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    ENTREPRENEURSHIP
    Podcast 13 min read

    Should You Name Your Business After Yourself? w/ Jodie Cook

    with Jodie Cook

    Chris Do and Jodie Cook separate naming a business after its founder from making it dependent on them.

    Chris Do

    Chris Do

    Founder, The Futur™ · March 11, 2026

    The Name Was Never the Trap

    A business can carry its founder's initials and still become independent. It can also hide behind an invented name and remain entirely dependent on one person. Jodie Cook, who started JC Social Media at 22 and later sold the agency, brings that distinction into focus through a naming decision that took almost no thought.

    At a networking event, Cook realized that everyone introducing themselves had something she did not: a company name. The room supplied a pattern. Initials followed by a description of the service seemed to be the accepted format, and her turn was approaching.

    JC Social Media was the result. Not an elaborate positioning exercise. Not a considered commitment to building an enterprise around her identity. A quick answer to an immediate social problem.

    The questions came later. People noticed the connection between her initials and the business, then treated that connection as a potential liability. If the company carried her name, how would it ever function without her?

    That concern forms the starting point for her conversation with Chris Do. Cook sees the same assumption discouraging people from developing a personal brand: visibility seems to promise permanent obligation. Become the face of the business, and the business supposedly becomes impossible to leave.

    Do separates two decisions that this argument collapses. Naming a company is one. Designing how it operates is another. The letters on the door do not establish who must approve the work, maintain every relationship, or resolve every disagreement.

    A founder's name is not the same as founder dependency.

    The distinction matters because a naming debate offers an appealingly small problem to solve. Change a name, commission an identity, and the work appears complete. Changing the business beneath that identity requires a different kind of effort: hiring, teaching, transferring responsibility, and resisting the impulse to take it back.

    Cook's own experience makes that difference concrete. She wanted a business that would allow her to travel. Instead, she initially built something that behaved like a job, with dependencies attached to her at every turn. The problem was not that clients could decode the initials.

    The problem was that the operation needed her.

    Personal visibility belongs in this discussion, but not as a substitute for examining the operation. The title of The Futur's You Don't Need a Personal Brand. You Need an Offer. points toward a neighboring distinction: the public identity of a business is not the whole business.

    For Cook and Do, the useful question is not whether the founder appears in the brand. It is whether the founder has become the only person through whom the business can deliver. That shifts the discussion from optics to structure, and from what the company is called to what other people are actually allowed to do.

    What a Buyer Can Actually Acquire

    Do approaches the naming concern through the perspective of a potential buyer. A recognizable founder can attract attention, but attention does not explain what changes hands in a sale. His account centers on three things: the client accounts, the repeatable operation, and the people capable of doing the work.

    These are not interchangeable assets. They support one another. Client relationships without delivery capacity leave promises unfulfilled. A process without customers has nothing to serve. A talented team without a workable operation or ongoing assignments is not the same proposition as an established business.

    • A book of business: Current accounts and client relationships that can support continuing revenue.
    • Repeatable systems: Processes that allow work to move from an initial input toward a dependable result.
    • The team's talent: The people whose skills and judgment make those processes useful.

    Do explains a book of business in practical terms: the accounts that remain active and the relationships that can produce further work. It is more than a contact list. Its relevance lies in the commercial relationships behind the names, including previous clients who can be approached again.

    His description of systems is similarly concrete. There should be a process through which work can proceed without relying on one irreplaceable individual. If that person leaves, becomes ill, or is otherwise unavailable, the buyer should not discover that the supposed business was really access to a single human being.

    Yet his own attempted sale reveals a complication. Founder independence is not the same as freedom from all dependency. Another employee can become just as essential to the value a buyer sees.

    Do recalls receiving a seven-figure offer for his company. The prospective buyer wanted one particular employee to join as part of the transaction. That employee refused, and the sale did not happen.

    The decisive obstacle was not the founder's name. It was a person's decision.

    That story gives the discussion a sharper edge than a general endorsement of delegation. Moving work away from the founder does not automatically make every capability transferable. A company can stop depending on its owner while remaining exposed to the departure of another central contributor.

    It also changes how the team should be understood. Employees are not simply a cost that sits beneath the founder's reputation. In Do's experience, one employee represented enough of the acquisition's value that the transaction could not proceed without them.

