best-selling books on different bands over the years . So we're starting to sign up these big names on the supply side , so that's validated . The other side is okay . Now that we've got these guys , are we are they going to generate the audience ? So before we get to the point where we've even signed up 50 podcasters , we're already saying that these guys are bringing their audience to us and we're generating those listens . That would be much more difficult , like an order of magnitude more difficult to generate , if we were trying to just build names from the ground up who didn't have that pre-existing reputation to bring to the table .
Transitioning From Employee to Entrepreneur
Steve GlaveskiAnd then the other thing is really validating monetization , and that's something that we did before we started no Filter . So I mentioned the content that we've created with Collective Campus . Like , we've been quite successful in taking that content and licensing it to third parties who want to publish it on their blogs or in their mobile apps or whatever the case is . So we already knew that we could take content and sell it to third parties as a way to license it and make money . So no Filter Media basically just gives us an opportunity to create 10 times more content , which means we'll have a hell of a lot more content to monetize and repurpose into different formats video , audio and and just diversify the revenue streams .
Steve GlaveskiSo definitely testing , but at the same time I think if you get really good at creating a lot of value with little effort , the value of testing kind of diminishes somewhat , because the cost to you if it doesn't work isn't that great . Like if we pull the plug now it's like , yeah , we worked on it for three months , a day and a half . I mean we could have gotten there earlier , earlier , but it's not a massive burden . When it is a burden is when companies decide to raise a million dollars , go out and spend the next 12 to 18 months building something and then they realize , oh , there's no market for it . That's , that's definitely a waste of birth , time and money . So yeah , there's always , always nuance with every sort of decision you take , I suppose .
Fatimah AbbouchiAbsolutely , and I think you've just demonstrated working in an agile fashion where you know gone are the days of the gigantic large multi-million dollar , multi-year programs of work . You're actually just testing the market , like I said , with a low risk , to get in there first and see it come to fruition . So it's really great . It's great to hear that . I'm interested in touching more on your earlier career . I know from my research that you were in banking , you were in auditing . You've got a lot of different certifications and experience in different areas . How and at what point did you realize that you actually wanted to move into entrepreneurship and how did your first book or one of your first books employee to entrepreneur come about ? Was that like shortly after or midway through ? Uh ?
Steve Glaveskiso I I spent close to a decade in those various corporate roles and I was around the age of 29 . I was working at bernstein young at the time and about to transition to Macquarie Bank in Sydney and make the move from Melbourne to Sydney to take that role , and I did . But while I was working there I just I knew for me there was something like deeper inside that was driving me or compelling me to go out and start my own business . I don't know what , because none of my family were entrepreneurs or anything to that effect . They were all employees . But I think growing up I was always somewhat anti-authoritarian , like I grew up listening to heavy metal music and I always just had this sort of . I was always attracted to things that were a little bit sort of less than mainstream and a little bit sort of rebellious in nature , like watching the Karate Kid . Growing up , I was always a fan of Johnny Lawrence and the Cobra Kai , as opposed to Daniel LaRusso , was supposed to be the good guy . So I was always a fan of the rebels .
Steve GlaveskiAnd while I was at Macquarie I basically founded a company called Hot Desk because I had observed that wherever I went as a consultant , so much empty office space , and Hotdesk was like an Airbnb for office space that was designed to connect freelancers , small business owners , with vacant office space in different buildings and applying some of those lean startup principles . I spent about $2,000 building a prototype , sent out press releases to about 100 different journalists , 99 of which completely ignored the email , one of which got back to me happened to be a journalist from the Australian newspaper , and they published an article which , long story short , led to me raising $150,000 and that was basically my ticket out of the corporate world and into a couple of years of what I call my personal MBA or my personal MBE , master of Business Entrepreneurship . And Hotdesk didn't work . I mean , it was a failure . The supply side I managed to build it out to like 1,500 locations across Asia Pac demand nowhere to be seen but learned a hell of a lot throughout that process and that , learning about the lean startup and these different ways of working and contrasting that with what I knew in the corporate world . I identified an opportunity there , and that's where Collective Campus came along , because Collective Campus was all about taking these techniques that you find in the world of startups and applying them to large companies who need to learn to be more adaptable . So that was a good .
