Do What Others Aren't: Career Reinvention with Paul Austin-Menear

[0:00] small-town Ontario and the opportunity gap

Dan Korus: so you're in Toronto now.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: Okay. Where'd you grow up?

Paul Austin-Menear: I grew up in a small town that I always think nobody has ever heard of it. but every time I meet someone new, like who's from kind of Canada, this part of Canada, and I say, yeah, no, I grew up in this small town called Bancroft. It's up the Algonquin Park, you know, it's three thousand people, it's the middle of nowhere. And they're always like, yeah, I know where that is. Like, that's where I stop to buy beer before I go to the campsite. Like, that's cool, man. And I'm like, You fucking

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: heard of Bancroft? Wow.

Dan Korus: What's it like? So it's out in the people are camping near there.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, it's so Ontario is Ontario is a it's a fairly sizable province. it sh where Toronto is is Toronto is southwestern Ontario, kind of. Well, south

Dan Korus: Uh-huh.

Paul Austin-Menear: southern Toronto really, or southern Ontario really. Like it's kind of right by the border between Canada and the US. You know, we can we can get over to Buffalo in forty-five minutes worth of driving, sort of thing.

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: where I grew up Bancroft is about a four-hour drive northeast of here. So it's like a couple hundred miles. and it's close to Algonquin Park, one of the largest provincial parks, like public parks in the country. and the provincial park is still probably another maybe forty, forty-five minute drive, hour drive if you've got traffic. a little

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: bit like northeast of that. and Bancroft is still central Ontario. Like if you go northern Ontario, if you go up to Sudbury, Timmins, Thunder Bay, those are kind of like the larger cities that that are up in northern Ontario, you're talking like twelve hundred, thirteen hundred kilometers, you know, like six, seven, eight-hour drive sort of thing. so I'm still like where I grew up, still central Ontario, super rural.

Dan Korus: Yeah, bet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, 'cause like a lot of Canada's population is in the bigger cities closer towards the border, right? And then it just is just yeah, it

Paul Austin-Menear: Ninety percent. Yep.

Dan Korus: gets as the further out you go, there's less people, but there's a ton of land up there. Well so what's it

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: what you're in Toronto now. Do you like being in a city? Do you ever wanna go back to not city living? Like why are you in a city now?

Paul Austin-Menear: I do. I don't. Yeah, I so I I I move to when you when you're in a town of three thousand people, there's there's not a ton of opportunity, career opportunity, right? Like if you're if you're gonna make a living in a town of three thousand people, kind of in the area where I was, you know, you're working you're working a retail job, or you're working for a government agency, you know, the town the province, maybe the federal government if there's something kind of around there. or you're a teacher, or you're a police officer, you know, doctor, nurse, local services, that kind of stuff.

Dan Korus: Yeah, local services, small town services. Yeah, I get it.

Paul Austin-Menear: or you're working in resource extraction. So you might be working in logging. you might be working in there was there was a mine fairly close to where I grew up in, uranium mine, that closed in the sixties, not because of anything, you know, crazy. contamination or whatnot. It was just that the mine was tapped out and the cost to extract uranium from the mine was more than what you can sell it for. So it's like, let's close the mine. So I I

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tag us.

Paul Austin-Menear: moved I moved out of the I moved out of that area for opportunity, like a lot of people do,

Dan Korus: When?

Paul Austin-Menear: you know? jeeze, I left Bancroft in two thousand and one when I went to university and never moved back. You know, I moved to a small town that town city called Peterborough that was eighty thousand people. That's where I went to university and hung out, worked there for a little while, started a business there. then I moved to Ottawa, larger city, you know, a million people, give or take. Then I moved to Toronto.

Dan Korus: So you moved out when you moved out to go to college, was that is that like a normal thing for w for kids in Bancroft to do at the time in the early two thousands? I mean, it sounds like a lot

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: of the industry jobs were kind of like there wasn't a lot. So you were either you're either picking up service and retail jobs there or you were moving away for different opportunities. So this wasn't like a Paul's Paul's skipping town. You know?

Paul Austin-Menear: Well, it depends on who you talk to, right? Like I'm sure I'm sure my mum

Dan Korus: Okay. Yeah, of course. Of course, of course, of course.

Paul Austin-Menear: would have loved it if I'd if I'd moved back, but you know, the opportunity just wasn't there. But no, it's very

Dan Korus: Yeah. I get it.

Paul Austin-Menear: really normal, really normal. Like there was a

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: there's a small branch office of a so in in Canada, what you guys

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: call college, we call university. That's the same kind of level of education. what

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: you guys call community college, we call college. So there's a a small branch in Bancroft of a college, community college, where you

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: you could go if you wanted to, but it was mostly things like continuum education. mostly things like, you know, basic bookkeeping, basic accounting, basic kind of very skill oriented stuff that would

Dan Korus: I get it.

Paul Austin-Menear: kind of feed the local economy. So super normal if you if you kinda want more out of your life, if you want to go and study and get a degree, you're leaving.

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: And the closest place to to go to to do that is Peterborough, the city that I moved to, you know, eighty thousand people, hundred and twenty kilometers away, about about an hour and a half drive.

Dan Korus: What was making that decision like to go there? Was it just the obvious choice

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: and the e like the lowest friction move, or do you remember like thinking about what do I want to do and deciding that?

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, there were there there were kind of a kind of a compounding of factors that make it made it like the right choice. it was still still close enough to home that I could go visit my family, and friends and whatnot if I

Dan Korus: Right. Like an hour, two hours?

Paul Austin-Menear: hour, hour and a half drive sort of thing. no public transit. So like to get there you're driving. Like there's no buses, no trains, no like flights.

Dan Korus: Okay, yeah. Right. Yeah. What what kind of car were you driving?

Paul Austin-Menear: at the time I was driving a two thousand and one Cavalier, Chevy Cavalier. No, that's

Dan Korus: What colour?

Paul Austin-Menear: not true actually. I was driving a I was driving the car that I'd fixed up the summer before. It was it was an eighty seven Mazda RX seven. like purple. So that was my go betweener to visit family.

Dan Korus: I'm gonna I'm gonna edit this so that way this car comes up so that way we can all imagine you in your eighty seven Maza R X seven. So you were into cars. You but you fixed up a car.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, when I was when I was when I was in high school, me and a really good friend of mine, we would we'd buy up a project car every summer. Like we'd pool

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: our money, we'd buy up a project car, we'd fix it up, put a sound system in it, and then like sell it at the end of the year. But this car, like I Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We always made our money back. You know, we might

Dan Korus: Yeah. And it flip it flip okay? Yeah. Right.

Paul Austin-Menear: we might make like beer money sort of thing,

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: when we sold it, right? Like

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: It was never really about the money and you know, at the time I wasn't really thinking about like money and business and all that stuff. So it was like, Hey, we're gonna we're gonna buy a car and work on it YouTube. Yeah, man.

Dan Korus: Who taught you who taught you how to do that? Where'd you learn? YouTube? Okay, so late late nineties you're on YouTube looking like how do I how do I fix up you know, how do I do this? Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, it was like so there were there were a coup back then there were a couple of websites too. And it was probably actually before YouTube. Like YouTube I probably started really using when I was in university. So like kind of mid two thousands sort of thing. I'd look up videos on how to do things with cars, when I needed

[7:22] fixing up a lemon and knowing when to let it go

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: to like fix my own car. But

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: back then there were there were these print manuals called like Haynes repair guides or something like that. So we

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: would we'd also go out and buy those 'cause they had like they're huge. They're like That kind of thick, right? So we had like we got everything. It's like, you need to change

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah, they got all of it in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: your windshield wiper. you need to change the seat. This is how you do it. So we'd buy

Dan Korus: Right.

Paul Austin-Menear: that for that model of car and kind of use that. and then like kind of poke around on the internet too, because there were like tons

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: of forums and blogs and stuff at the time for like gear heads back in the good

Dan Korus: Back in the good old day of forums. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: old days. Yeah, like old school forums. Yeah.

Dan Korus: Yeah. And so,

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: you know, I've had some some cars that I think were just like unlucky. You know, those cars were like you just pour money into it and it just you keep pouring money into it and you keep pouring money into it and like there's just ghosts in the machine or something, and not friendly ones, like not fun ones. and so I've just had better

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: luck with Toyota recently. even though, you know, my old Subaru two thousand five saved my life and I should have bought it. I should have bought it, auctioned it back from the scrapyard and fixed it up again and rebuilt it. that's my mistake. and to Ulysses, that was the car's name, to Ulysses out there, if you're recycled, thank you. You know. So I don't know. Have you ever had cars like that? Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: Forever grate forever grateful. lemons, man, like we we so we call that car up here le a lemon. You know, the car

Dan Korus: Right.

Paul Austin-Menear: that just like you pour money into and you you can't make it

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: work and stuff just happens. Like we call those lemons. Yeah, we've I've

Dan Korus: Right.

Paul Austin-Menear: I've had those before. I've had those before. I had a I had a Volkswagen, an eighty

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: seven Volkswagen that was it was like that. It's a model called the Fox. Stuff would just go wrong. And I was like, okay, I can't even sell this. I'm just gonna send it to the scrapyard. A year later, I

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: had a different 1987 Volkswagen Fox, same model,

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: same place of manufacture, absolutely everything the same except for it was a different model and had different headlights. And I think it was a different size engine. It was awesome, you know, for it was great.

Dan Korus: Just went forever. Yeah. Do you think at at some point like and and I tend to get attached to my vehicles, you know? Like I'll name them, they get names, and I think that they

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: have souls. I don't know. Do you think have vehicles have souls? Do you think they have like like can machines have souls?

Paul Austin-Menear: I think that man, that's that's a that's a big question. That's a big question. You know, we we gotta start with the qu we gotta kind of start with like what is a soul, right? And how

Dan Korus: Sure.

Paul Austin-Menear: do you how do you even answer that question? Like, what is a soul? I definitely think that there's something special about cars. I

Dan Korus: Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: think there's something special about most machines. I think that machines which are assembled in a certain way. with a certain amount of care from people and processes that care about quality products. I think

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: that those are special and all the things that kind of combine. Yeah, we can maybe call it a soul. We can maybe call it a soul.

Dan Korus: Okay. Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: we definitely name our cars too though. Like we have right now a we go to Volkswagen Jetta, 2014 Volkswagen Jetta that we've had for seven years. Over seven years now. and it's its name is Greta. Because it's a gray Jetta.

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: It's Greta.

Dan Korus: That's awesome. It's also a good name. do you think that if someone names their car, it'll last longer? Like they'll take better care of it?

Paul Austin-Menear: I do actually. I do. I think that people who I think that people who build attachments and connections to to the machines that they own, whether it's a car, whether it's something, you know, else, I think that they do tend to take better care of it because they amputomorphize it a little bit, right? Like we tend to think we tend to take getter better care of things that we feel positively about, you know, whether it's love or fondness or affection or something else. we take better care of them. So, like you name your car, yeah, I think you're gonna take better care of it than you would otherwise.

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah. It's like dogs. you know, like twenty years ago it was more common to have like an outdoor only dog, you know, and now dogs like

Paul Austin-Menear: For sure.

Dan Korus: sleeping in the bed and my dogs sleep in my bed with me, and so they're like more of a member of the family, so people are more likely to take better care of and buy you know, more

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: things and higher quality standards of care and so it's better for the animals. better for the

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: veterinary industry. You know, so from a systems perspective, w how do you decide when you get rid of a lemon? You know, 'cause like I think a lot of people would probably have a lemon in their life and you probably have an interesting perspective on this. But it's like the sunk cost fallacy, you know, like when are you calling the sunk cost and when do you know? and

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: I'm I've got an answer to this too. I'm we're off on a huge tangent right now, but I've I'll bring it back, don't worry.

Paul Austin-Menear: Hey, I feel like we are both rabbit hole people and there's a lot of really fun stuff that you find down the rabbit hole,

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: whether it's like the top, middle, or bottom, rabbit holes are great. unless you get a deadline of like 347 PM and it's like 316 or something like that.

Dan Korus: Yeah, yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: no, so yeah, the how do you how do you how do you know when it's time to get rid of a lemon? For me, it's always been a combination of annoyance and money. So if this if this car causes me grief, you know, within like three or four times in a month or something, I'm gonna put in

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: place like the lemon clause and be like, all right, how much money do I need to put into this thing to make it work? and it's unscientific. That's just how I go about it. But at the end of

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: the day, like if you wanna be real serious about this, like there's a whole bunch of different things that you have to look at when it terms when it comes to like owning a car. you've got to look at your cost of ownership. Right. Like

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: what are your financing costs if you're financing it? Like if you're leasing. The nice thing about leasing is if you're leasing this thing and the stuff that's going wrong with it is like covered under warranty. It goes back to the dealership and you're like, Hey guys, I'm renting this Mofo and I cannot drive it, you deal with it. if

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: you're financing it, not so much. If you bought it outright, not so much. So you gotta look at the money side

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: of it.

Dan Korus: Yeah. It's true. Yeah, it's definitely it's an emotional decision on some levels. But then there's also just like, okay, I've put in, you know, the amount of money that this car was worth originally, you know, into trying to get it to run and still having issues. Like I think my dad's rule of thumb that I've always gone by is if you're paying more like throughout, you know, like a three or four month rolling average, like if you're paying more than what a new car payment would cost. You know? and

[14:43] why a history degree still teaches real skills

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's smart.

Dan Korus: that includes towing fees for if you're broke down on the side of the road. You know.

Paul Austin-Menear: I I I assume that you guys

Dan Korus: It's time to get a new car. toon from college, you're in the eighty seven Mazda

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: RX seven in the color purple.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yep.

Dan Korus: and what are you studying? What did you pick?

Paul Austin-Menear: I was one of those people who went to university without a plan. didn't

Dan Korus: Nice. How'd it go?