    He does not present this as a comprehensive theory of mergers and acquisitions. Later, when discussing company size and saleability, he explicitly limits his authority to the creative businesses he knows. That restraint matters. His examples are operating experience, not universal acquisition criteria.

    The narrower lesson is still substantial. A buyer needs more than the promise that a founder has stepped back. The business must contain relationships, methods, and capabilities that can continue working together after a change in ownership. A neutral name cannot manufacture that continuity, just as a founder's initials do not automatically prevent it.

    A Different Name, the Same Starting Problem

    Cook named her agency in seconds. Do took a more deliberate route with his design company, Blind. The contrast is useful because both businesses initially faced the same underlying condition: their founders were the people clients expected to reach.

    For Do, Blind expressed a design philosophy developed while he was in school. The work should not begin with a predetermined answer. It should begin with the client conversation, before assumptions about the solution have hardened into a direction.

    The name also created a deliberate contradiction. A visual design company called Blind invited curiosity. It was a way to start a conversation about how the studio thought, rather than simply identify the person who owned it.

    None of that made the company independent at the beginning.

    Do was the business because he was the person doing the work. Clients wanted him involved and expected to speak with him. The thoughtful name described an ambition and an approach; it did not replace the need to build an organization.

    The separation happened through hiring and development. Do describes training people to do work he had previously handled, then gradually moving responsibility toward them. One intern became an art director, then a creative director, and eventually the principal point of contact.

    That progression is important. The handoff was not simply an announcement that clients should stop calling the founder. It followed an expansion of another person's capability and standing inside the company.

    Delegation includes transferring credibility, not just assigning tasks.

    Do reinforced that transfer publicly. When Blind showed its work, the credits included everyone who had contributed. His own name appeared as one credit among others, rather than as the organizing explanation for everything the company produced.

    In his telling, some clients eventually did not know he was involved at all. That was not evidence of a weakened company identity. It was evidence that other people had become credible representatives of the work.

    The movement from individual maker toward business builder also gives context to The Futur's Moving from Makers to Entrepreneurs. Here, the change is visible in who receives recognition, who speaks to the client, and whose judgment the organization is prepared to trust.

    Cook describes a less orderly beginning. First, she did not know how to hire. Then she did not know how to train. After that, she struggled to leave people alone. Each stage exposed a different obstacle, and solving one did not automatically solve the next.

    She estimates that she spent about three years getting those things wrong before booking a trip to Australia forced a more serious approach to systemizing the business. The travel she had wanted from the outset became a practical reason to change how the agency worked.

    The contrast between the two founders is not accidental naming versus intelligent naming. It is two routes toward the same operational requirement. Other people needed the ability, the standing, and the room to carry the company. Neither a descriptive set of initials nor a carefully chosen philosophy could do that work for them.

    The Founder Cannot Remain the Choke Point

    There is a stage at which a founder can remain close to nearly everything. Do describes the familiar small creative company where the owner knows every employee, has hired most or all of them, and still touches much of the work. That closeness can conceal how much the company depends on continuous personal intervention.

    His rough reference points are around 20 people and around $5 million in revenue. He calls them a rule of thumb, not a boundary that defines every business. He also acknowledges that a smaller team can generate substantially more revenue.

    The point is not the number itself. It is the change in what one person can reasonably hold together.

    As a company moves from a small team toward a much larger one, the owner cannot remain the approval point for every creative choice, strategy decision, and piece of writing. Hiring more people does not resolve that problem if they are all waiting for the same person to act.

    Do makes the absurdity vivid: the founder can end up paying a large team to watch the founder work. Capacity exists on paper, but authority has not moved. The company has expanded its payroll without expanding its ability to decide.

    Some owners respond by shrinking the business again. In Do's account, they return to a size at which personal control remains possible. That is a different choice from building an operation that can function beyond their direct involvement.

    At Blind, he describes a more deliberate separation. Four creative directors had room to run their work. They could seek his perspective, but that perspective was not automatically an instruction. An opinion from the founder was something to consider, not an order that displaced their judgment.

    “Because you don't want to create a dependent culture,” Do says.