Steve GlaveskiAlmost six years ago now , by 2018 , we were listed as one of the fastest growing companies fastest growing new companies in Australia by the Australian Financial Review , and it was around that time that I wrote Employed Entrepreneur , because making that leap requires that you essentially shed your skin , so to speak , because a lot of the behaviors that you pick up in the corporate world can actually be you know , they can sabotage your efforts in in entrepreneurship like seeking perfection and always outsourcing accountability or seeking consensus before you make a decision .
Steve GlaveskiLike in entrepreneurship , where there's so many moving parts and things are moving quickly and there's so much ambiguity . You oftentimes just need to make a decision , move forward , learn from it whether it succeeds or failed , and just keep moving forward as fast as you can . And so Employed Entrepreneur basically unpacks everything for someone who is gainfully employed but has that itch that I had and wants to make the leap . And there are no guarantees of success , of course , but it is something that I think will help increase someone's chances of success and help them avoid many of the common pitfalls that first-time entrepreneurs fall into .
Fatimah AbbouchiAmazing and obviously you know , in terms of your career in the past , that you've done . I know you've done journalism , accounting , project management , it . You've done a lot of things . So it sounds like you've used and leveraged all of that as part of all of the business opportunities that you've been presenting to yourself in your entrepreneurial journey . I'm interested to know , because I think there's probably a lot of people out there that are probably wanting to get into entrepreneurship , maybe want to set up a business , maybe they're working full time at the moment and not really sure when to take that leap of faith . You've just helped identify that . You know you waited till the opportunity came financially to enable you to do that . What other tips or advice can you give to someone who maybe doesn't have that just yet as to when to make that decision from being in a full-time , secure job somewhat to actually jumping into the entrepreneurship world ? What sort of advice would you recommend ? What things should they have in place before they make that leap of faith , do you ?
Steve Glaveskithink look , it's a . It's a good question , and sometimes I feel there's two answers to it , because it really depends on the nature of what you're working on . In some cases , certain ideas will require you to basically throw caution to the wind and work on them full time , whereas other ideas you might be able to test market appetite for without making that leap . So in the latter case , like , there are countless things you can do today If you spend a few hundred , if not a few thousand dollars defining what your business model is , what are the key assumptions around the product , the customer segment , the revenue model , and then just building landing pages , building ads , testing that , trying to generate , generate a wait list . You can do that for a hell of a lot of products .
Building Innovative Culture for Success
Steve GlaveskiMy girlfriend recently set up a high protein , low carb ice cream idea essentially so it's called mr and the way she went about testing market appetite was literally . It took about two weeks . She set up a landing page with a bunch of Facebook ads determining whether or not this was something people would be interested in , and for a couple of hundred dollars , about 150 odd people signed up to the waitlist . She was able to then speak to a lot of these people , and many of them actually came forward and said that they were diabetics , and so that wasn't even something that was identified in the initial sort of business modeling . But that then opened up this idea to a whole new market of people who potentially could have appetite for high protein . Whole new market of people who potentially could have appetite for high protein , low sugar ice cream that would normally not be able to eat that kind of food but would love to right . So you can do a lot of testing and once you get enough indication of market appetite , I'd say you'd have to wait until you have some form of revenue before you make that leap . And again , I'm not impervious to the individual circumstances , like do you have savings at bank ? Should you have about six months worth of savings to cover rent and living expenses and everything else ? I'd say yes , because otherwise you're going to stress yourself out , worrying about just getting by instead of freeing up that cognition to work on your business .
Steve GlaveskiOne thing I recommend people do if you've been in the corporate world for a number of years , if you've got some credentials and accolades , you might be able to secure , say , a two or three day a week contractor role , and these contractor roles generally pay quite handsomely like anywhere between 800 to $1,500 a day in some cases , and if you can get by on most people can say $3,000 a week through a contractor role .
Steve GlaveskiThe beauty of that is it frees you up to spend the other days just on your business , which for me I call that a reverse side hustle , and for me that's much better than a traditional side hustle where you'll be at work five days a week and you'll be absolutely exhausted and then you'll try and find some cognitive scraps at like 7 pm after you've been working all day to work in your side hustle and you know you're absolutely , like , exhausted by that point . Even if you do work on it , the quality of that work's not going to be great . So if you can secure like a two or three day wait contractor all and then spend two full days working on your business , you'll be much better off over the long term amazing , really good , really good advice .