Paul Austin-Menear: know what I didn't know what I wanted to do. So I my first year I was a major in Greek and Roman Civ. So I was studying Greek civilization, Roman civilization. I was studying kind of a combination of anthropology, history, and literature was that program. An arts program, liberal arts program, right?

Dan Korus: Okay, okay, okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: realized kind of at the end of that, after my partying was done with and I was like, I need to actually get something out of this degree. And I don't think that this particular program is going to lead to a place that has employment at the end of it. So I should probably switch. Yeah, just one year. One year. One year. One year. It was my first year.

Dan Korus: And how many years did it take to get to that to get the that decision? A couple, one or two? okay. okay. So you realize you realize relatively early on. Well, that's the point

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: of, you know, university, right? Is to

Paul Austin-Menear: yeah, for sure.

Dan Korus: low stakes environment to learn. Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yep. And a lot of a lot of universities up here now have common year in their first year for precisely that reason. Unless it's

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: a highly specialized STEM program, your first year is common year and you do like a bunch of different things that's mandated so you can kind of figure your stuff out. Then you declare kind of at the end of your first year and you apply to to a specific like actual focus program your second year. so I moved into history because obviously that's going to lead to employment. at the end of the degree, right? But that's what I

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: chose. one thing kind of looking back on it now that I'm quite glad that I finished out my history degree was the underlying soft skills that you learn in a program like that are extremely useful. Researching, writing, communicating, critical thinking, situational awareness. There's some statistical analysis that you do when you're studying history. And you also learn how to interview people. how to kind of structure conversations and you take those those skills and you transpose them into a business environment or an organizational environment and they're incredibly useful, especially now when people are saying, AI is going to completely destroy the labor market and all of these jobs are going to go away. But there's like a silver lining, the jobs that aren't going to go away are the ones that involve creative thinking and critical thinking and situational awareness. Because you'll need to be able to direct the AI tools in the right way to get things done. So I look at that and I'm like, okay, so I've got all those skills. Now, does it would it help me find a job today? No, no, it wouldn't, having a history degree and being able to talk about these skills because employers haven't caught up. Employers don't know how to evaluate and assess for these skills in a way that's objective and bring new labor into their talent pool. And say, okay, you have high scores on critical thinking. So you're gonna be great at this job. You start here, do this role. And that's a big reason why Jen and I do roast the post. You know, we we think that the hiring pipeline, the talent pipeline, how companies hire is completely broken and deeply fucked up.

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: You know, you were on the show with us last week, you know, you've been in the live studio audience a couple of times before. Yeah, it's it's cool. It's cool. But

Dan Korus: Yeah. That was a really great experience by the way. Yeah, I love Rust the Post. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: you know, this is this is why we do the show. Because we want to put our energy into nudging this whole process in the right direction in a way where companies can start to do this in a way that makes sense for like the modern talent pool in the context of AI and all of this other stuff. Because companies are just like, most of them are just kind of bringing in a tool and saying, okay, that's it. That's all we need. We've got an ATS, you know, we've got a talent intelligence platform. Let's install

Dan Korus: Yeah, I get it. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: it and like follow the prompts and we're good. Doesn't work that way.

Dan Korus: Yeah, I get it. You know, and I think the the theme of this conversation is is baller, you know, and I think a lot of the lot of the things that you're bringing up are really good. This is really good self-marketing. I just want you to know. and I'm gonna ruin it. so I've got in my notes when I was doing my research on Paul. you studied contemporary Slavic history, the rise and fall of the USSR. So dude, why that? Why that? Is that like is that did

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. Yeah. I

Dan Korus: you get to pick like It's like, hey, you're either gonna study the rise and fall of the USSR in the post cold war era, or you're gonna you know, you're studying Rome. I don't know. Like were there too like why'd you pick that? Why?

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, why that? Why that? So one part of it was structural and a part of it was interest-based. The structural part was when you do a liberal arts degree in in Ontario, anyway, the province where I live, you you pick a like a program focus. history was

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: my program focus for that liberal arts degree. And then most universities within your program focus, you pick a concentration.

Dan Korus: Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: And there are different concentration types that are kind of set out. And you if you do an honors degree, which for us is a a four-year degree versus a three years degree, we we call a three-year degree like an associate's degree. but you do them both in university. Anyway, so I did an honors. And in a lot of universities, when you get to your honors year, you essentially have to write a proposal for your concentration focus. And you can do a thesis if you want. people who do a thesis at their fourth year baccalaureate level, typically they're going into a master's program. I did the four year thesis thing. I didn't go into a master's program. So I went through that process of like, this is my concentration, this is going to be my thesis, this is my proposal, and then you have an

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: advisor and you talk to them and all that. I was deeply interested at the time, because this was two thousand and this was two thousand and six. So the the fall of the Berlin Wall was only fifteen years behind, right? It was a time

Dan Korus: Yeah. Right.

Paul Austin-Menear: when there was a lot of very interesting stuff coming out. like you'd have things that were recently declassified, you'd have things that were kind of coming to light through academic analysis and through interviewing and through like discourse in academia and whatnot. So I just like

Dan Korus: Like what?

Paul Austin-Menear: I really, I really liked it. One of the things that I think influenced me the most to answer your question in a little bit of a roundabout way, is there is a book written by Mikhail Gorbachev. perestroika. Perestroika is the title of it. Yeah,

Dan Korus: Okay, cool. Awesome.

Paul Austin-Menear: so I so I read perestroika in probably 2004, 2005, and the the content of it was just like it was fascinating. so that's what I did my concentration year and my thesis in. it was basically like

Dan Korus: What was fascinating about it for you?

Paul Austin-Menear: What was fascinating for me was, and it's it's a little bit tough to to rationalize and reconcile it now because of like the knowledge that I've accumulated between then and now kind of colors things differently. But at the time, what really fascinated me, fascinated me, was the concept of communism. because I'd been growing up with with this idea of communism as like, you know, bad, evil commies, communism fails, it always

[22:05] how to stay open to ideas you disagree with

Dan Korus: Right.

Paul Austin-Menear: fails.

Dan Korus: Right.

Paul Austin-Menear: without like motivation to go and do better things like yeah no absolutely everything's gonna fall apart like communism's equal blah blah blah let's go get the commies and like throw them out into the sea sort of thing. I grew up with all that, especially being in a small

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm. Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: town. but I didn't really see a bigger picture about what communism was supposed to be until I got to be kind of university age, right? So I started reading about all these things like okay, communism was supposed to be collective benefit, it was supposed to work like this. that's not what happened because power corrupts. So you have communism where you know the elites, the upper echelons, seize control of the means of production and they seize control of power and the benefits, the wealth of that is not actually distributed down the way that it's supposed to be. So I got really

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: fascinated between the difference I got really fascinated about the difference. between what was supposed to be and what actually was.

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm. Got it. Okay. No, this is really good. This is this is what I want to know about you, Paul. This is good. Okay, we're getting there. No

Paul Austin-Menear: I'm gonna end up on like a watch list somewhere being like, he's he's talking about communism.

Dan Korus: Well, if that puts us on a watch list then I'm supposed to be on it too. I mean like I we can't be a society that is scared to at least discuss things intellectually so that way we know about them. You know?

Paul Austin-Menear: I agree. I agree.

Dan Korus: that that sort of ignorance is not helpful for any of us. and that's why we have

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: a divided nation and and world right now. so yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. And one of the one of the most important things too on that on that tack

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: is that you we also need to be able to to ingest and evaluate things that we don't agree with

Dan Korus: Yes.

Paul Austin-Menear: in a way that is fair balanced and objective. Because if we if we hear an idea or we hear someone say something and our knee-jerk reaction is, that's crap, that's crazy. that person's a villain, forget about it, throw it out, that's bad.

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: That's bad.

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: Like you, you don't have to agree with an idea to accept that it's an idea and that someone else might like it.

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. If you were gonna teach someone How to be better about that, how would you do it?

Paul Austin-Menear: really hard. It's really hard. I've thought about that a lot.

Dan Korus: Why?

Paul Austin-Menear: because people are people are emotional. If you think about the way that the brain is structured, you know, there are the different there are the different sections of the brain. There are different sections of the brain, right? You know, like there's the limbic system. There's that like prehistoric thing where it's like, you

Dan Korus: No. No, just kidding. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: know, you you've got to make that fight or flight decision like right away whether you're going to like there's that part of your brain. And and because of the emotional flavor or like layer that's brought to a lot of discourse, especially in politics,

Dan Korus: Uh-huh.

Paul Austin-Menear: because of that emotional layer that it's all wrapped in, it engages with that fight or flight kind of mechanism that we have in our brain. So if you're going to get around that problem, that division and whatnot. You you have to train people, you have to teach them and show them how to ignore their fight or flight, how to ignore those impulses and just like put them in a side, put them in a little box, stick them away for a minute, and then critically think about the actual content of something that's come in front of you. And critical

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: thinking is like critical thinking, it's one of those things that is very, very simple. It's a very simple content, very simple concept, but it takes a ton of repetition. It takes a lot of repetition and a lot of practice to get good at critical thinking. So you have to be able to say to someone, this is what critical thinking is, this is how to practice it. Do it 20 times a day for a year, and it'll start to change how you approach the world. But who's gonna do that? That's where the real challenge kind of lives and exists. This is stuff that should be in schools. It's not. Should be though. You have to want to too. You're right. Yeah.

Dan Korus: They have to want to. They have to want to. You have to want to. You have to want it and it has to be important enough to you that you get better at it. One of the ways that I've gotten better at it is by having people around me who are good at it and watching them think. and that's slower that's faster. I think it's a cheat code. I think it's faster than learning yourself, because then you get to have your first thought and then you see theirs and then you learn like, I was wrong there.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yep. And that's another thing you have to be able to do. You have to be

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: able to do, you have to be comfortable with the idea that you're going to be wrong about something. Whether it's

Dan Korus: Yeah. Right.

Paul Austin-Menear: like a factual piece of information, everybody is wrong about facts every day. I am wrong

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: about facts. I still struggle with this a little bit when it comes

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: to light that I said something that is demonstrably incorrect. You know, a lot of people, your your first instinct is like to try and grab that and cover it up and rationalize it. Or just like run away from it, right? But you have to be able to say, I was wrong about that.

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: That's okay. It's not going to break anything about me or this relationship. I just need to accept it, acknowledge it, correct it, if you need to correct it, and move on. That's really hard to do. There are not a lot of people who are emotionally willing to do that, right? So like you have to be able to do that.

Dan Korus: Yeah, it's tough, dude. It's very tough. Okay, so I'm I'm big on the story here. Remember when you were telling me about you went to college and you studied this stuff and and then you said you started a business. Okay, when was that?

Paul Austin-Menear: Yep. Yep. Yeah. So the the first business that I started was two thousand and six. And it was a little bit before graduation actually. I yeah, so I

Dan Korus: Okay, so a little bit after graduation. A little bit before that's right, that's right, that's right, that's right.

Paul Austin-Menear: took I took a what we call a victory lab up here, a fifth year in my four year degree. And that happened because my first year I was in a completely different program than I ended up in. And

Dan Korus: Yep. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: I also spent a whole lot more time socializing, in various ways and a whole lot more time until three in the morning than I

Dan Korus: Paul the party animal.

Paul Austin-Menear: should have if I was serious about my studies. so my grades weren't super great.

Dan Korus: come on, we've all been there.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. So no, I I took a victory lab. So two thousand six, while I was still in school, I started this business. consulting business. You know, I helped people with

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: communications, I helped people with some PR stuff. There was some image related stuff and I would work with people who ran companies, people who were running for like local office. I had one client back then who was running for we call them members of parliament. your version of Congress Congressman, same sort of thing. There

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: you go. British Parliament.

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: It's Westminster. So I I had one client who was who was running for running for a seat as an MP. And we did some coaching on communications and on perception. so that, you know, I just kind of did while I was working or while I was studying and it was part time and whatever, it was fun. made some extra cash and I sold that to somebody else in two thousand seven who was doing

Dan Korus: Hang on, Paul.

Paul Austin-Menear: sort of the same thing.

Dan Korus: Hang on, bud. There's something there. okay. So you're a college student.

[29:26] a 23-year-old consulting politicians on nonverbals

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: And you're telling grown ass adults how to communicate. What kind of communication things are you teaching these guys and gals?

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, so this was a this was a guy and

Dan Korus: Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: this guy trusted me because somebody else that he knew and trusted introduced the two of us. That's kind of where the relationship started.

Dan Korus: Right.

Paul Austin-Menear: but the the kind of things that I would that I would work on with with these folks were presentation, you know, what do what do the things that you're communicating nonverbally say to other people and how do you build habits? craft them in a certain way, which sounds super skeezy. And there are tons of people who do this, right? In in

Dan Korus: Okay. No. It makes perfect sense. Keep going. I'm I'm on board. You have my vote.

Paul Austin-Menear: in politics though, it sounds super

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: skeezy. And I actually don't like this in politics. I think that politicians should show up as their authentic selves. everything else be damned, but that's not how it works. so I was working

Dan Korus: Right. I get it.

Paul Austin-Menear: with these I was working with these folks on on nonverbal communication. And what it really boiled down to was What do you want to project? What do you want to communicate? Who do you want to communicate to? Okay, let's do some research now that that's identified and figure out what aligns with the views and how these different like kind of groups perceive you. So there were like focus groups that we get involved in that we commission. There was surveying, there was like there was something I did back then that I called I called simile profiling. So it was basically like, you know, look at these five people, which do you most identify with? And then we would map out the things about that particular person and then come up with a plan to guide the person I was working with in that direction, sort of thing. So it was it was stuff like that.

Dan Korus: How old were you when you were doing this?

Paul Austin-Menear: No, twenty three twenty three, twenty three.

Dan Korus: Okay, Paul. Who taught who taught you how to do that? Who taught you how to teach nonverbal communication skills at the age of like twenty three?