    His approach contained clear reasons to involve him, rather than an open invitation to route every uncertainty upward:

    • Creative directors could call when they felt creatively stuck or needed another point of view.
    • They were required to involve him when a job appeared to be slipping away.
    • They were expected to make a serious effort to solve the problem before escalating it.

    Those conditions distinguish independence from abandonment. The founder remained available, but access had a purpose. His involvement was not supposed to become the default method for moving ordinary work forward.

    This is the operational side of the growth question signaled by How To Grow A Small Creative Agency. In Do's example, growth requires more than additional people. It requires a different relationship between the owner and the decisions those people are hired to make.

    He also resisted casual hovering. Checking over shoulders and offering unsolicited corrections would have told the team that independent authority was conditional on his constant satisfaction. Instead, the responsibility for requesting help sat with the creative directors.

    That did not mean he never intervened. He recalls joining difficult client conversations after the team had exhausted its options and helping close the project. The distinction was frequency and purpose: an experienced closer brought in for a specific problem, not a founder whose presence was required for normal business to occur.

    Founder Confidence Is Not a Job Title

    Cook introduces a phrase for something less visible than a process: founder vibes. At a gym where she had competed, she began talking with the person at the desk and discovered that he owned the place. Something about his manner had already suggested that relationship to the business.

    She wonders whether employees can learn to convey the same quality. The question reaches beyond confidence as presentation. An owner has a kind of authority that an employee does not automatically possess, even when both understand the work.

    Do responds with a memory from early in his career. While waiting at an editorial company's office, he encountered a woman who checked whether anyone knew he was there and offered him breakfast. He interpreted her ease and attention as signs of ownership, though the anecdote does not establish her role.

    What stayed with him was the willingness to act without making the interaction someone else's problem.

    His more consequential example concerns an alarm at an office. He recalls people remaining at their desks, looking around while the sound continued. After finishing what he was doing, he entered the room and told everyone to leave the building.

    The alarm turned out to be false. Afterward, he met with his management team and made the expectation explicit: when safety appears threatened, uncertainty is not a reason to leave everyone sitting in place.

    Do reads the incident as a contrast between following an established process and recognizing when action is needed outside one. That is his interpretation of a particular event, not proof that employees lack judgment. The management lesson lies in the expectation he had to articulate afterward.

    A rulebook cannot anticipate every situation. But expecting people to act beyond the rulebook creates another responsibility for the founder: they need to know what authority they have, and what will happen when they use it.

    Responsibility requires permission to exercise judgment.

    Do makes that expectation especially forceful with employees who deal directly with clients. He wants them to represent the company's principles rather than retreat into uncertainty whenever a customer challenges a decision.

    His examples reflect his own commercial posture:

    • Do not discount simply because a customer applies pressure.
    • Do not assume every complaint requires an extended defense.
    • Be prepared to refund a customer and end an unsuitable relationship.

    These are not presented as a universal customer-service script. They illustrate the gap between a founder who feels authorized to make a decision and a representative who believes every difficult interaction requires permission.

    There is a tension here. Earlier, Do rejects a culture that waits to discover what the founder wants. Now, he asks people to act in accordance with his principles. The distinction is between requesting a fresh answer and understanding the basis on which an answer can be made.

    Without that distinction, delegation becomes imitation. With it, the founder's standards can guide independent decisions without requiring the founder's presence. Cook's contribution is to identify what can still block the transfer: an employee who expects punishment for acting will not experience that authority the way an owner does.

    Make Independence Safe Enough to Practice

    Cook presses on the consequence of that imbalance. Founders can project certainty partly because they do not experience their own company as employees do. Someone who can be fired has a reason to hesitate that the owner does not share in the same way.

    Her question is whether psychological safety requires a promise that employees will not lose their jobs. Do refuses the blanket guarantee. Misconduct, inappropriate behavior, and a hostile working environment remain grounds for action, regardless of an employee's talent or financial value to the business.

    He says he has lost good people because of their behavior, even when doing so hurt the company financially. That detail matters because it establishes a boundary around the confidence he wants employees to develop. Acting with authority does not place anyone beyond accountability.

    The protection he offers is narrower. Employees should not fear being fired for making an ambitious attempt and taking a considered risk. In contrast, repeatedly choosing safety and doing only what has always been done can become a performance problem.