Fatimah AbbouchiI think that , um , that would really help some people because there's a lot of desire to go out and start businesses , but if you don't have the right things in place before you do that , you could actually end up in a worse situation . So thank you for that . Take that on board . Often when we talk about so , we do a lot of things in the agile space and often when we go into an organisation and deal with them and they say they want to be agile , they want to do agile , et cetera , there's often a misunderstanding as to what agile is and whether they're actually suitable to take that on board . Do you find that with innovation , when you hear companies saying , oh , we're going to be innovative , that it's actually the sort of same misunderstanding of what innovation actually is ?
Steve GlaveskiYeah , To a certain degree . Yes , actually reminds me of this tribe which has gone on to be known as cargo cults cargo cult tribes so I forgot exactly where it was in the world , but they were more or less visited by Westerners who flew in and brought food and aid and all sorts of stuff , but then these westerners basically left and so these tribes were very sort of indigenous native tribes to the region . They weren't very developed at all . Um , you know , they were still living in you know more or less huts and uh making bonfires to keep warm and uh , still basically hunter-gatherer tribes . But what they did once these westerners left , they would fashion , like planes and navigation towers out of wood . So they'd kind of create all of these , uh , I suppose , signals of of what these westerners had , so , for example , artifacts . They'd create the artifacts . But what was missing in those planes was obviously the engine , like the turbines , everything that makes the plane go .
Steve GlaveskiUm , and I find that kind of shows up in the corporate world to some degree as well , where people conflate uh , innovation with what they see and say the startup world . So it could be oh , we're gonna kit out the office in table tennis tables . You can wear whatever you want on a Friday . Let's call it wear a hoodie Friday , so we can be like Mark Zuckerberg . Let's create an app for this product , which you know . Let's create an app for our insurance company and , like , I don't know about you , but I'm not exactly going to be picking up my phone checking out my insurance premiums every single day , like it's not . So there is this tendency to conflate innovation with just these artifacts that you see in the startup world , and that's definitely something that needs changing . For me , innovation is more around , not just taking new things to market , but also the way you go about doing that , and I wrote a piece recently that suggested that most companies run like crap , and that crap is an acronym . So C consensus , seeking R hyper , responsive to every request that comes in . A available If you invite me to a meeting , yes , I am there . It doesn't matter if I have a million other priorities , I'm there .
Steve GlaveskiAnd then P process , paralysis , and when you combine these things together , what happens is you can't get much done because you've said yes to all sorts of demands on your time , you're constantly seeking consensus and even if you want to make a decision , you've got all this red tape to to get through , to move the needle one inch forward .
Steve GlaveskiUm and organizations like that have put in place these processes to help them execute and deliver on existing business models , which is fine if the world doesn't change . But the world is changing quickly and those business models quickly become redundant . But in those types of environments what also happens is your best people who want to create change , who want to contribute to the DNA of that organization , they leave because they want to work somewhere where they can actually make a change and not be beholden to all these sort of bureaucracy and these cultures that just bring them down . So over time those companies might end up with a redundant business model and people on the bus who just don't help them get stuff done . So for me , innovation starts with that culture piece and ensuring that you've got a culture where people can actually get stuff done , because it doesn't matter how good your ideas are if you're not executing . If you're not able to execute , then you're already cooked from day one .
Fatimah AbbouchiAbsolutely , and I think you know , talking about the larger companies , typically they've sort of bogged down with all their legacy and they're really trying to become more agile and move and be flexible and to be innovative as well . They're probably going to look at what's actually holding them back and I like that acronym a lot . I did read that article that you wrote with that in it . So , yeah , I think there's definitely a lot of challenges and a lot of learnings . The larger businesses could benefit and should maybe be looking at introducing more entrepreneurial sort of skills and mindsets into the way that they run projects and programs . Have you seen or heard anything about that ?
Steve GlaveskiYeah , definitely . So . I mean , if you look at some of the more progressive companies who are , you know , kicking goals , both when it comes to innovation , when it comes to their share price , I mean , it's hard to look past organisations like your Amazons , like your Netflixes of the world , and the one thing that both those organizations have in common is this empowering culture . So Netflix , for example , has constantly reinvented themselves , whether it was mail or a DVD , to downloadable films , to streaming films , to creating their own content , so that they wouldn't be at the mercy of film studios who could lend licensed content to someone else . Their culture is one where they don't have you know , mountains of process , like their whole thing is .