Paul Austin-Menear: know it was something I was interested in. I read a lot. one of the things about me that is kinda kinda weird but kind of makes sense why I am the way that I am, I am a vociferous like ingester of knowledge. Like I'm reading, whether it's online, whether it's books, blogs, papers,

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: I'm reading almost constantly. When I'm not doing something, I'm reading. Or now that I'm doing something all the time. I'm listening to podcasts about different things while I'm like transiting from A to B and like the car or the bus or the train or plane or whatever. Listening to podcasts and it's never it's never educ it's never entertainment type stuff that I'm engaging with. It's always educational type stuff. So I'd been reading about nonverbal communication and perception and and things for probably five or six years at that point. so

Dan Korus: Why?

Paul Austin-Menear: I just took the ideas that interested me. It interested

Dan Korus: Why?

Paul Austin-Menear: me. I never actually thought about

Dan Korus: Why Paul?

Paul Austin-Menear: it. I never actually thought about it. You know, honestly, I never I never thought about at the time, even until you ask this question now, why did that interest

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: you? I have no idea. You know, you could you could make an argument that you could make an argument that like a couple of years earlier I was working in retail and I was in menswear like selling high end suits and stuff. well I shouldn't say high end, they weren't really high end, but selling suits where you make commission. So I wanted

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: to make more money. Maybe that was a part of it. I don't know. Maybe it was a part of maybe a part of it was kind of controlling controlling my own perception landscape, how people perceived me. Maybe I subconsciously wanted to understand and and be perceived in a different way, but I never actually consciously thought about it. I just found it interesting. So I read about it.

Dan Korus: Okay. and don't take this question the wrong way, but I've got a hunch here and I'm gonna see if it pays off.

Paul Austin-Menear: Ha ha ha.

Dan Korus: You were pretty popular in college, right? Do you have some friends?

Paul Austin-Menear: So let's let's dig into what popular means. What does popular what does popular mean?

Dan Korus: Who who are you staying out till three in the morning with, Paul? Were you alone at a bar?

Paul Austin-Menear: lots of people. Always people. Always people. So I

Dan Korus: Always people, lots of different people.

Paul Austin-Menear: yeah, lots of different people, lots of different people. So I I'm very selective about who I form close and ongoing friendships and relationships with. I always have been. so

Dan Korus: Yep. Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: I I have a very small group of people that I love and trust and genuinely like want to seek out

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: and spend a lot of time with. but I have

Dan Korus: Hundred percent. Your comfort group.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. But I have tons and tons of people that that I like hanging out with. You know, I will be around in the social setting. I will talk to them. Like I there there are very few people that I have met that I couldn't have a beer with and just shoot the shit with for fifteen, twenty minutes, half an hour, whatever. so in in university it was it was kind of that. It was like I would go to a party with this group of people, I would go to a club with a different group of people, you know, I would go to something with people from another college entirely, and just meet people and hang out. Like I never really cared so much about going out with with someone that I knew. Like I I was perfectly comfortable just like kind of diving into a room. By myself and talking to people. Like that never bothered me all that much. Mainly because I never really gave a fuck about what other people thought of me, even back then. So it was like more of a thing when I was single. I had to care a little bit about what certain people thought about me because I wanted certain things. That's different now.

Dan Korus: When did you meet your wife?

Paul Austin-Menear: one time and then

Dan Korus: Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: didn't talk for probably probably six or seven years at all. got reacquainted with each other and started dating. So in in in two I met her in 2000, just to answer your question now, now that you've like put it to me and I can actually remember the dates, I met my wife in 2009 for the first

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: time.

Dan Korus: Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: and I went out with a friend of mine, went out for coffee with a friend of mine. Actually it was brunch. Yeah, it was brunch. Went out for brunch with

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: a friend of mine who worked with my wife. So she brought my my

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: wife my wife along. And it wasn't really meant to be like a setup or anything like that. It was just they were friends, you know, my wife had nothing to do. So my other friend said, Hey, I'm gonna go out for brunch with my friend Paul. you know, come along. So we met then and I got her number because I thought she was cute and I texted her and she never texted back. I was like, well that sucks. So I went back to I went back to the city I was living in at the time, Peterborough, and went about my life, moved to Ottawa

Dan Korus: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: in twenty fifteen. No,

Dan Korus: Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: moved to Ottawa in twenty eleven. Yeah, I moved to Ottawa in twenty eleven and

Dan Korus: Yeah. Right.

Paul Austin-Menear: moved from Ottawa to Toronto. In 2015. And I was talking to this same friend, I think it was Canada Day or something in 2015. And she was like, I'm just out at like a campfire or something with Claire. And I was like, Claire, she's the worst texture backer ever. Tell her that. And like my friend was kind of drunk in Toronto, and I was kind of drunk in Ottawa.

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: And so she passed that message along and Claire actually texted me. And I was like, You're the worst texter backer ever. And she was like, Well, make up for it now. And we talked until probably three in the morning that day. And she

[36:48] why you need to get comfortable reinventing yourself

Dan Korus: Wow. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: she like learned that I was moving to to Toronto. And she was like, I live in Toronto. I guess before

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: the thing was like, I don't want to date some dude who lives in a different city. It's a couple hours away. Like, screw that.

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: So when we were in the same city, Things happened.

Dan Korus: That's cosmically beautiful. So

Paul Austin-Menear: Kind of.

Dan Korus: I I know you don't have like an awesome answer for why you're so interested in people, but it really does seem like you're like this relationship system person, you know, and I'm like drawing

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: the thread through and I'm I'm not trying to like linearize your life. and I have a bad habit of just kind of like armchair making

Paul Austin-Menear: Ha ha ha.

Dan Korus: like a diagnosis on the pod. and I'm I'm I'm not trying to do that here. I'm just wondering if this fits. But you know, you've been really interested in people and their relationships and exposing yourself to a lot of different opinions and mindsets. And for years thinking about how you get along, you know, with other people. And I think it's it's normal for you to say it might feel normal that you're not intimidated by going into a room full of people alone, but I don't think many people are similarly confident in those sorts of social interactions. I think it's a very

Paul Austin-Menear: Mm-hmm.

Dan Korus: rare skill to have. and I'm trying to figure out because If I was thinking

Paul Austin-Menear: Mm-hmm.

Dan Korus: of a politician, most people or like a business, you know, a business person who's looking for advice, and and no offense, like most people wouldn't go to a 23 year old. You know,

Paul Austin-Menear: Hundred percent they wouldn't.

Dan Korus: but you were doing focus groups, simile profiling.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: you had like good nonverbal communication tools to give them. Like I like, you know, most people take their entire career learning how to speak to different groups of people. I'm This is really interesting, Paul. this is really cool. I like this a lot. so you graduate, you're doing these sorts of like minor consulting things. It looks like at some point you go into marketing and design. What? That's out of left field. That seems out of left field. So let's talk about that.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. Yeah, I know, right? I know, right? Yeah. So The my my career, my path has not been a straight one. Like it has not been it has not been like,

Dan Korus: I love it. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: hey, let's let's keep on driving down this highway and you know, we'll kind of stop at like stoplights, maybe we'll turn ref right a little bit here, but we're always gonna get back

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: to that highway at some point. fuck no, that has not been my life. I have had

Dan Korus: I get it. Right. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: to or sometimes wanted to reinvent myself like three, four times, like in a very major way.

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: And I I would love to be able to say that it was part of like some grand plan or design or whatever else. And but I always had like kind of a vision for what I was doing. No, that ain't true. It's been a necessity. but I've reinvented myself.

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: and a lot of people kind of go through that too. And and I think that I think that I think that people should put time and effort into getting comfortable with that. Because I I believe that traditional career. paths and life paths as we've kind of been told that you know, like you do this, you get that. if you do this, everything will be okay. If you do that, like you'll go down this thing and everything will be great. I think that that is eroding. or it's quite possible that it just never existed in the first place. It was a construct and a fallacy. So I I think that people need to get comfortable with the idea of reinventing themselves

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: in the workplace, in your career, it's really hard. And that's another reason why Jen and I do the show.

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: Cause you get on this one path and you you say, Okay, you know, I'm in marketing. Okay, great. So you're going to go and work marketing jobs. and marketing's

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: a pretty broad field, right? So like there is significant

Dan Korus: Okay. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: latitude for yourself to for you to reinvent yourself in a certain way within that field and like jink left and right and it's all good, it's all like kind of contiguous and it's fine. for me though, like getting into marketing kind of stemmed from doing consulting and it actually also stemmed from the failure of a second business that I started with partners. And this business was an actual business that had like employees and it had like payroll and it had stuff like that. First one's just me.

Dan Korus: Okay. So the first one is just you and maybe you had an L L L C or something and you were just collecting money and doing taxes and stuff. Wow. Okay, th that's impressive. And that twenty three. That's very enterprising

Paul Austin-Menear: Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. twenty-three. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Korus: of you, Paul.

Paul Austin-Menear: It's it's also it's also so kid there's this I'm gonna get something off my chest for a second. there

Dan Korus: Get it off.

Paul Austin-Menear: is this perception of Canada as a place that is not business friendly and that people in Canada are not entrepreneurial and that we don't start businesses and that we like work for the government and that's pretty much all we do, or we go cut down logs and mine like Rocks and shit. that ain't Canada. And plant trees.

Dan Korus: And plant trees. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: That ain't Canada. Canada is a very, very entrepreneurial place. There are tons of people here with that energy. and people like to say that Canada is a very difficult place to start a business. That is also not true. This is amongst the I think the last time I read an OECD report on this was a couple of years ago. but Canada ranks in the top ten. of countries in the world for ease to start a business. It's incredibly easy to start a business here. And it's also cheap. So our version of a you said an LLC. I don't know if there's a if there's a business structure in the US that's just like a person but no legal entity. Yeah okay

Dan Korus: Yeah, so proprietorship. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: so so sole proprietorship here too. So you can

Dan Korus: Nice.

Paul Austin-Menear: you can start a sole proprietorship and register your business with the province or the federal government that structure for like I don't know a hundred bucks or something like that. Super cheap. Right. So that's what I did. anyway,

Dan Korus: Pennies. Nice. Yeah, it's pretty cheap. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: now that that's off my chest. What was the question again?

Dan Korus: I get it. Well, so I so you you had you had your first thing, right? And

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: and and then I was wanting to know why how you got into marketing and you said, well, there's a step in between and it was the second business that I started and there were partners and and employees in it. So tell

Paul Austin-Menear: yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Dan Korus: us about that. Like what what happened where you decided like, okay, I'm gonna go I'm gonna go try something different for a little bit. Because honestly, like the first business, I was like Dang, Paul, okay, this is where you you know, this is where you got your chops. You know, and

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: then and I love the l nonlinear path by the way. Like this is very cool. I'm I'm

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: a big fan of breadth. that's I'm a big fan of it. So yeah, well tell us about that

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: second business and then how it led to marketing.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. So the second business, it was a market research firm, technology-based market research firm. So this is

Dan Korus: Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: this is so there there's also another step in there. I graduated university in two thousand seven and

Dan Korus: Okay. Yeah. Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: you know, I sell this business, this consulting business to someone else who's

Dan Korus: Yours.

Paul Austin-Menear: kind of consulting in the same place. And you know, I didn't sell it for a lot. It was like it wasn't

[44:09] a QR-code startup that was five years too early

Dan Korus: Okay. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: a lot that that I sold it for because I was basically selling a client list in a system, right? So I think that I I think that I sold it for ten thousand bucks or something. Right. Like it didn't have a whole

Dan Korus: Which a two thousand seven for your first business is pretty great. It's pretty awesome. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. Yeah, right? Like it's it's not nothing. It's not nothing. But it's not like a

Dan Korus: That's great.

Paul Austin-Menear: it's not like that story where you hear about the founder who's like young and they build this huge business

Dan Korus: Whatever.

Paul Austin-Menear: and they exit for multiples of like all this stuff and like, you know, big fun story. It definitely wasn't that.

Dan Korus: You gotta give yourself credit, Paul. Like most businesses are gonna fail. Like you successfully exit a business on your own with nothing, you know, like with

Paul Austin-Menear: Fifty percent of all businesses fail. Yeah. Yep.

Dan Korus: no help, no nothing, no Claude Max Pro Plan or whatever. You know, you like you did it. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: It was pre all of that. It was it was pre Google Drive. Back then, like there wasn't even hey Google Sheets. There wasn't like Google Docs. There wasn't all of these productivity tools that

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: that we take for granted now. Like I was building my system stuff with like doing a lot of sketching and there were some there were like there were some software like programs that you could I forget what I was using. But there was like kind of workflow and diagramming stuff that you could have on your PC and like you can use it to kind of build like these models to communicate it. It was clunky as balls 'cause like it's two thousand seven, right?

Dan Korus: So you're making like like like flow sheets of like processed flow sheets almost and you're sketching these out on paper.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Kind of. Kind of. More it was more like it was more like relationship mapping. But yeah, I would create digital versions of

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: that to kind of like enhance the work that I was doing. but yeah,

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: point was that like back then there isn't all of the cloud based productivity stuff that's free and easy and right there that we that we take for granted today. yeah.

Dan Korus: Do you miss raw dogging entrepreneurship?

Paul Austin-Menear: Kind of, kind of, because and here's why. it is it is incredibly easy to start a business and build something around the internet, around media, whatever else. Like the the barrier to entry to build an online business is it's practically nothing. That means that

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: there are a lot more people doing it. That means that the competition for the same limited pool of attention, which is what you really want if you're starting an online business or a media business, is pretty fierce. With those barriers in the way, there are fewer competitors. So I feel like your probability of success if you've got everything else like put together well is actually higher. Whereas now it's easy to do. So your success probability is lower because competition is like insane. It's wild. yeah. So a part part

Dan Korus: Harder to stand out. Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: of me does kind of miss raw dogging a little bit.