    Protect initiative without excusing misconduct.

    That resolves an important part of the conversation. A founder cannot demand independent judgment while making every imperfect decision feel dangerous. Nor can independence mean that standards of behavior disappear. The two forms of accountability need to remain distinct.

    The same distinction changes the meaning of a handoff. Transferring a task is easy to announce. Transferring authority requires the founder to tolerate decisions made without prior approval, including decisions that the founder would have handled differently.

    Cook's admission that she struggled to leave people alone captures the practical difficulty. Hiring and training were not the final steps. The next obstacle was her own behavior once someone else had the job.

    Her wider discussion with Do continues in The Costs of Being Internet Famous. Here, however, the relevant cost is not visibility itself. It is the operational burden created when a founder's importance becomes a requirement for everything to proceed.

    The practices described across their two companies offer a concrete sequence of work, without requiring a new name or a disappearance from public view:

    • Train people to perform work previously handled by the founder.
    • Move client contact toward capable team members as their responsibilities grow.
    • Credit contributors publicly so the company is not understood as one person's output.
    • Define when escalation is necessary and when the team should decide.
    • Give advice without automatically turning it into a directive.
    • Distinguish ambitious attempts from conduct the company cannot accept.

    These practices also give Cook's travel story its significance. Booking Australia did not supply a better brand strategy. It created a reason to confront the dependencies that her everyday presence had allowed to continue.

    Do's account of Blind points toward the same test from another direction. The company could continue while he taught or pursued other work because other people had become legitimate centers of responsibility. His role remained available without remaining universal.

    A founder does not need to become invisible. The founder needs to stop being the only acceptable answer.

    Before another naming debate, examine the decisions waiting for the owner, the clients who will speak to nobody else, and the employees who carry responsibility without authority. Those are the places where independence is either being built or quietly refused.

    The name can stay. The dependency cannot.