Steve GlaveskiWe want to hire people , we want to pay at the top of the market and we want to bring a players to work for us , but in order to do that , we need to keep process low and we need to trust that these people , who we've hired to think , to make decisions , will make good decisions and even if they don't , they will learn from their mistakes and pick up the pieces and move forward . So it's about creating these cultures where you attract , engage and retain high performers who are self-motivated , who want to make a difference in the world , who have the capabilities that can get them to where they need to go , and also have the competencies , strengths and they're aligned with the values and mission of the organization . Branson says you know , I'm successful because I hire people that are smarter than me . I give them the resources they need to succeed and empower them with a worthwhile mission and I get the hell out of the way . And that's exactly the same at Amazon
Strategic Decision Making and Automation
Steve Glaveski.
Steve GlaveskiYou know I've mentioned a couple of times being burdened by process . One thing they do well and this is something that Jeff Bezos alluded to in his 1997 shareholder letter , which I recommend everyone reads is delineate between type one and type two decisions . So type one decisions are big , hairy , consequential , irreversible decisions , like deploying $100 million of capital somewhere . That's something you perhaps want to bring a few people in discuss . Make sure you don't jump to conclusions . People in discuss , make sure you don't jump to conclusions . Type two decisions , on the other hand , reversible , inconsequential , uh , if you make a mistake , you can fix it .
Steve GlaveskiNow , in most traditional organizations , there is this tendency to treat all of our decisions like type one , like what color should the button be on this website ? I'll let I don't know . Let's call the entire marketing team in here for a one-hour meeting and we can discuss , and part of that's outsourcing , accountability , not wanting to make a decision that turns out to be wrong , which is a reflection of these fear-based cultures . But the reality is , most of our decisions are type 2 , and we should be treating them as such . And when we do that , we can move quickly , and that's why companies like Amazon , like Netflix , who do that , are able to innovate and you can have 10 times more capital than these companies , which is pretty hard right now . But even if you did and you traded every single decision as a type one , you would fail .
Steve GlaveskiAnd it's the same advantage that startups have , whether you're a team of five or 10 , coming up against a team of 1,000 . If that , that team of a thousand spends all its time around boardrooms making , treating every decision as a type one , but you guys are moving fast and you've got one tenth of the capital you guys will win . So , like decision making and how you go about working , for me is always number one to to innovation , to growth , to success in any , any domain , whether it's a large organization or whether it's you in your life . Like , the faster you learn what works in your own life when it comes to relationships , when it comes to your health and fitness , the faster you can make better decisions and the faster you get to your desired outcome yeah , absolutely , and to actually taking the lessons and then applying them taking the lessons you've learned and actually not doing the same thing and expecting a different result .
Fatimah AbbouchiI'll make a note of that Jeff Bezos letter as well , so people can read that You're running so many different businesses at the moment . You're creating businesses , you're writing books , you're speaking around the world or were speaking around the world , et cetera . There's so many things going on . How do you stay organized and what do you recommend is the sort of maybe first couple of things that you look to automate to make , you know , your and your team's life easier , if you know you're starting with something small .
Steve GlaveskiYeah . So when it comes to so , there's this saying that you can only do one thing . Well right , you shouldn't spread yourself thin . But my thing is you can only do one thing . Well right , you shouldn't spread yourself thin , but my thing is , you can do more than one thing as long as you're working on one right thing at a time . So , for me , it is really what are my goals right now and what are the actions that are gonna get me closer to those goals ?
Steve GlaveskiNow , I might have 20 potential actions , but what I like to do oftentimes is and this could be on a day-to-day basis , it could be on a quarterly basis what's the value of this action out of 10 ? And what's the cost of this action out of 10 in terms of time , money , and then just a simple value divided by cost equals X . Now , that's how I would go about prioritizing the steps that I take to get me closer to my goals . Right , so it could be the value of this action is a nine , the cost is a three , and therefore nine divided by three equals three . That could be higher than everything else on my list , which might be a two or a one , and therefore I'm going to focus on that task and that's because everything in the world is subject to the Pareto principle or the 80-20 principle .