Dan Korus: I get it. yeah. Okay, so you you exit. I totally lost my butt. Yeah. Yeah. The first exit. Yes.

Paul Austin-Menear: yeah, yeah. So I so I so I exit that business. Yeah, so I exit that business. You know, I sell that business for ten thousand bucks or whatever, like small amount. and that that's right around the time that things I think the the sale of the business actually closed in July of two thousand eight. what happened in August of two thousand eight in the US? Housing bubble went poop. So I kind of took that as a sign to just like withdraw myself from the world of work for a bit, go back to school. so I

Dan Korus: Nice.

Paul Austin-Menear: went to college, community college, and studied business administration. because like running my own business as like a kind of solar founder or whatever, I was like, you know, I actually kinda like this and I just made ten thousand bucks. So maybe I should learn more about how to actually do this. so I did. And I went into an accelerated program that would get you a three year diploma in a year. It was crazy. And you had to have a university degree to even be considered. Like you had to show, like, you know, I've got all of this stuff so I can be exempted from these courses or whatever that are a normal part of this program. so

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: it was three semesters back to back and it was like it was wild. I didn't do a whole lot else. But for me it was like

Dan Korus: Yeah. That sounds like a lot.

Paul Austin-Menear: it was a good way to sit out like the kind of shit from you know, the mortgage crisis, the heavy bubble collapse. So I did that. But I met some people while I was at college. one of them was well, they were both actually my two partners, they were both actually established and had careers and whatever and they wanted to do a side hustle. So we came up with this concept where we were using QR codes to do like surveying in live retail environments. This is twenty eleven. Now, like that's super, super common today. You walk into pretty much any retail store, like anywhere, you can scan a QR code and fill out a survey, and yeah, you'll get entered for a chance to win like a gift card or something goofy like that. that's completely ubiquitous and common today. We were trying to do that in 2011. So we were too early. And that's ultimately why the business failed. there's actually a patent out there on SIPO with my name on it. We have to enter it because we were like, What's the point of having this patent if we don't have like a big war chest to defend it? And also like the technology ain't there for this to work. So that was the second business.

Dan Korus: Yeah. But you patented the idea. That's cool.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, we so in Canada, you can under CIPO rules, you can I don't know if it's the same in the states or not, but you can patent novel business processes. And we were going for that type of patent. we got to the stage where we'd done like the filing and it was advertised in. Gazette and it was getting to the point in the patent process where you would there's this like there's this period where you have to wait for other patent holders to review and object to your patent filing, like if they have grounds to do so, blah blah blah. So we were getting towards that

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: and we were like, wait a second, if we think about this, if we get a patent for this, we need to be able to defend it, which costs money and we don't have money because we're a startup. Why are we doing this again? So we were like, let's not pay the next like filing fee and just abandon it. But we still wrote the patent

Dan Korus: Got it.

Paul Austin-Menear: and went through the process. It was kind of a fun experience.

Dan Korus: It's awesome. Yeah, man. Okay. So then what happened with those co founders?

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, things things things didn't end well. Things didn't end well. Like the business just it just didn't work. Like we really struggled to we had a couple of pilots with customers and we really struggled to acquire customers because this is a retail environment kind of thing, right? So we're looking for grocery retailers like supermarket retailers, general retailers, hard home building DIY retailers. And we're we're going to them and saying, like, hey, we can collect information. And again, 2011. We can collect information when people walk into your store with a phone, you put up signage, they scan this little code, we collect all the information, and it can be about the experience, it can be about like products, it could be like a net promoter score type of thing. we can do all of that and we can deliver Aggregate and analyzed information to you without human oversight. So we can give you like this data for a fraction of the cost that anyone else who is doing this like in a traditional way with you know paper surveys or email surveys can. And the thing is that somebody has to have a phone and they have to scan this thing. Where it fell apart was that in 2011, the ability to scan a QR code with your phone was not. ubiquitous and it was not a part of the native operating system. So it wasn't just like, you know, you hold your phone up with your camera app open. It sees the QR code and redirects you to the website. That's how it works now. Didn't work that way back then. Back then you had to download a specialized app from whatever app store your phone was on and install it and

[51:31] when a partnership ends and nobody talks again

Dan Korus: Yep. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: know how to use it. That was the critical failure that we never got over. So we just never acquired enough customers to make the business financially viable. And the money that we'd put into it went away, you know, and the employees that we had, we had to lay them off. You know, we did write by

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: them to the best of our ability. But it all just kind of fell apart. And I haven't talked to either one of them in probably the what fifteen years it's been since that all went sideways. And like it was bitter. It was bitter. Yeah,

Dan Korus: Was it bitter bitter exit or just like yeah?

Paul Austin-Menear: it was bitter. And it wasn't it wasn't like we had problems with each other. We had a really good, respectful relationship. But it was it was a noticeable amount of money for everybody involved that we lost, right? So like that's a really bitter pill to swallow. especially for me at like 26 and seeing everything that I'd made from my last business kind of go away. Like it's it's really tough to swallow that. So we just we just never kept in touch, you know, like we were cranky with each other a little bit, but not in the way that was like deep and ephemeral and vicious. It was just like, fuck this shit. And then life just kind of gets in the way. Plus I moved to a different city.

Dan Korus: You ever like go look up on LinkedIn and see what they're doing now?

Paul Austin-Menear: Nah. I don't really care. I mean they're good guys. they're good guys. I never had friendships with them.

Dan Korus: Really? You never want to reach out and just say like, Hey, I'm sorry, like that that went well, you don't have to message me back, but just let you know like doing well now, hope you're doing well.

Paul Austin-Menear: No, this is the first time that I've actually thought about either of them for a long time.

Dan Korus: Wow.

Paul Austin-Menear: also that I've always I've always kind of had this I've always kind of had this thing where the past is in the past. Right? Like the

Dan Korus: Yeah. Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: way that I think about life and and kind of the progression of time and the events around us is that the past is in the past. Like you can't change the past. All that you can do is you can try to correct the mistakes that you've made. in the sense that you don't make those same those same mistakes again. And you try to be a better person. And if the opportunity avails itself, you try to make things right with the people who you've wronged. that's how I've always looked at this. But like the one thing that's common with that is that the past is in the past. You know, if everybody's kind of getting along and it's been a decade or 15 or 20 or 30 years, what's the point of reaching out? Like really all that all that you're doing at that point, if you make that decision to reach out and get back in contact with someone that you might have wronged is you're trying to make

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: yourself feel better. So you're putting a burden on them because of that. And I've always kind of thought, why? Why would you do that? Right? Like that's kind of selfish. If you're just trying to make yourself feel better and there's nothing else that could come out of that, it's a little selfish.

Dan Korus: I mean I do it a lot. I've done it multiple times.

Paul Austin-Menear: And no shade. You know, there's there's nothing wrong with that. There's absolutely nothing wrong

Dan Korus: And I think

Paul Austin-Menear: with that.

Dan Korus: I think and I and I'm not saying you're wrong, 'cause like I totally see your point. You know, if you if there's relationships in the past where there are people that I haven't apologized to 'cause I feel like they owe me an apology. You know,

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: and I'm still holding on to that and that's what I'm bad about. But I think that you know Yeah, I yeah, I wanna feel better. You know, like I think that well a a lot of the times with like money and stuff and things that go wrong, like sometimes it's just worth reaching out and just being like, Hey, I I don't think I handled that great and I appreciate you as a person and you can stay mad at me forever. You don't even have to accept this, but I just want you to know like I'm fucked up there and you know Sorry for that. And I think that for a lot of people that can be a really healing moment and it can feel so good. You know, even just to acknowledge, like, hey, I didn't do well. I'll tell you a personal story if you're cool with it. This podcast is about you,

Paul Austin-Menear: Hm. Yeah, absolutely.

Dan Korus: Paul. This is about you. But I'm gonna make it about me. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: Well, that's that's the thing though. Like what's what's the what's the saying? There's no there's no you without me or there's no there's no team without me. I mean the same thing happens with like conversations that are one on one, right? So like in this context where you're saying, Hey, this podcast episode is about you, Paul, well, it doesn't actually exist without you. So even though you think it is

Dan Korus: True.

Paul Austin-Menear: about me, it is collectively about us by the very nature of what it is. So tell me your

Dan Korus: I know. That's true.

Paul Austin-Menear: story. Tell me your story, man. I'm really curious.

Dan Korus: So I was on the rowing team in college and I lived with a bunch of rowers. And And we'd secured an awesome house in a good location that was like halfway to school, halfway or a little bit closer on the side of town that was towards the lake where we practiced. And

Paul Austin-Menear: Mm.

Dan Korus: great location, quiet neighborhood, near some trails. And five guys wanted the on the rowing team who were going to be seniors after we graduated and left wanted the house from us.

Paul Austin-Menear: Hmm.

Dan Korus: We did what's called a a lease transfer. It was called a lease transfer. And So then we ended up paying for that out of our security deposit and they took the security deposit money back when it went to them. So we never saw our security deposit money.

Paul Austin-Menear: Mm.

Dan Korus: and so it became a big stink, right? Because and like we I think we ended up becoming whole, but we had like threatened to like sue our friends, you know, and like sue some kids because, you know, we were a couple years ahead of them at the time and had jobs and we were like, Yeah, this is like, you know, this was a lot of money for us at the time. you know, like several thousand dollars each. Like that's not that's not nothing, you know what mean?

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: especially to people who are just so like I think that and I was really very bitter about it for several years because it just felt like to me it was obvious what the right thing to do was, and At the same time, like I'm not proud of how I talk to my friends, you know, and how we handled it. And a lot of it was over message. And now I would have known, like, okay, we should have like gone to see them in person or bought them a lunch and talked about it. Or like we should have done

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, yeah.

Dan Korus: a different process that allowed for no, we're not doing a lease transfer. We're gonna have them inspected and get our money back so that way we're all square, we're all whole, you know, and you guys

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: can go in with your own contractual agreement. And so, you

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. So

Dan Korus: know, I think I think through that there's a lot of There's always it's always tough with money and friendship.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: and my parents have a rule that if you give money to someone, you should never ask for it back. You know, and you should just expect that you'll never give it back and then you're never upset and that's just you don't give money to people and expect it back. And I think that's a really

Paul Austin-Menear: Mm-hmm.

Dan Korus: good rule for life 'cause you just should w aim to be a generous person and not have those relationships. And so, you know, for me I did go and end up in going apologizing to them. We were I, you know, founded a alumni association and some of them didn't show the first year. I did like an alumni event and then in subsequent years they did show and so I had a conversation. I just pulled them all aside and I was like, hey, like I know this. And to me, I ended up feeling like that was one of my favorite alumni association years because more than seeing my friends who I love and who are still in my life and who are visiting in couple weeks, it was extremely important for me to Make good with people where, you know, I wasn't proud of anything, any part of that.

[58:52] money, friendship, and lending as a donation

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. You know, it's

Dan Korus: Any part of that situation.

Paul Austin-Menear: it's it's interesting like what you what you described I've also gone through. 'Cause we have we we have similar similar things up here with like the w where I went to University of Peterborough, like student town, student town,

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: all of the friggin' housing is like student housing downtown in one way or another. Like it's it's all investor properties,

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: right? there's student residences. This is a small university, like, you know, it's it's very small. Like the total student population might be eight thousand people, I would guess. Small university, small liberal arts college.

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: so not a lot of student housing. So same kind of market dynamics. You have to go and rent like in the surrounding community. And then that brings up opportunities and money and investment and everything. Cause like, you know, your mom and

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: pop landlord, they decide they want to get in and be a landlord for students. A lot of them get out because they realize that. students party a lot and they're not super responsible and they're gonna break stuff and make stuff dirty and whatever else. in

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: in Ontario, lend friends or roommates money. And, you know, when you're a student, 300 bucks is like it's money. Like that kind of makes a difference for you.

Dan Korus: That's a lot.

Paul Austin-Menear: I always worked part-time when I was in university, even before I started that business. I worked at McDonald's. so I had a little bit of cash kicking around, sort of thing, and I could lend friends money or whatever. And I came into those situations, same sort of thing, where it was like I didn't get paid back and it made me mad because it was like I know what I had to do to make that money. And I was making that money available to like people who I thought were friends and they were kind of turning around and screwing me to dig that. Like my personality at the time was to hold a grudge about that. I'm a lot more chill now. And I definitely at some point in my life came to the same conclusion that you know your your dad did. And it was like, don't lend people money and expect to get it back. The way that I always have considered lending people money as a grown up is like, it's a donation. If you get it back, consider it a bonus. You know, if you're gonna give someone money, do it out of generosity and do it out of like caring and wanting to give to them and help them out when they need it. So, like as an adult, that's always been kind of my perspective on lending money to people that you know. business is different though. Like when we talk about these two sets of dynamics, you have that dynamic where money is going back and forth between friends. There's a bond there, there's a relationship that you care about. when it's business

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: partners You know, there isn't necessarily that bond or relationship there. So the dynamics are different. And I actually say to people like, do not go into business with people that you like, that are like your friends, that are family, that you have like bonds that are really important that you care about. Don't

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: go into business with those people because business will fuck those up. And if you care about maintaining those personal bonds. Business, even if it's the most respectful business possible, it will screw with those bonds. So don't do it. Which means you have to figure out another dynamic or mechanism to build trust between business partners. and that's

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: definitely one of the things that I was not good at in that business that fell apart. I didn't really

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: know how to build trust, which was really funny because I would advise people on how to be perceived in such a way that they could build trust. Right.

Dan Korus: Yeah, I love that. Dude, this is so fun. So what have you learned what have you learned since then? Like, okay,

Paul Austin-Menear: Okay.