    TRANSCRIPT

    I think that so many people avoid building their personal brand because they think it's going to make their business reliant on them and I feel like when I was building my agency which I accidentally named after me people would ask me this all the time like oh whoa your name your initials and it would be this really big problem and I feel like you might have been asked this question as well or a variant of this question and I feel like there's so much more to it than just personal brand equals can't get away from your business or business reliant on you that I thought it would be a really good topic for us to dig into today there's a couple ways we could look at this I think many entrepreneurs solopreneurs build a business and the easy name is to call it something after yourself like no and associates or like how attorneys and ad agencies do this and it's just a bunch of last names put together and then eventually they grow and they grow to a certain point or they think they want to exit or sell or be acquired or something like that so let's just unpack that without adding more personal brand in there because if we can understand that then we can just see what the difference is with a personal brand so you sold your company I sold my company it was called jc social media my name's jody cook it was actually my initials but I named it completely by accident I named it in two seconds when I was at a networking event when I realized I didn't have a company name I felt like I needed a company name everyone in the room was introducing themselves it was about to be my turn I sensed a pattern with all the businesses in the room that they were all called ml accountancy and jp entertainment and js electrical services and that kind of stuff and I just kind of went okay jc social media and that was literally it there was no more thought that went into it whatsoever and then also I feel like it's like the ad agencies like sterling cooper draper price however many more last names were added electrical services and that kind of stuff and I just kind of went okay JC social media and that was literally it there was no more thought that went into it whatsoever and then also I feel like it's like the ad agencies like Sterling Cooper Draper Price however many more last names were added onto that but then also my great -granddad had a family business that was named using their last name and so it's just so unbelievably common that people do this and it's almost like we've got this this idea that this is the way to name a business yes because it doesn't require a lot of creative input from the person and most businesses are not started by creative entrepreneurs they're started by entrepreneurs and so they go with their last name so if your name is baked into your business and we can just look at history and say they seem to be doing fine without the founders and the owners in the company anymore so what are we worried about when it's called Sterling Draper Price Cooper or whatever it's called and Draper's not in it Sterling's not in it it seems to be fine so what people are really buying are systems a book of business and they're usually buying the talents that's part of that team that's really what they're buying so a book of business if you're not familiar with that term it means the accounts that you have that are valid and open and that you can count on for some reliable income so they want to see that they basically it's like your rolodex or your address book of current and previous clients that they can call upon and kind of rekindle the relationship they're buying that they're buying the system and the system is something that can be repeated and there's a process in place so that they know when input a goes in output z comes out and you have something set up and it's not tied to a specific person because then they can't buy the business because that person would get sick quit or suddenly pass away they'd have a huge problem and then not in this order but the last is the talent who's there because they're buying the brain trust they're buying the creatives the engineers the legal team they're buying that entire team because without that team the process and the book of business are quite useless and I know this because when I tried to sell my business when someone had offered me seven figures to buy my business they wanted one key employee there's the legal team. They're buying that entire team because without that team, the process and the book of business are quite useless. And I know this because when I tried to sell my business, when someone had offered me seven figures to buy my business, they wanted one key employee and that key employee refused to go. So I'm like, I'm screwed. So of course I didn't sell my company because of that. We asked ourselves, how active is Dan Whiten? And I don't even know who Kennedy is, but how active are they in Whiten and Kennedy and running Nike ads? They're pretty old now. And we talk about Saatchi and Saatchi or Foote Coleman and Belding or any one of these legacy Ogilvy. Well, David Ogilvy is dead. Agency continues on without him. So we're talking about reality now. It's a liability to have it tied to one person. We don't expect Roy Kroc, the person who really built McDonald's to be making the burgers. We don't expect Howard Schultz to be the barista, the founder of Starbucks. It just doesn't make any sense. And here's the best example, the poster boy of them all, the one of the most charismatic humans who've ever lived. We didn't expect Steve Jobs to be designed in computers, circuit boards, or even to write the copy for the advertising. Yet he was so linked with Apple's fortunes that when he died, I was really worried the Apple stock was going to tank. So much so that when it dipped and it went back up, I sold. Foolishly, I sold. And now Apple's worth so much more without Steve Jobs than it ever was. It's a $3 trillion company under Tim Cook, who arguably doesn't have much of a spark or a personal brand at all. And it's because humans are a little bit smarter than that, that there's engineers, designers, designers, user experience designers, packaging designers, all these kinds of people who make the thing work. There's a figurehead and we know that it's just a figurehead. There are some cases that I do want to talk about this. Okay. You know who Seth Godin is? Prolific writer. He's written over 20 books. He has a company called Alt MBA and people sign up in droves and Seth doesn't run it. He doesn't touch it. All he does is say hello at the beginning and says, congratulations at the end. So what he's done is he's established a system and a framework that works without him. That's what real entrepreneurs do. They build companies that aren't tying everything to themselves. It's hard. And people sign up in droves and Seth doesn't run it. He doesn't touch it. All he does is say hello at the beginning and says congratulations at the end. So what he's done is he's established a system and a framework that works without him. That's what real entrepreneurs do. They build companies. They're not tying everything to themselves. It's hard to be a big company and have everything be about you. It's kind of impossible. There are actors who will put in a different category