Steve GlaveskiYou know , 20% of your inputs are responsible for 80% of your outputs . If you're running a company , chances are roughly 20% of your customers are attributable to 80% of your revenue . But if you break that down , 4% of the inputs are responsible for 64% of the outputs . 1% of the inputs are responsible for 64% of the outputs . 1% of the imports are responsible for 50% of the outputs . So by being more like , tuned into these things and identifying the signal in the noise like what's the signal ? What's that 1% ? That's going to get me the furthest way forward . I'm going to focus on that . So , like no filter media , like we could have done a million things to take that three months and turn it into three years before we launched , but we didn't . We focused on what are the key things that are going to get us to where we need to be .
Steve GlaveskiSimilarly , with my books you know I've spoken to authors , and no disrespect to the authors . They've written some great books , but I've had authors on my podcast who've basically told me they spent five years writing their book and in some cases that might be warranted . In my case , what I did by being very intentional about how I work and getting into that flow state , I would commit to writing , say , between 3,000 and 5,000 words a day for a period of about three weeks , and I would just not do anything else during that period of time . And by the end of those three weeks I've basically got close to 70,000 words , if not more , and then I just need to edit from there on in . And it really comes down to define your goals . What are the actions that are going to get you there ? How do you prioritize those actions so you focus on the high-value tasks and then just execute in a way where you are free from distraction , you are solely focused on that task . And then , like you said , automation .
Steve GlaveskiThere's absolutely so many things you can automate nowadays , whether it's marketing , sales , customer service . I think it really depends on what your goals are , rather than just me giving out general advice . But like , for example , if it's sales , one thing that has worked reasonably well for us is when we publish , say , an ebook . So content marketing , we would publish an ebook on a particular domain , so , for example , innovation in insurance , and then we would use automation tools to contact innovation executives from insurance companies across the globe and send them this ebook through LinkedIn .
Steve GlaveskiSo , rather than doing that one by one , by one , by one , we can automate that to send out , say , 200 messages a day , and we're not selling anything , we're just saying , hey , check out this ebook . And that's a great way for us to begin a conversation with different organizations , with different executives across the world , by giving them value to start with . So that's just one simple example of how you might use automation . But anything that is process oriented , anything that is a step-by-step , rudimentary process that you think you can just turn into code or you can get someone else to turn into code for you , then , yeah , you shouldn't be doing that yourself . You should be freeing yourself up to think because that is what human beings are paid to do these days like , if it's a step-by-step process , machines can do that for us yeah , absolutely .
Fatimah AbbouchiIt's interesting . You mentioned that around automation one or something that we've kind of learned more recently , but it's interesting in the early entrepreneurial days . I don't know if you experienced this , but a lot of people would say to myself you know , focus on the idea and developing out the idea and throw money at the processes later . Don't worry about the processes , sort them out later . Anyone can do that . So do you kind of agree with that , or do you think there needs to be a balance between yeah , look , I think there has to be some
Maximizing Remote Collaboration and Team Bonding
Fatimah Abbouchibalance .
Steve GlaveskiBut it really comes down to the objectives . In the unique circumstances I gave that example earlier of the Mr Nice high protein ice cream . Now in that case you don't really need processes because your objective is really just to test whether or not there is market appetite . Now , if you take that next step , then you need to start thinking about your processes , but at the same time , like I wouldn't jump to the conclusion of working on like inventory fulfillment and having like this huge supply chain operation Like initially , my process might be well , I'm expecting maybe a few hundred orders , so I'm going to take that supply chain in-house , I'm going to be packing orders into boxes , I'm going to be taking them down to the post office , because it can become tempting to just pre-occupy yourself with the processes and in that point put in place all these sort of heavy-duty supply chain stuff .
Steve GlaveskiAnd then you realize , oh , we've only got a couple of hundred orders and I've spent $10,000 to $20,000 in countless months setting up the supply chain . That is way beyond what we need . So you've always just got to make sure that you've got alignment between your objectives and your processes , because once your processes go far beyond where you are , it can be debilitating in some respects . Um , and I think that's what it comes back to like a process is there to empower you to get to your goals .
Fatimah AbbouchiThe moment it starts to be being a detractor , that's when something is wrong with your process yeah , you can't spend all your time on the process and you're not selling any products or services . Services , because that's going to be inefficient .