Dan Korus: if you were gonna if you're starting again, Paul, and this is now we're getting into the really awesome questions, which I love. How with a business partner, you know, and I think it's good advice to not go into business with friends, just like it's good advice to not live with your best friends. You know, I mean obviously live with your partner who should I hope is your best friend, but you shouldn't live with your

Paul Austin-Menear: Best partnerships are. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, the the way

Dan Korus: I know you shouldn't live with best friends. I wouldn't live with my friends anymore. how do you build trust within a business relationship? Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: So like the the way the way that you talk to your wife, you know, the limited observations that I've kind of had with that, where she's been a part

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: of like the substack lives that you've been in, is pretty flipping obvious that you guys are friends, you know, as well as partners. And same thing with my wife. Like me and Claire, we're best

Dan Korus: Yeah. Totally. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: friends. We are really good friends. You know, that's the only

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: way I think that a that a really good, like fulfilling relationship works, you know, long term. So like building friend building trust with business partners, it's really it's what I've kind of come to now. And and when I said before, like don't go into business with friends and family. what I kind of kind of take away from that statement or what I want to, you know, kind of make clear about that statement is don't go into business with existing friends and family who are not, you know, business people. Who don't understand like the dynamics around it. That's where your relationships tend to like blow apart when the business stuff gets a little bit hairy, because business stuff always gets hairy. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't be friends with your business partners. It just means that you have to go into it with managed expectations. You have to all be on the same page. You have to have an understanding that the business could get hairy because of. Any number of reasons could be, you know, a thousand things that make a business get really hairy, and that's going to cause stress amongst all the partners. You can be friends with your business partners as long as you have an understanding of that and as long as you mutually agree to the principles by which you're going to make decisions together about the business. So if you can go, one of the best trust thing trust-building things that you can do, pardon me, one of the best trust-building things that you can do with business. partners is be very clear, very transparent, and very open up front about what your expectations are and then get the same from them. As long as all the partners understand each other's expectations and are willing to truthfully, honestly like work those, work towards those and keep them present, that's where you start to build trust and business relationships. There's also the concept of don't screw the people you're in business with. That one should be self-explanatory, but happens all the time. If you value a relationship and you want it to maintain strong over the long term, a business relationship, don't screw the people that you need that from, that you want that from. And give as much of yourself as you request or require from them. There's reciprocity too. You know, reciprocity is another great mechanism for building trust over time. If you reciprocate, the actions, the value that others give you, and vice versa, building trusting relationships is not that hard. It actually is very easy if you enter into it thinking about reciprocity as one of your kind of guiding principles.

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah. That's good tips. I also think that From my limited experience, I would say you want to pick people that are willing to work on it as hard as you are. You know, and that when things are messed up are willing to work on that as much as you are.

[66:14] why old advice to self-censor at work is wrong now

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Korus: You know, and as someone who's like a deeply emotional and sensitive guy, it always hurts when you know, you meet people out there in any in any facet of life where you'll you'll find people who aren't as invested in making things right or as good as as you are. And

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: some of the business advice I've gotten from mentors has been like, Well, Daniel, you know, like you shouldn't you shouldn't bring your entire heart to work with you.

Paul Austin-Menear: That doesn't work.

Dan Korus: You know, like you should you should you should portion it off. You know, and the same and and other people have given me advice like, well, if you're gonna climb the ladder, you know, you should be always agreeable and not fight with people and you know, you shouldn't have like a strongly presented opinion and you should always, you know, be available for them and do all these things. And I I think that that just makes a shell of yourself.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, absolutely.

Dan Korus: I don't agree with in any of it really? And

Paul Austin-Menear: I don't either.

Dan Korus: if you're in a situation where you can't bring your heart and yourself and your own oppositions to it, what like what are you doing there?

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. Yeah, it's also you you think about that kind of advice and that that is, you know, the things that you said, those are classic pieces of advice that have been

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: given to, you know, I'm not sure, I don't know how old you are, like I'm mid forties sort of thing. But that advice Okay, all right. So you just moisturize, you have you have fantastic skin.

Dan Korus: Me me too. Just kidding. Yeah. Actually in my fifties. Keep going though. As a Gen Xer,

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, so that that's like that's classic advice that's that's been given out. right. And

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: it it made perfect sense for the so if I'm gonna frame this and say, all right, that is advice that boomers gave my generation, which is true. That is advice that boomers gave my generation. And those those pieces of advice made perfect sense in the cultural context and the organizational context of the time when boomers were like, mid career and kind of like later career, even now the way that they think about it is kind of colored by those experiences that came, you know, a decade, two decades, three decades before today. They still think in those terms a lot of the time. so I I don't belabor the advice. It does make perfect sense, but the context is wrong. The context has changed. So if you want

Dan Korus: Yeah. How so?

Paul Austin-Menear: to be I don't believe that I don't believe that you brought up Be agreeable, don't fight, don't be passionate, like something along those lines. Like basically self-censor is the the piece of advice if you really wanted to still it down. Self-censor, self-censor, self-contain.

Dan Korus: Self censor, self contain. Be the be the good boy they want you to be.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. I don't believe that that is good advice today. You know, if you you take the context of organizations today and you say, all right, you know, I am mid-career. I'm getting to senior manager, director, associate VP level, and I am responsible for leading teams. There's a thing that happens when you get promoted to those positions in an organization that thinks about organizational design and growth seriously. Like startups are completely different. They throw around titles like they're candy. Titles are usually used as mechanisms to recruit and retain. They don't actually mean much of anything in a startup environment. But in an organization that has a little bit of maturity. To it. When you get to that level in your career, you are supervising people a lot of the time. Right. So the thing that you are supposed to be doing, a lot of organizations don't tell you you're supposed to be doing or provide support and training for, is it is your job now as a leader of people not to be the best, most awesome employee, getting the work done, grinding at a high level of quality, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If you're a kick-ass rock star who got promoted into a leadership position to lead people, your job is to help all of them become kick-ass rock stars, essentially. So that's a big flip. That's a really big flip. You go from being the person who does great work and is celebrated for it into helping other people do great work, guiding them in that direction. So that the leverage that you create through that. benefits the entire organization. You know, what does leverage look like? Is it one person doing great work or one person teaching five people how to do the same amount, the same level of great high quality work? Well, leverage is those five people doing the same amount of great high quality work. Okay, people who are younger, who are reporting to you, who you're leading, and it is your job now to guide them in that direction and teach them how to do great high quality work. They're of a different generation than I am, typically, right? If I'm 45, the people reporting to me are mid-20s, maybe early 30s. The generational context is very different. You know, there's a lot of talk about Gen Z, and there's a lot of talk about Gen Z being a certain thing. the way the media paints it is that Gen Z is homogeneous and they all think and dress and feel and talk the same way. That's complete bullshit, like it is for every generation. People are individuals.

Dan Korus: Yeah. Right.

Paul Austin-Menear: People have their own things, right? But there are context differences that you have to pay attention to for generations. So with Gen Z and with people who are younger, even I'm at the elder end of the millennial spectrum, at the younger end of the millennial spectrum, the whole pardon me, the the whole get along to get along thing, we see through it, or they see through it. Even I see through it. I don't like it, you know. If you are self-censoring, if you are containing yourself. That is picked up on by these younger people and they see it as inauthentic. How do you build trust without authenticity in how you communicate to them? So that's a very, very long-winded way of saying, I agree with you and this is why. I think that you should be yourself if you are a leader of people and you are leading younger people. I think you should be real and honest with them. I don't think you should coddle them. I don't think that you should give up authority if you need authority for something and say just do whatever you want. It's still your job to guide them. But I don't think that you can have that shell and be effective, be effective, because you can't build trust in that circumstance, right? That just doesn't work.

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah. Did you like research my business and think of some talking points that would like perfectly pitch it beforehand? Or was that just like off the cuff? Okay, cool. Good. I'm using I'm using those sound bites. No, no. Take ya.

Paul Austin-Menear: No. It was off the cuff. I one of one of the things that I could do it. One of the things that I could be a lot better at if I'm if I'm being, you know, honest and everything.

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: One of the things I could be a lot better at is doing preparation and research ahead of time for practically anything. I

Dan Korus: No.

Paul Austin-Menear: am an off the cuff person. I shoot from the hip. You know, I start talking about stuff and it's like,

Dan Korus: You're good. That's what this podcast is.

Paul Austin-Menear: let's talk.

Dan Korus: And not that like my taste is what matters, but I always r I listen to these I end up listening to these podcasts like four times, you know, before they get released. You know, and then I listen to it after it's released to make sure that the my release copy didn't have any mistakes. And so, you know, Monday morning I'll be getting ready and my podcast releases on Spotify at four thirty AM and I boot it up and I listen to it, you know, as I'm getting ready for work on on my run and I like better now. I feel like I learn more and I will listen to the guests and think like, damn, I should've asked about that. Or I really said right, or you know, my my verbal fillers too many times. Or my question

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: delivery I was like, Wow, this clut question delivery sucks ass you know, and that one always kills me. Yeah. Yeah.

[73:35] a toxic ad agency taught me what not to do

Paul Austin-Menear: Those are those are hard, Like, verbal verbal fillers are hard. Like the well, I just did it, right? Like, you when when you're when

Dan Korus: Yeah. Right.

Paul Austin-Menear: you're when you're talking, those are normal bridge words. You know, they just they come out,

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: you don't think anything about them, they're accepted by the other person because they're completely normal,

Dan Korus: Yep. Right.

Paul Austin-Menear: but then you listen to it, like yourself saying them out loud, and you think, everyone is going to believe that I am a complete fucking moron. Because I

Dan Korus: I know.

Paul Austin-Menear: said the word like three times in the span of two cents is like that's that's just

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: one thing that I find really hard to to get

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: around when I'm doing editing for our podcast. something you touched

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: on there. I don't know how many of I don't know how many of your listeners have their own podcasts, but tip for people who are producing their own podcast, listen to your own podcast like Dan does. You know, I listen to the podcast, like I the the production and the editing on Roast the Post. So I listen to it. You know, well, I'm editing it, I'll listen to it afterwards, I'll watch it. And one thing I found particularly useful is think about your different target audiences and how they'll be listening to your podcast. So if you can make the time, well, I shouldn't say if you can make the time, make the time. Listen to parts

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm. Right.

Paul Austin-Menear: of your podcast in different settings. Like listen to five minutes with earbuds on, see how it sounds. Listen to it when you're on the subway or you're on the streetcar or the tram. you know, for five or ten minutes, see how it sounds. Listen to it on laptop speakers, see how it sounds. Listen to it on like a decent sound system, see how it sounds, a home pod, you know, Alexa, whatever else. You gotta think about your audience and how they'll be consuming your content and make sure that it reasonably will be a decent listening experience on those different mediums. Or else at scale as you grow, you'll start to lose subscribers because they're like, shit, I can't actually hear this thing. The audio's terrible.

Dan Korus: Yeah. It's a good tip. I love the mug by the way. I saw it a couple times and I was like, Am I reading it right? it's got the QR code. I love that. Here, put the QR code back up for everybody and let's

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: get like the let's get focus on it so that way people can get this QR code scanned. okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: So Jen, Jen and I made made these mugs for ourselves. And there's like there's exactly two of them, one for her, one for me. because we

Dan Korus: Nice.

Paul Austin-Menear: were like, we're gonna make swag for the show, we're gonna sell it on Shopify, it'll make billions. And then we got

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: like into the nitty-gritty of actually producing a podcast, and it doesn't quite work

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: that way. So swag and merch and whatever is on the very long-term roadmap now.

Dan Korus: Okay. Okay,

Paul Austin-Menear: Mm-hmm.

Dan Korus: so marketing. You got a lot of career

Paul Austin-Menear: Marketing.

Dan Korus: in marketing and then you go to product, you know, and you go into commerce, ops. Like,

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. Operations, supply chain, e-commerce.

Dan Korus: what's the deal, Paul?

Paul Austin-Menear: What is the deal? Yeah, this is this is another

Dan Korus: What was the deal?

Paul Austin-Menear: this this is another like my career has never been a linear path. And at

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: at some point I realized that it would be better if I you know that that that question that that people ask you in job interviews sometimes, like, what's your five year plan? What do you want to be doing in five years? I remember a a guy who I'm still really close with today, great dude. he was interviewing me and he asked me that question and I thought about it for a sec. And this was just after I'd moved from Ottawa to Toronto. And I was like, I don't know what my plan is, man. I've been living in this city for two friggin' weeks. I'm trying to find an apartment. Like my girlfriend's here. I want

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: to spend time with her. I don't know what my plan is, like, how about a job?

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: thinking that in my brain.

Dan Korus: Right.

Paul Austin-Menear: he asked that question because like, you know, probably just read somewhere that that's a question you ask in an interview. It's good question. I was like, no. So I said to him, you know, the universe looks at our plans and laughs in our face. So I've always prioritized adaptation to change over having a plan and a path that requires me to go down a certain gate. so I I don't have a plan and I'm okay with that. But I will always do the absolute best that I can in the moment, looking as far ahead as I can to drive things forward for us in this business. Kind of said like some version of that to him. and he liked it. But yeah, like marketing, ops, supply chain, e-commerce, back and forth, chink and jag and everything. after that business kind of fell apart and I was moving to Ottawa, I decided that it would be a good idea to get like a growing up job for a little while and collect a steady paycheck. and whatnot because I've never been doing that before. I've been working for myself or I'd been an owner in this business and we weren't paying ourselves a salary. Like it just wasn't that established, right? So the employees, they were getting paychecks, we weren't. So I kind of thought to myself, yeah, I just lost a bunch of money. Let's let's collect a paycheck for a while. And I started looking for jobs in Ottawa and came across one for marketing agency, an ad agency. And I thought to myself, well, it's kind of fun. You know, I've been doing communications work for a while and I kind of touched across like marketing with this business and whatever that's interesting. Let's get into that. So

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: I started working for this marketing agency. and it was an interesting experience. It was a very, very toxic workplace. I learned

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: a bunch, a bunch. I learned a lot about marketing. I learned a lot about communications. I learned a lot about direct marketing, guerrilla marketing. And I also learned a lot about what not to do as a leader of people through observing. Ha ha. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Korus: What'd you learn? That sounds like this sounds good. This sounds juicy. Stick into that.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. Don't don't yell at your don't yell at your team. Don't yell at your employees. Don't do that. That's one thing. It's pretty simple. You know, you'd think that that would be, you know, kind of easy to understand and let's not do that. Apparently there are people that still yell at their employees. So yeah, don't yell at people. Treat people with respect and decency. that's another thing, you know. Like don't treat the one thing that I observed about working in this place was that staff, the team, the employees, small agency, there were 15 people, I think, at it, sort of thing. the owner of the business. seemed to think about the employees in the business as his personal property. You know, you would get calls, evenings, weekends, you would get expectations that were unrealistic, you would get demands that were very much about like him, him, him, versus what was actually good for the business or the teams or the operating environment. It was very cult of personality sort of the the way that it operated. And I learned that that

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: is a great way to create a business where people are stressed out all the time, they're anxious, and ultimately that impacts the performance of the business and you lose clients because you're producing crap work. So I learned all of these lessons by going through kind of bad things about that business rather than being taught the good things that you should be doing if you want to build strong, resilient teams. It's an interesting experience overall.

Dan Korus: So this this was a leader who was was was yelling at ploys.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yep. Yep. Yep. Behind closed doors, open doors, there's lots of yelling.

Dan Korus: And so you you learned you learned by watching them what was inappropriate.

[80:57] every young person should work a service job

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now not to you know, I don't want I don't want the the the kind of perception to come across that it was completely negative and it was all bad and everything. I did learn a lot of really valuable lessons. I did learn a lot of good things. I learned a lot about marketing and perception and persuasion. and I learned

Dan Korus: Absolutely.

Paul Austin-Menear: a lot about like the the the technical craft of marketing. I learned a lot about copywriting. I learned a lot about

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: content and hooks and structure. I learned a lot about SEO at the time. It was big at the time. I learned a lot about the good old days, right?

Dan Korus: yeah, those are like the Google the Google heydays, right? Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: I learned a lot about the technical facets of digital marketing back then. So, you know, I don't want people to kind of take away from this that it was just universally complete shit. It wasn't. I learned a ton, but there was a lot that was bad about it.

Dan Korus: You know, being in those hard environments where there's a leader above you that or around you that isn't engaging in the workplace in an appropriate manner,

Paul Austin-Menear: Mm-hmm.

Dan Korus: I think that that's living in dog ears if you're willing to think about it in the right way and learn about what's right and what's wrong in the right way, if you can self reflect and put yourself in the situations and learn from those things. And I don't think that it's as conducive to positive leadership because then you leave that knowing what bad looks like and you still have to go practice and be good at what good looks like.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: But You know why and you've

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: seen it.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: That was that your experience?

Paul Austin-Menear: That was my experience. Yep. Almost to a T. That

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: was my experience. Yeah.

Dan Korus: So I tell I tell people it's good a little bit to find those situations and to hang on as long as you can because you're gonna learn so much. Not that you have to, but that's the bright that's the upside. That's the silver lining.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. So I'm I I'm I'm a very I'm a firm believer that every every high school student, every young person should work in hospitality or retail or

Dan Korus: Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: a service-oriented environment for minimum wage. Because those environments are at least here, maybe it's different in the US. I'm not sure what the what the labor landscape's like in the US for those types of jobs. but here, those types of jobs tend to be very emotionally demanding. They tend to be physically demanding, and you tend to see

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: the worst of humanity in those customer service interactions. Like, there are just terrible people who come in and complain about stuff that they should not be complaining about. It's like, does this really matter? No, it does not. I'm sorry that you're mad. but I believe that every high school person, every young person should work in those jobs. so that they know what it's like, so that they can then internalize how that feels and how it impacts the environment around them. And so that they know what not to do. It's like a very much earlier kind of positioning of what I went through at that marketing agency, like picking up what not to do and translating it into what should I do, you know, by osmosis. If every young person worked those jobs, I think society overall would be probably a marginally better place. Because there would be more understanding and more emotional awareness and intelligence out there.

Dan Korus: Agree. And You work at this marketing agency, you collect your paycheck

Paul Austin-Menear: Mm.

Dan Korus: for a while. What next?

Paul Austin-Menear: Got old. no, actually, so what next? I

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: I you know, I stagnated a little bit and

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: I I felt the I felt the urge and the tug to build things again. I've never I've never been the kind of person who can just take a list of ten things that you need to do to do your job every day and do them forever and that's it. I've never been that person like that it just

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: gets old. So I got to a point at this

Dan Korus: Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: agency where where I was a little bit like, you know what, this I don't like this whole I'm doing this job and only this job. So I went to my boss and proposed some different things. Like, hey, you know what? At this business we can do this thing and we can do this thing and we can monetize it this way and we can monetize it this way. I kind of want do that. What do you think? And some of it he was like, no. 'Cause he didn't like get it, or there was some fundamental flaw in my logic, or there was something else where it just wouldn't work out. But a couple of things he was like, Yeah, that sounds interesting. Build a program. so I transitioned from one job and that agency to a completely different job in the agency that was more entrepreneurial. Like it's kind of been called entrepreneurship at various points over time. Like you act as an entrepreneur,

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: but inside a company. So I kind of became that. And I liked that. Yeah, for a couple of years, did that, went along fine. then that agency lost some clients. And some of those clients were very, very big clients. So there was a financial crunch. And then there were layoffs. And I was one of the laid off people alongside the team that I had kind of built to do this thing. so all of that kind of imploded. And that was my first time being laid off.

Dan Korus: Congratulations.

Paul Austin-Menear: Thank you, thank you. I was twenty no, I was thirty. I was thirty-two at the time. So first time being laid off at 32. Yeah, I did all right.

Dan Korus: So you you got burned, you went around, you know, you were like, Okay, I want the stable paycheck, and then you got whether it's on entrepreneur or entrepreneur, you got that that entrepreneur dog in ya and you were like, Let's

Paul Austin-Menear: got that rich.

Dan Korus: do some got s let's do some more stuff and then

Paul Austin-Menear: Mm.

Dan Korus: that leads to a layoff. So then what? Were you feeling emboldened?

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: Were you like, let's go build or

Paul Austin-Menear: So at the time, I actually had a huge cast on my leg. I'd ruptured my Achilles tendon about

Dan Korus: my god.

Paul Austin-Menear: on my right leg. I'd ruptured it probably about six weeks before I was laid off. So like I was I was working from home. And this is like twenty

Dan Korus: No. Yeah. geez.

Paul Austin-Menear: this is like twenty fifteen when working from home is not super easy because

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: the tools that make it easy didn't exist yet. Yeah.

Dan Korus: Yeah. We didn't have those tools yet. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: So I'm I'm trying to work from home six weeks. get laid off and I'm like, fuck. my first instinct is like, okay, go find a job, you know, start looking for a job. because like my severance for this layoff was not great. It was maybe two months worth of expenses, three if I really, really stretched it. It's not a lot of backup, right? So I go looking for a job. and this is where I get into the corporate world and how interviews kind of go there for the first time. I go work or I go interview for a job at a bank that has been acquired by another bank. So there are dynamics involved with like the acquisition and the merger. I'm in this big cast, I get myself on a bus, go across town, it's an hour fifteen. Each time I go to this office to interview. Guess how many interviews I went to in a cast, Dan? Guess how many?

Dan Korus: Seven.

Paul Austin-Menear: Six. Yeah. And yeah, it was it was something. It was it was something.

Dan Korus: Whoa. What the shit? What what job what what job is this, dude? Are you interviewing to be president of of Beerland or something? Like what like what this is a what prestigious role

Paul Austin-Menear: You would you would you would think that. You would think that.

Dan Korus: are you going for?

Paul Austin-Menear: You would think that. And the the highly prestigious role that I was interviewing for was digital media coordinator

Dan Korus: my god.

Paul Austin-Menear: or digital media specialist or something like that, working within the working within the bank's credit group. So basically I would be building paid ads to convince people to sign up for credit cards. That was really essentially the job A to B. Six six interviews. Six interviews. Four of them with the the bank that had been acquired, and two of them with the bank that had acquired this other company. And the the regional managing director for the bank that had acquired, the bank loved me. You know, my interview with him was half an hour walking around. I kid you not. I was walking on this cast with this guy. and he loved everything

[88:18] six interviews in a cast and still ghosted

Dan Korus: Gosh.

Paul Austin-Menear: I had to say. And he was like, You know what? I still need to talk to like the acquired banks person that's in charge of this, but I want to bring you on and you'll have an offer from us by Monday. Monday comes. You know what happened, Dan? Nope. What happened was nothing. I gave it till Wednesday. You know what happened on Wednesday? Nothing. I give it another week. No what happened? Nothing. I give it two more

Dan Korus: Nothing? They ghosted you?

Paul Austin-Menear: I give it two more days and I email the recruiter and I'm like, Hey, so

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: you know, blah blah blah said this and it's been two weeks, what's going on? And you know what happened? Nothing. So, you know, to kind of shorten the tail end of this, it was another week and a half. And the recruiter said, Yeah, we've decided to go in a different direction. Thanks a lot. And I was like,

Dan Korus: my god.

Paul Austin-Menear: You kidding me? After six interviews, well, I'm basically like on crutches in a cast out reach way. You know, the guy who runs the entire bank for this region of the country and owns the bank that, you know, you guys work for said he wants to bring me on and he wants to hire me. And you're going in a different direction. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So after that, I

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: said, fuck this shit, Dan. I'm moving to Toronto. Cause Toronto is the business capital of Canada. It's the Mecca. There's so much opportunity. If you go to Toronto,

Dan Korus: So when you when you moved back, this is when and this time period is when you get the text from Claire, when Claire and the F like the bonfire night that happens. So this is the same period.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, around this around this time, round this time period. And by by that point, by that point, by that point,

Dan Korus: Okay, we're full circle. I'm caught up. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: I'm out of my cast. So I'm like kind of walking normally again. So when I move to Toronto,

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: I'm able to walk again. Like my calf is basically a stick. You know, it took me probably three, four years to build the muscle mass up again and get the flexibility back from that ruptured Achilles tendon. Highly recommend folks at home, like don't rupture your Achilles tendon. It sucks.

Dan Korus: Yeah, there's like these small muscles in our feet, shoulders,

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, all the stabilizing muscles. Yeah.

Dan Korus: and hips. And when those get fucked, it's incredible the devastation that it has on the rest of the body. So,

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: okay, Paul, you go to Toronto. You're in the big city. How did you get Big for Canada? That's huge.

Paul Austin-Menear: Move to Toronto. Mm hmm. Big for Canada, you know, three three million people. Biggest biggest city in the country. Three million people. Yeah.

Dan Korus: What I wanna know is like and and we don't have to go through all of your jobs because I think I've got the big story, right? 'Cause you're still in Toronto now, right? How did you

Paul Austin-Menear: Hm. Still in Toronto now.

Dan Korus: go you're what are you doing now?

Paul Austin-Menear: So what actually let's we don't we only really need to go through one job in Toronto because there was only there only there was only one job in Toronto. It was a great job. Yeah, it was it was a great it was a

Dan Korus: Do it, please. In between then and now. Okay, tell us. Tell us.

Paul Austin-Menear: great job. it was a startup. I worked for a for a smart lighting company that was in consumer IoT. and I I joined that company at fi I think I was employee number fifteen. And I joined as an operations manager, marketing operations manager. and I departed the company during a restructuring round in 2024, which was partly my choice. Like I we kind of looked as looked at everything as a leadership team and said, wow, this is not going so well. Like we've got to do restructuring. And I looked at

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: kind of the character of what was gonna be on the table after the restructuring and was like, what am I gonna be able to friggin' contribute? So, you know, my boss and I at the time had an honest conversation and it was like, package me out. And that will actually let you probably preserve two other jobs that are gonna be a lot more useful after that restructuring, right? So it was it was a pretty it was pretty easy calculus that conversation and that decision and like I don't I don't begrudge like being laid off again, at

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: all because it it just kinda had to happen. But so Coming to Toronto, getting that job. How do you think I got that job, Dan? Take a guess.

Dan Korus: How how'd you get that job?

Paul Austin-Menear: at the time I didn't know anybody else in Toronto. And I also knew that I didn't want to do the job board thing because I'd just gone through six months in Ottawa of

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: like firing out like job applications through like job boards and getting ghosted and rejected and told no and all this other stuff. I was like, you know what, fuck all this shit. I'm gonna do something completely radically different and I'm going to approach this on my own terms. So what

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: I did was on my website, I put together like a landing page and a little kind of like content pathway conversion funnel. And then I built some other stuff around that. I wrote up letters and printed these letters and signed them. I wrote up a little card that had a QR code on it and a web link on it, and I started doing research. And I was like, okay, what companies exist within a four kilometer radius of this very specific part in Toronto that I want to live in because I wanted to live somewhere urban, somewhere that was like kind of dense that you could like walk to, lots of parks around, public transit, easy to get to work and whatnot. I didn't want to spend two hours on the freeway each way to work, right? And from work.

Dan Korus: Mm.

Paul Austin-Menear: So I kind of came up with this, you know, this radius. What companies are there? What companies are there that I'm interested in. And applied this filtering process and finally came up with like and then hit LinkedIn and found hiring managers and all that. And I eventually, this took me a couple of weeks. I came to a list of about 200 contacts. And I mailed those 200 contacts a letter with a handwritten address on the front, with the thesis in mind that because it wasn't an email and it wasn't an application tracking system, I would be much more likely to get. me in front of a person who would make a hiring decision. And I tracked all this. Like I tracked all the metrics. Like I kind of put some analytics work to it and wrote a blog post or two about it after I finally got a job. But I outlined all this and you know I would basically say like this is me, this is what I do. This is why I like your business. Go to this link. I made this webpage just for you. If you like it, let's talk. and it was about 30 people that out of the 200 that were like yeah let's talk. I talked to I talked to fifteen of those thirty people.