Fatimah AbbouchiOh , that's fair enough , and at the moment , obviously there's a lot of remote working . You've probably got , I'm assuming , your team's dispersed , probably because you do have some outsourcing that you do in your business as well . You've written an eBook recently on remote working as well . How do you think we can maintain levels of collaboration and enhance team bonding through a screen effectively ? Have you got any tips for us ?
Steve GlaveskiYeah , it's a good question . I wrote something recently about team bonding and how , in many cases , there's nothing that will bond the team better than doing meaningful work and working towards shared goals . I think for me , that is number one , and in many cases , you also need to reflect on what do your people actually want ? Like , when it comes to bonding . You might have introverts in the team who don't really want to spend another hour on Zoom quote unquote socializing with people , and then you'll have other people in your team who want that human connection right . So you really should take the pulse of what your people want . How are they feeling ? Do they want more human interaction ? Do they want more interaction with the team ?
Steve GlaveskiSo , apart from doing that sort of high-value work and working towards a shared mission , it's also like what sort of activities might people work on remotely through the screen ? So you know there's and I'm not a massive proponent of you know playing games online or anything like that , but it could be like projects that are not work related that people can work on . So you might have , like musical people in the team . I'm not saying this would be an entire organization project , but there may be , say , four or five people in your team maybe one's a drummer , another one's a guitarist , another one's a singer and they can record separate parts of a song , pull them together and then present them to the wider organization , right ? So that's like one example of thinking outside the box and having people work together on something that's not work-related but still fun and still helps them bond . So it's going to be different based on the skill sets of people in the organization .
Steve GlaveskiOne thing that I also think is important is if we are going to spend more time away from the office , then we're saving tons of money , especially if companies downsize their office space . So , for example , in New York , the average annual cost per employee for office space is $14,000 . So if you've got , say , yeah , it's huge . If you've got 100 employees , that's like $1.4 million . And if you cut your office space by by a half , well , you've got 700 000 dollars that you didn't have before . Now , perhaps distributing some , if not all , of that back to your employees in terms of making sure they've got good equipment at home , making sure um , you know , maybe paying for gym memberships , sending food hampers home on a monthly basis , like taking some of those office perks and re or transferring them into people's homes , because just because they're not going to an office anymore doesn't mean that they shouldn't have , you know , the best possible work environment .
Fatimah AbbouchiUh , as possible yeah , absolutely no , really good points , I think , um , you know , the other thing that that comes to mind , something that happened recently in our team is , obviously , people are working from home . I don't know about you , but I'm obsessed with online shopping at the moment because I feel like it's Christmas every day . It's still free to just keep arriving . Maybe one of the things that we did is I sent sort of a little care packages to our team recently . It was just a couple of , you know , drink bottles , a coffee cup and some chocolate , but it just shows that they care and if they're saving that sort of money , I absolutely agree and I and I think that your , um , your hot desking business might , maybe , may make a resurgence because at the moment , there's a lot of uh , a lot of flexible office space activity going to be happening .
Fatimah AbbouchiI think I don't think everyone's going- to go back to the office as they yeah , well , that's it .
Steve GlaveskiUh , I don't think so . Um , I think there'll be a hybrid approach going forward . Some people , like I , actually did some work for a client in the US recently , and part of that work was trying to figure out , like , do people want to go back to the office ? And I'd say about 50% of people said they wanted to go back for maybe two days a week . So very few people . It was only about 15% of people that said that they wanted to go back five days a week . So very few people . It was only about 15% of people that said that they wanted to go back five days a week .
Steve GlaveskiSo I think we won't go back to full-time face-to-face , but that's my business . That's a lot of the startup businesses I know . However , I think in certain industries that are a little bit more traditional , who like to anchor to the past , they might find it difficult to adopt this on a permanent basis . I hope that's not the case , because I think there are so many benefits to working remotely . I think there are benefits to that hybrid approach , though .
Steve GlaveskiRight , so , having face-to-face interaction one or two days a week , but even then , even if you don't have that local office , like part of that part , of those packages that you reward your employees with , could include a budget to get a space at a coworking space , even if they go out there one or two days a week , or a budget to attend meetups , just some avenue by which they can continue to build those relationships , continue to learn from other people and just get out of the house and have that change of scenery , because you're staring at the same four walls every day , seven days a week if you're , you know it's , it's in your house , right ?