Dan Korus: Fifteen percent. Fifteen percent meeting conversion.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yep. I talked to fifteen of those thirty people. three of those fifteen gave me offers and I chose one offer. And the one job that I worked for 10 years, for 10 years, the one company I worked for for 10 years, I should say, the guy said to me like very specifically when I read this thing and like went through the landing page and all the stuff, I was like, This guy builds friggin' mouse traps. We need a mouse trap builder. Let's hire this guy. So he basically strong armed his business partners into like making room for my salary because I'd gone through that exercise. That's how I got that job. And I was there until twenty twenty four.

Dan Korus: So you built a cold outreach ad funnel for your own for your own personal

[95:40] do what others aren't

Paul Austin-Menear: Before the tools existed for it.

Dan Korus: job outreach.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: Do you think that would still work today?

Paul Austin-Menear: Nope. Nope. Wouldn't work today.

Dan Korus: Why not?

Paul Austin-Menear: wouldn't work today. There are a couple of reasons for that. reason number one, people are hybrid and remote much more often than they were back then. Like this is before COVID. So everybody was in the office five days a week. doesn't matter who it was, like If there's a corporate address or like a regional office address listed and you know a person works out of that office, you know that they're there and you know the mail gets delivered to them. It's different now, you know. It's different, even with RTO mandates. Like maybe in five years, something like that would work again because RTO mandates have made five days in office the standard again. But I don't think it would work quite as well today for that reason. Now there is like

Dan Korus: It just get lost.

Paul Austin-Menear: it'd get lost, yeah. Yeah, like it wouldn't even get and like there are there are fewer mail delivery and front desk people working in office buildings as well. So it's like that piece of mail is probably going to sit, even if the person does work in that office, that piece of mail is probably gonna sit in like a mailbox in a lobby or somewhere silly for two months. And by the end of that two months, like you've moved on or they've moved on, right? So it's not gonna be the same. There is one piece of advice though that I would distill down into one sentence and kind of give to everybody. do what others Doesn't matter what it is. If you want to make change, have an impact, get success, whatever it is, do what others.

Dan Korus: How do you find out w everything that people are doing?

Paul Austin-Menear: Not a perfect science, but that's for damn sure. Lots of generalizations. But if you if you if you observe what's going on around this particular thing that you want to do, like let's take let's take paid advertising, for instance. That's probably a really good one. So companies

Dan Korus: Sure. Okay. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: now, because of the proliferation of meta ads and you know Google ads and all that stuff, at the very start of those products, they were like small and they were super, super cheap. Right, because they're trying to get customers to like buy their ads and they're trying to build up an inventory on the other side of eyeballs for impressions to sell those ads against. So, like back in the heyday in like the 2010, 2011, 2012 of digital advertising, you could build some killer, killer digital advertising, digital marketing programs, because the cost model worked so well. It was so cheap compared

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: to direct mail. Which has, you know, trackability problems. There are problems figuring out how direct mail actually works, like how effective it is. It's expensive. You

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: gotta print and ship stuff. There's all this goes that that goes into it. Radio, same sort of thing. TV, same sort of thing. So in like twenty ten, twenty eleven, twenty twelve, even a little bit before, you know, the do what others aren't is digital marketing programs instead of TV advertising or radio advertising. But now we're at a place where these digital marketing platforms are so ubiquitous and expensive. The cost has gone way up. Like I've seen, I've seen people, companies, particularly in insurance, it's really expensive. I've seen companies that are paying like $250 to $500 for a CPM in those spaces. That's crazy expensive. Crazy expensive. You could get that same CPM for about 30 bucks in 2011, right? So the question now becomes like digital advertising, do what others aren't. So instead of doing like your meta ads, instead of doing your Instagram ads, instead of doing all that stuff and doing what absolutely everybody is, you're not standing out, do what they're not. Community programs, local advertising again, things where you're gonna get eyeballs very, very inexpensively that aren't these big platforms. There's always a pendulum to this stuff. You know, if you understand what the accepted norms are and you think about those accepted norms and you determine that those accepted

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: norms aren't really going to work for you, start thinking about what you could do that isn't that. That's where do at others aren't really starts from.

Dan Korus: Yeah. So you do this job and you basically consult your way out of having a job into being laid off. So now so that's

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. Yeah. I mean it was yeah.

Dan Korus: the last job, like what that gets us to present time, Paul.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, that's that gets us to present time. Like they're the last six

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: months, like my exit period with with that company was was quite long. Like it was it was five five or six months because I had a lot of stuff to do. Like there was a lot for me to do. I I was over in Europe doing supply chain stuff. Like I was looking at warehouses, I was looking at contracts, like I was just

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: going full kit all out. throttle wide open trying to get all this really important stuff done at the time I was a vice president. so I was trying to get all this really important stuff done before I exited. And I did barely, except for I think there was one contract for for a supplier in Europe that that I hadn't renewed and signed. I had to hand that off. But it was like six months where I was working probably probably about 50% more than I would normally have been. And I never worked an eight hour day at this company. Like it was more like ten, eleven, or twelve as the norm for me. so

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: I'm working like two days in one essentially for this six months. At the end of that, I was completely burned out. I was strung out, I was emotional, you know, like ten years of my life was coming to a close. I hadn't even thought about what comes next, didn't even have a lick of what I was gonna do next. So I was a hot mess. Like I was an absolute mess for about three months. Well, I tried to sort myself out and kind of figure out what was next. And, you know, I went through that I went through that that period that a lot of people do where you've got like imposter syndrome going on. You think, geez, I just did all of this stuff, but maybe it was all bullshit. Maybe nobody else actually values all of the things that I've done because, you know, I'm kind of loosely talking to these people and saying, I did this and this and it's not turning into job offers. So I I definitely went through that. But over time I realized that Things were fucked up with the job market. End of 2024, early 2025, like things are fucked up with the job market. This also kind of leads into me and Jen doing Rose the Post and everything kind of around that. but I also realized aside from the labor market being really messed up, I didn't actually want another corporate job. It wasn't good for me. That environment just doesn't work for me. So once that once I really like accepted that, because I always knew it, but once I accepted that, I kind of put my my head and my heart towards like, well, what comes next? And I started this process of thinking through, okay, what are my values? You know, and that's a big question. But in this context, it's like, what are my values when it comes to the professional energy that I put into stuff and that I put out into the world? So I started thinking like, what actually matters? And I've always been more of a bigger picture. kind of person, I don't think about my own wants and needs too seriously. Like I don't really care because like I'm a simple person. It's really easy for me to fulfill my own needs. So I start to think like, all right, what matters to me? And it's more society, it's more community, it's more like country, it's more bigger picture stuff. And I start to think, okay, how can what I've learned and done over time contribute to what matters to me. In that context. And the answer was kind of like, okay, well, helping people learn how to start businesses, helping people learn how to scale businesses and learn from the mistakes that I've kind of made before. Like when I think about the future, and there are two paths when it comes to the economy and to communities and labor markets and stuff, you know, one path is MA activity kind of continues. And we end up with three mega giant, humongous corporations that own everything, all of the assets and employ all of the people. And, you know, there's that kind of future. I don't like how that future looks. The other path though is you have tons of small businesses competing in marketplaces, both labor and economic marketplaces. You know, they're resilient, they're strong. A lot of them fail. That happens. You know, that's a part of competition, but a lot of them succeed. The net benefit of having that future where you've got a lot of resilient, thriving, small and growing businesses is that labor markets are more stable because there's a diffusion of economic power. You don't have three big tech companies doing all of the hiring. You have a half a million, a million, two million, five million businesses, employers that are hiring five to ten people. That's the pathway that I want. So I start to put my energy towards that. I work today exclusively with small businesses and businesses that are growing. You know, if a company is turning over between 5 million and 100 million in revenue, it doesn't matter what industry, what sector they're in, and they want to grow and they know that there are potholes ahead, and they run into these potholes and they want to figure out how to grow, hitting fewer potholes, that's what I do. I work with them. Operations, marketing, human resources. finance, we help them figure their shit out. That's

[103:01] why I only work with growing small businesses now

Dan Korus: Who's we?

Paul Austin-Menear: me, myself, and I and the network of contractors and partners that I work with on specific things for specific occasions. Now I'm I'm absolutely a solopreneur. I thought about starting an agency. people told me I should start an agency that does this so that I can compound the leverage that I have, the impact that I have. but I don't want to do that. I just want to I want to live a life where my needs are taken care of. I don't basically I don't want to be responsible for the economic well-being of people by having direct employees right now. That'll change in the future. There'll be something where I have employees again, but right now I just don't want to do that. You know, I want to be on my own. I wanna figure stuff out. I wanna walk the path.

Dan Korus: I think it's a lot of responsibility to do that. And there's a lot that comes in your day with just having to be able to care for people. You know, and so just like how you said you don't want to have a dog because you know, you know what that requires and you'd want to do it right, this is the same.

Paul Austin-Menear: It is.

Dan Korus: Okay, Paul. When you were burnt out, after ten years and you're VP of this company. are you just so grateful Claire was in your life?

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. Yeah, I absolutely was. I absolutely was and still am. You know, I have

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: I have never had a day where I haven't been grateful that she's in my life. You know, there's there's

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: that whole saying that people kind of kind of throw out there, which is maybe a little bit overused, maybe not. she's my rock or he's my rock, that saying.

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: I know that my partner I can depend on, you know, like I know

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: that she's always going to be there and that she will not judge me. for the dumb shit

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: that I do sometimes and that's that gives you strength. That gives you a lot of strength and a lot of power. You know, I don't think that this

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: journey this past ten years would have worked out the way that it has without her

Dan Korus: How do you give back in that relationship? Like how do you how do you Cool. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: I do the same for her. Do the same for her, you know, reciprocity. reciprocity, like we talked about it before in in the context of like building trust with partnerships, but it also is

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: is a pretty critical component of personal relationships too. You know, whether it's friends,

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: whether it's family, whether it's loved ones, whether it's the romantic partner, wife, what have you, husband. reciprocity is is very, very important, you know, give what you get and vice versa. Like that's that's

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: a very, very big way of of making it work. You know, and generosity too is a part of that. You know, be be open, be thoughtful, be kind, be giving. treat the person like you'd wanna be treated. You know, those are those are things that are really important and like I try to embody those in my relationship with my wife.

Dan Korus: Are you a teddy bear or a hedgehog?

Paul Austin-Menear: I am an armadillo and I'm very, very offended that you asked that I was either of those things. How dare you. I

Dan Korus: Say more, Paul. Why why armadillo? What does that mean? Like a turtle? A shelled creature.

Paul Austin-Menear: You know, it's it's actually so let's let's let's talk about the question. the

Dan Korus: Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: question is an A or B question. The question is you have two choices. The way that I'm wired, I bristle at two choice questions. but yeah, no, two, so binary binary questions, questions with two options, problems with A or B. I bristle at those and I I kind of instinctively resist them and fight against them because I don't believe that the answer is A or B. I believe that A or

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: B is the starting point.

Dan Korus: Look, I'm just wondering, like you got business Paul. You know, we have business Paul, he's in his

Paul Austin-Menear: Ha ha

Dan Korus: corporate suit. He's got a badge that says, I'm the VP. I I read and sign important contracts.

Paul Austin-Menear: No.

Dan Korus: you know, and then you come home after like your ten or twelve hour day or your like important business trip in Europe doing important business, you know, person stuff and you come home and like Like are gonna like do you snuggle? Like are you just like, you know, like really glad to see your person? Like do you

Paul Austin-Menear: absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

Dan Korus: like ice cream on the couch under a blanket kinda guy? Like are you do you going up to like

Paul Austin-Menear: Yep. Yep.

Dan Korus: a nice dinner? Like I don't I don't you know, like I you know what I mean? I don't know. Just wondering. Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear: All of these things and more, Dan. All of these things and more. No, I so I I'm a cozy person. so is my wife. Like we are we are cozy people. Like we we go out and we have fun, we go to restaurants, we go to like sports events, we go to movies, we go to we don't go to clubs anymore 'cause we're of that age.

Dan Korus: Uh-huh.

Paul Austin-Menear: but we'll we'll go out and we'll have a good time, like we'll do stuff. but we're both like I would say happiest and most comfortable chilling out at home with each other. sort of thing and you know it's not usually ice cream.

Dan Korus: Nice. In the Armadillo Den.

Paul Austin-Menear: In the armadillo den. It's not usually ice cream because my wife has dairy intolerance. so

Dan Korus: Okay, what is it?

Paul Austin-Menear: so it's it's it's usually wine.

Dan Korus: Okay. Got it. Okay, cool.

Paul Austin-Menear: 'Cause neither neither one of us has allergies to wine and thank God.

Dan Korus: I get it. Food allergies are tough.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: I hear it. Okay, so you work with small businesses between five

Paul Austin-Menear: Yep.

Dan Korus: to ten million in revenue annual, and five to a hundred. Five to a hundred mil revenue.

Paul Austin-Menear: Five to a hundred. Five to a hundred actually. Yeah. Yeah. The the thesis of the thesis of what I do is really like, let's let's figure out how to solve problems and look ahead. You know, that's kind of what I do. And and what I've kind of discovered is that businesses that are turning over less than five million, usually they can't afford me. And as much as I would love for my kind of time to be to be a nonprofit, like charitable, like

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: truly altruistic venture. I gotta pay rent, I gotta save for retirement, I gotta like I gotta pay bills, gotta live. so I charge money for that. If you're turning over under

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: five million, you probably can't afford me. And that's not a

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: that's not like a an ego driven statement. That's a it doesn't make financial sense for you to hire me yet kind of statement. over a hundred million in revenue, typically pretty mature corporation, pretty mature company. Already have a lot of legacy and a lot of established systems, and change management is hard. Change management change. It's really, really difficult. I can do change management in kind of the Fortune 500 environment. I do not fucking want to do change management in those environments. I would rather like pull out the hair that I don't have. There are a lot of reasons why. So when you're a when you're a large established, mature company with things that you have always done and always will do, changing those things is incredibly difficult. Because you're dealing with people, you're dealing with personalities, they're distributed, there are a lot of different decision makers, there's a lot of money involved, there's lots of legacy software. And at the end of the day, with a publicly traded company or with a c company of that caliber, things come down to cost benefit on a spreadsheet. Right. So if you project that the cost of changing a certain thing, because it will improve a business like process or piece of operations or whatever is X and that doesn't make sense on the spreadsheet under column Y, it doesn't really happen. So I perform best in environments where those kind of judgments, those decisions, are about less than the spreadsheet and they're more about vision, future, will this work? Does it fit with our strategy? Like when it gets to a certain point of bigness, if you will, I don't want any part

[110:23] measure product and experience satisfaction early

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: of it because it's going to be more of a fucking pain in the ass than I want to deal with. One of the nice things about

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: working for yourself is you can choose your clients. I will give it that.

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah. Well, my business does a hundred and one million a year, so I was gonna say we should work together, but it doesn't really make sense.

Paul Austin-Menear: You're out, man. Forget it. No, doesn't make sense. Hundred and one, you're out.

Dan Korus: Yeah, I was thinking like maybe, but I don't know. It's your bar, not mine. just kidding.

Paul Austin-Menear: Ha ha ha.

Dan Korus: So What about well you've you've started a lot of stuff yourself and you're also starting s your stuff yourself right now. So for people who want to get to five million a year, you know, and I'm in that category.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Korus: you know, like let's let's talk about that. Like let's let's start our advice portion where, you know, you get to offload all of your wisdom and knowledge.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: you know what I mean?

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. big question. Big question. If you're you're under five million, you're trying to get f to five million, what do you do? That's a that's a big question. There are a lot of answers. So pick a pick a pin. Put a pin in the map. Where do we start?

Dan Korus: Toronto.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: you know, I think a lot of people a lot of people start with a with a vision, you know, and let's let's assume that they've already established some sort of like product market fit. You

Paul Austin-Menear: Mm.

Dan Korus: know, they know what service or thing they want to provide. They know who they're gonna provide it for, they the pain point they're trying to solve.

Paul Austin-Menear: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dan Korus: and I'm not thinking of anyone specific in mind, but You know, let's say that they've got a a proven product process. They're at the point where they're ready to start scaling and and proving that out across like the larger industry, finding people, you know, they've got their case studies, maybe their pilots are done. let's assume that their niche is a is an accurate pick, you know, and that there isn't like an entire product redesign that needs to happen. They've got the basics, the brand, the website, maybe some outreach systems that are maybe scalable, maybe not.

Paul Austin-Menear: Mm-hmm.

Dan Korus: there's cash in the pool. It is not a red ocean. Is that enough?

Paul Austin-Menear: Yep. Okay. So first thing that business a business making under five million at that point with what you described, first thing that I would say is start measurement of satisfaction with the product and with the experience. most businesses at that level of scale, they don't do that part. They only start to think about measurement of satisfaction when they're much, much bigger. And usually by the time they get to that point, It's a lot harder to implement. not only the tools, but the management leadership philosophy that makes adapting and changing based on that feedback more of a cultural habit rather than something where it's like, we're going to do this because the survey said we're going to do it. For any business that's there, start measurement, satisfaction measurement, like RFN. Just do it. start as simple as like I'm going to send an email out to a key stakeholder for five

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: customers that I just worked with. Email, personal, one-to-one. How did that go? You know, how did it turn out? What could be better? Like let me pick your

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: brain and get that feedback in. You know, for the person who's

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: the person who writes that email should be fairly senior in the organization. It should be a founder

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: or it should be someone who is in a a position to effect change based on the feedback that comes back. Then from there you want to start getting a little bit more mature about it. You want to start building out surveys and things that you can automate based on parts of your sales and your product lifecycle. So if you have a deal that gets to the very like end where it's like contract sign, yes or no, and someone chooses like, no, you know what, we're not going to sign. See if you can build a loop where you collect Feedback on why. What were the things that made you not want to sign? Because you want to be able to do a win-loss analysis based on that information. That's going to do two things. It's going to help you A, refine your sales process and smooth over rough points there. And B, it's also going to help you refine your product and your experience. Because, like, people think about product and experience as one and the same, but they're not. Product and how you use a product and what it accomplishes what it does for a customer is not necessarily the same as the experience of using that product. And for the buyer

Dan Korus: Uh-huh.

Paul Austin-Menear: of the product, both things matter. So you want to measure factors of both of those things so that you can improve over time. So like measurement, measure as much about the customer experience as you can as early as you can and build a habit. Now one thing that happens

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: as the organization grows and I see this a lot One thing that tends to happen is early on, your founders, your senior leadership team, the people who have been there like from the very beginning in positions of authority and accountability and whatever, and they like they care and they're scrambling to find product market fit. So they're talking to their customers and their prospects all of the time. They're always asking, how can we make this better? What can we build for you? What can we do? How can we make this work? Why would you, what would make

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: you buy more? What would make you stay more longer, stick around a little bit longer? The early founding

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: teams are always doing that because they have to. Without it, they

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: go under. They don't survive. But when they hit success,

Dan Korus: Right.

Paul Austin-Menear: it transitions a bit. The organization starts to scale. Those people who are doing that by habit are now thinking about other things and they're doing other things. They're figuring out how do I build a team? How do I build a supply chain? How do I do marketing? How do I do all of these other things? And talking to customers falls by the wayside. So you get into this messy middle position where nobody's really talking to customers until much, much later when you're established and mature and somebody's like, why don't we have any NPS scores? Why don't we have customer satisfaction scores? Why don't we have product satisfaction scores? So you've got to figure

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: out once you hit that success point, that inflection point, you've got to figure out how to preserve the habitual nature. of talking to customers. That is super, super important. If I could give

[117:44] advice for day one, team leads, and the C-suite

Dan Korus: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: a growing business that was around 5 million, that was flipping and starting to scale beyond one piece of advice, it would be that. Figure out how to make measurement of product and experience satisfaction happen.

Dan Korus: That's such good advice. It's great. This is this is why this is why, you know, this why we only work, you know, this is why Paul's expensive, folks. Yeah. Cause you can't just say you can't just say, not worth your time, you know, and then like and then we're like, well,

Paul Austin-Menear: So you know what the

Dan Korus: we know Paul's a wizard. Like Paul's a wizard. Paul built his own

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: Paul built built his own ad pipe like funnel. You build your own like a sales funnel for yourself in the end to look

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. To look for a job.

Dan Korus: for a job. Like, so you can't just sit here and tell us, I'm not a smart wizard who knows cool things, you know? You know what I mean? And then be

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah. You know the the crazy thing, Dan, the

Dan Korus: Well, it's also not worth the time. And like now we're getting a taste, you know, we're getting a flavor. and I'm also getting free consulting.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The the crazy the crazy thing is that I'm not actually that expensive. in the terms of like

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: if you you stack me up beside other management

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: consultants that do similar things in similar industries for similar companies, I'm actually not ex I'm actually not that expensive. Like my billable rate is typically 20, 25% lower than management consultants that work at firms and agencies. and that's because

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: I don't have the overhead in the middle of supporting staff. And offices and all that stuff. Like I don't, so I'm cheaper than

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: most. And I don't care to make up the difference in profit in my pocket. I'm a terrible capitalist. It's like do what I say, not what I do. My own life, I don't really care about money all that much beyond what I need to like live, you know, groceries, rent, getting around, saving for the future.

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: I don't care about accumulating wealth beyond that. So I'm cheap.

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. okay, I got three more questions for you. For someone who's

Paul Austin-Menear: Hit me. Hit me, man.

Dan Korus: starting their first day of work tomorrow, it's their first day of work ever.

Paul Austin-Menear: Mm-hmm.

Dan Korus: What's your advice for them?

Paul Austin-Menear: Don't beat yourself up at the end of the day. You're gonna feel like a tool at various points through the day. You're gonna feel like you should know what you're supposed to do, but you don't. and that's going to be a little bit stress inducing. Like the end of your first day of work in any job, you're gonna go home feeling like you're a bit of a tool and maybe you shouldn't be doing this. That ain't the thing. You know, if you show up to the office or show up to the workplace and you don't know what to do and nobody has come along and said, Hey, welcome. This is your first day. This is what we do. This is how it all goes down. This is where you need

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: to like go. These are the things you need to like read and review. If nobody has done that, that is a failing on you on their part, not on your part. So don't

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: beat yourself up at the end of your first day.

Dan Korus: Nice. For someone who's mid career, maybe a middle level manager, a senior team lead. What advice do you have for them?

Paul Austin-Menear: Hmm. One's harder because there's a lot of accumulated kind of personal context that goes along with that question. for someone who is a team lead,

Dan Korus: Let her rip.

Paul Austin-Menear: yeah, for someone who's a team lead who's like mid-career, specifically someone who is kind of like new to people leadership, I think my advice for them would be think about servant leadership. Think about how Your being a manager can make the people who report to you, their lives, their professional lives, where workplace lives, easier. Right? Stop thinking about how do I hit this goal? How do I continue doing the work that I've been doing before? and start thinking about the people that report to you, the people who are on your team. Because when you're a leader of people, we talked about this before, of course, but When you're a leader of people, your job is to clone yourself if you've been a high performer and promoted because you've

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: been a high performer. And it is very rare inside organizations in North America that you are given a manual or training on how to become a leader of people when you are promoted. like you might

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: get some token management training, but you don't get leadership training and people training. So I think my advice is like. Think about how you can make your team more effective rather than managing them. Think about leading them instead of managing. There's a big distinction there. Very different things.

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. good. Okay. now for the C suite. Our VPs, our Ps, our CEOs.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: What what do you got for them, Paul?

Paul Austin-Menear: the ongoing resilience and growth of your business. there's more to it than what your CFO brings forward in the spreadsheet. So when you're thinking about restructuring and layoffs and everything else, and it makes sense on the spreadsheet because of strategic change or all of the different reasons that have been put into the business case on why you need to do these layoffs, there is one thing you should be aware of. The accumulated Institutional knowledge of your workforce of your staff is not captured anywhere in you know GAP, generally accepted accounting principles. The asset value of institutional knowledge does not exist on your balance sheet. Ergo, it is not a thing in these business cases that involve layoffs. So when you decide that people can go. you are throwing out an unvalued asset that actually has substantial value to your business. Think twice about a layoff based on a spreadsheet.

Dan Korus: Good advice. It's very specific advice. I wasn't expecting something that's specific. that's great. And

Paul Austin-Menear: Yeah.

Dan Korus: if you make less than a hundred million dollars a year, Paul can help you with this.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yes, yes I can.

Dan Korus: How can people reach you, Paul? What's like what's the best ways to get at you?

Paul Austin-Menear: So yeah, I mean if you if you want to reach me to talk about consulting about your business and whatnot, the best place to

Dan Korus: Yeah.

Paul Austin-Menear: kind of do that is go to sixcatalysts.com. number sixcatalysts.com. That's my consulting website. if you're kind of interested

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: more in the work that I do in like organizational design, you know, I mentioned before that I've got a podcast with, we haven't even talked about Jen, Jen Frahoole, my co-host on Roast

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: the Post. You know, you want to check that out, it's a little bit mouthy. We swear a lot, even more than we did on kind of like our conversation this show, me and Jen. that's

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: roastthepost.show. And it's

Dan Korus: Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear: basically a place where we read between the bullet points and try to help companies figure out how to unfuck the hiring process.

Dan Korus: Nice. As a as a weekly listener of Roast the Post, I really like that show. I too am big on learning.

Paul Austin-Menear: Thanks. And we love that you listen.

Dan Korus: I love I like that learning is fun. I think I like that you bring different guests on from different industries. I got to go on last Friday and it was really fun to just like get to talk shop and like just get to wax about something that I know a lot about that's always fun. Like You know, as a neurodivergent, how often do you get to like showcase your your your niche interests? You know, your niche special interests. Not a lot. and it's it's a really good tool too, because it helps you understand the hiring process in a different way. And a lot of times we take

Paul Austin-Menear: Mm-hmm.

Dan Korus: it for granted and we know that our hiring process can be better and that there's all these improvements we need to make. And knowing that something is broken and understanding how it's broken and how you can fix it are two very different things. And I think

Paul Austin-Menear: Very different.

Dan Korus: a lot of us take our own knowledge for granted and kind of stop at the observation that something could be better. And so roast the post is a really fun way for a weekly hour-long dose of just like understanding what you know could be better about a job ad. and as I, you know, scale my company. hoping that one day I can be worthy of Paul.

Paul Austin-Menear: Ha ha ha.

Dan Korus: I will I will be I will be making anonymous Gmail accounts and submitting my own job ads to you guys before I post them. to for feedback.

Paul Austin-Menear: Love it.

Dan Korus: and both you you're on you're on Substack so that'll be linked in the show notes we'll have your linked in there and six catalysts too and I always want to know like so I know about catalysts from the chemistry perspective what you know why six catalysts

Paul Austin-Menear: Why six catalysts? Yeah. Because there are basically six places where good shit can come from in an organizational setting. And I talk about each of the six on the website a little bit more in the about section, like why I named kind of my consultant practice six catalysts. But the underlying philosophy of it is that good ideas can come from anywhere at any time. So let's be open to them.

Dan Korus: Nice. All right. Cool. And if you're curious about what those six are, because that's a perfect hook, go check out Paul at sixcatalyst.com.

Paul Austin-Menear: Yep, they are all there and so am I.

Dan Korus: Nice, we did it.

Paul Austin-Menear: Mm-hmm.