Steve GlaveskiSo that can get a little bit deflating after a while . So , just being conscious of these things and you know , I , I , I can only suggest or point people to these things , but if , if you are a leader of a team , like just sending out even anonymous surveys and just finding out how people are going , what would they like to see from the organization , how many days a week would they like to work in an office and what could you be doing better to support them , because everyone's different . So really being proactive about that and taking , you know , necessary action accordingly you're right , just asking the question .
Fatimah AbbouchiYou'll be surprised sometimes the answers you get , especially when you make that opportunity anonymous and there's a lot of uh on anonymous some sort of the collaboration tools that are floating around that I've seen people use as well . So , um , yeah , very well said . Um , in just coming back to your , to your new , your newest book that's coming out in october , can you tell us a little bit more about the six hour work day and why you think that you know that's important and why you release this book now ?
Steve Glaveskisure . So the book is called time rich . Do Do your Best Work , live your Best Life . It comes out in early October through Wiley .
Maximizing Productivity in the Modern Workday
Steve GlaveskiNow , the six-hour workday came about because I was finding myself coming home from work , you know , at like 7 to 8 pm pretty much every night for the first couple of years of Collective Campus and that was like 12-hour workdays . And after a while , while I started to reflect on why I was doing this I mean , getting home at that time there's really not much else to do other than maybe read a book or watch some Netflix like my personal relationship started to suffer . I didn't have time for my personal interests . I definitely wasn't going surfing , unless I wanted to get eaten by a shark after afterk and I thought , well , why am I doing this ? And I realized I was just anchoring to the past of the way life was when I was in the corporate world , where you would stick around , providing everyone else in your team was around , providing your manager was still in the office . You would stay in the office , whether or not you had more work to do , and I realized that by about 3 pm most days during this period I was pretty much done , but I felt the need to stay back , to quote unquote set a positive example for my team . And then I read something that Adam Grant wrote , the professor from the Pennsylvania , from Wharton , from Wharton Business School , and he basically said something about six-hour workday . So I thought , well , let's trial this . And we did it for two weeks and the six-hour workday worked as a forcing function , forced us to do away with all the waste . It forced us to automate , to outsource all the rudimentary stuff , and just forced us to automate , to outsource all the rudimentary stuff , and just forced us to really get better at focusing . And what we found at the end of that two-week period was productivity was as good , if not better than what it was previously and people's emotional wellbeing was better . So I ran these anonymous surveys and people basically said they had more time to spend with their like newborn daughter , they had more time to reconnect with old hobbies and interests . And since then , um , I basically wrote an article about that experience , called the case for the six-hour workday for harvard business review , and that became the book .
Steve GlaveskiNow , the key premise of the book is that the 9-5 workday , the 8-hour workday , that harkens back to the Industrial Revolution . I mean there was a textile manufacturer in the 1850s called Robert Owens , who was an advocate for 8-hours rest , 8-hours play , 8-hours work . And that came to fruition in 1937 with the Fair Labor Standards Act . But the thing about work back then was it was all quite algorithmic , like you were standing on an assembly line , you were crawling through a coal mine , you were in a wheat field as a farmer and the more hours you put in more or less conflated with the output . But since that time work's very much moved from algorithmic work to cognitive work .
Steve GlaveskiAnd the thing about cognitive work is you can really only get into what psychologists call the flow state , what Cal Newport calls deep work , where you're up to like five times more productive , where you're solely locked into a task and the rest of the world just fades away .
Steve GlaveskiYou can only get into that state for about four hours a day .
Steve GlaveskiBut the way we go about working nowadays checking our phones every five minutes , checking email every 10 minutes , being interrupted through Slack messages we don't spend an hour in flow because every time we're interrupted that flow gets broken and it can take you about 20 minutes to get back into that space .
Steve GlaveskiSo the book is all about how to cultivate a way of work where you can spend four to five hours max a day in the flow state and that will be sufficient for you to get to your goals . And we talk about no filter media , getting it from zero to where it is now in a very short amount of time with almost no resources . That's leveraging the principles that I put forward in this book around focusing on high value work and being able to cultivate that flow state . So that's really what that book is all about , and I think , whether you're an individual , whether you're a startup founder , whether you're a corporate executive leading a team , there's so much value in there that can just transform the way you go about creating value and not just creating value , but also freeing yourself up to spend more time doing all those other things that you enjoy , otherwise known as life .
Fatimah AbbouchiYeah , amazing . And you talk about things like turning off notifications , which I actually did probably about a year ago , and it's just changed things completely . You don't need to be notified . As you said , there's something very urgent . You'll get a phone call . Probably get two or three phone calls in a row , so that's probably another one . What would be maybe another example that you can give us , a tip that you can give to listeners to actually get some time back in their day ?
Steve Glaveskiyeah , look there , look , there's plenty . I mean , one is just saying no to things . I think we have this predisposition towards saying yes and that's like an innate desire to be liked to not let the other people down . That's an evolutionary bias , because when we were wandering around the African savannah tens of thousands of years ago , you were beholden to your tribe and if you were ostracized by your tribe that would mean imminent death . So we have a difficult time saying no . It's kind of like if you go out to brunch on the weekend and you're not quite fond of your smashed avo and the waiter comes over and says how was everything ? You tend to say yeah , it was good , because it's much easier to do that than to tell the truth .
Steve GlaveskiSo learning to say no to things , to meeting requests , reminds me of an example from Dominic Price , who's a chief evangelist at Atlassian . He got into the habit of just saying no to meeting requests and he found that two-thirds of his meeting requests were sticks . So he would throw that stick back and it wouldn't come back , and only one third were what he called boomerangs . He'd send off the meeting rejection and it would come back saying no , we really need you at this meeting and just by doing that he freed up 15 hours a week . So learning to say no to things basically means that you're freeing up time to focus on your goals , not other people's goals .
Steve GlaveskiAnd another thing would be speaking of evolutionary biases . We're predisposed to conserving energy because , again , that would help us to survive back when we were hunter-gatherers . But that predisposition , which helped us survive then , can actually sabotage us now , because it manifests in us sitting down to our work and taking the path of least effort checking Twitter , checking LinkedIn , checking email instead of focusing on the high value task , which may require a little bit more cognitive energy . So the one way around that is to just take the smallest possible step on that high value task . Like if it's a 1500 word article that you need to write , just commit to writing 100 words .
Steve GlaveskiThey don't need to be perfect , just write . And once you get that wheel rolling , momentum builds . And so I mean that's a law of physics where once a wheel is rolling , it requires a lot less of a push to keep it rolling , a lot less energy to keep it rolling . So just take that first step , first thing , whenever you sit down to your desk , and you'll find that by doing that day after day . That becomes your default mode and you get a lot better at getting into that sort of flow state , doing the high value tasks rather than filling your day with like shallow level work that makes you feel like you're being busy but ultimately leaves you with very little to show for it come the end of the day .
Fatimah AbbouchiAmazing , and I think you hit the nail on the head . You just got to find whatever your flow time is , with morning , afternoon , etc . I'm starting to realize that mine is really good in the morning and then I can do all my meetings in the afternoon , which works for me . So , finding that balance , um , amazing . This has been so , so , um , educational for me . I've followed your work and , um , when I've met with you , I always , as I said , to start , um , pick your brain for questions and things like that . So I think I've learned a lot . I think people listening have learned a lot . Obviously , your your book coming out in October 2020 . We'll put links into into the show notes for that so people can access it and get on board with that . Is there anything else you'd like to share with our listeners , a call to action , a piece of advice or a question to ponder before we go ?
Steve Glaveskisure . So people are keen on learning more about the book . They can head over to timereachbookcom . They can download the first chapter for free and they can also download a PDF I've put together of Time Reach Tools , which is just a whole like . It's about a 30-page PDF which talks about how can you automate sales , how can you automate your marketing , how can you automate customer service All sorts of stuff which not only helps you get time back but hopefully for a lot of people , also helps them get a lot closer to their goals at the same time .
Fatimah AbbouchiAmazing . Thank you so much , steve . I really appreciate your time and I'm looking forward to hopefully future conversations , because we could have probably talked for a few more hours , as I mentioned at the start .
Steve GlaveskiThank you so much , Fatima . I really enjoyed the conversation .
Fatimah AbbouchiNo worries , thank you . Thank you for listening to this podcast . We welcome any feedback . Please let us know by going to wwwagilemanagementofficecom . Forward slash agile ideas . You can also find us on most social media channels by searching agile ideas or follow me on linkedin . Thank you for listening . Please share or rate this if you enjoyed it . I hope you've been able to learn , feel , think or be inspired today . Until next time , what's your Agile idea ?