where their face, their likeness is their bread and butter. So that's a different thing. So their companies are really built around them. So should they perish? We don't want the carbon copy of that person. We just want that person. I get that. There's this thing called the effective span of management. Are you familiar with that concept, Jodi? No, maybe not. Like how many people you can actively manage properly and you can count them on one hand. It's five. So in business management, there's this rule that you can only manage five people well. So if you look at the C -suite, there's about five people that the CEO kind of manages, right? CRO, CTO, CFO, and CMO. So there's about five people that can manage and those five people manage five people. Those are the senior VPs. Then you have senior VPs. And then you go to VPs. And the VPs go to something else, something else. And it just keeps going like that. And if you look at government, it's exactly how government is done. There's basically five people who report to the boss and then five people. So that's how it starts to mushroom out. When you're under 20 people, under $5 million in revenue, one person can effectively sort of, not effectively, but they can sort of manage each and every single person. They still know everyone's name. They probably hired everybody. They're going to fire everybody. And it's not really a company that is easily sold. It usually has some problems. Now, I'm sure there's M &A people out there listening to this, mergers and acquisitions. People are like, no, no, Chris, you don't know what you're talking about. And then I would bow to you and say, of course I don't. I really don't. And I'm just reflecting on the businesses that I'm aware of in the creative space who really the company cannot survive without them. Not for any period of time. I just want to repeat back to you to make sure I understand your thinking. So when it's below around 5 million, that's when it's kind of a lifestyle business. It probably couldn't survive without the founder simply because of the size of it. It's a rule of thumb. Around 20 people, around $5 million. You can do $20 million and you're running a really good company under 20 people. But once you start going between 20 to 100, around 5 million, that's when it's kind of a lifestyle business. It probably couldn't survive without the founder simply because of the size of it. It's a rule of thumb around 20 people, around $5 million. You can do $20 million and you're running a really good company under 20 people. But once you start going between 20 to a hundred people, you can't be the choke point anymore. It just doesn't work. When all decisions are being made by you, your hands are in all the creative work, the strategy, the writing, then basically you pay 99 people to sit around and watch you work, which you can do. But I don't think a lot of businesses do that. So what they do is they let those people go and they shrink the team back down to 20 because they want to retain control. Now, a tale of two cities is this. Jody starts her company when she's young and she calls it JC social media. I start my company when I'm young. I call it blind. So you can see like, okay, we already diverge because I was like, I want a name that means something. My name doesn't mean anything except for means me. And I call it blind because it stands for philosophy, which I've embraced when I was in school. It's kind of the modernist point of view on design, which is we don't begin the project with preconceived ideas or notions. We begin when we talk to you. Therefore, we begin blind. And that's why we called it. Plus, we thought it would be a total zag in the market when you're a visual design company called yourself blind. It raises some eyebrows and it starts some dialogue. There's a pattern here in terms of how I think about my company's name. So from the very beginning, blind is Chris Doe because it's just me, right? And people are like, we need to talk to Chris every single time they need to talk to me. But as you may know something about me, I start to develop systems pretty quickly, hire people. I train them on how to do what I do. And I just do the gentle handoff. And then before you know it, I have an intern who becomes an art director, who becomes a creative director, who then becomes the main point of contact. In some cases, people don't even know I exist anymore. And I make a point to promote and talk about all the creatives and use super inclusive language and make sure I give proper credit to every single person. In a pretty rare move at that time, when we would show work, we would list every single person who worked and contributed to the project. Whereas I made it a point where I would be one credit of many credits. And so in that case, for many years, I would just kind of... to every single person. In a pretty rare move at that time, when we would show work, we would list every single person who worked and contributed to the project. Whereas I made it a point where I would be one credit of many credits. And so in that case, for many years, I would just kind of disappear into the darkness. I could teach, I could do whatever I wanted, and the company would hum along. The general rule was, we don't call Chris unless it's an emergency. And when they called me in, and it was an emergency, and they got the explanation as to why we don't do that. I said, I hired smart people. Smart people are in this room. Smart people can solve this problem. I'm leaving. Because you don't want to create a dependent culture on what does Chris want to do. So the general rule is, I don't check on you, you check on me. I'm not a hover boss. And what that means is, I'm not going to sneak up behind you like, oh, what are you working on? Oh, I think this could be better. I'm not sure this writing is sharp. Basically, I told my creative directors, and there were four of them at the time. I said, call me if you feel creatively stuck or you need a different point of view. And when I give you my point of view, it's not directive, like you must do this thing. It's just for you to consider. Because I want you to use your brain. And the only other time they would call me is when they felt, and this was literally what I said, if the job is slipping through our hands and you can feel it, you are obligated to call me in. But do everything in your power not to call me. And they would call me from time to time. I would be like the wolf from Pulp Fiction. I'd come in, I'd clean up the dead body, and we're like, we're out. We're good. So sometimes they're like, we did every test. We've had five conversations with the client. They're not ready to say yes. I would get on the phone with them, and I would just talk them through, and then we would just close the project. Because I knew how people worked. There's some things you say to people, and if you say those magic phrases, they will say yes. Move, you muppet! Alexa, traffic has me famished and furious. Remain calm and think of sushi. I can book a table nearby. Thanks, Alexa. Move! Shall I play that hangar management podcast again? Good idea, you cheeky... The all -new Alexa Plus gets you and gets things done. I may... Alexa, traffic has me famished and furious. Remain calm and think of sushi. I can book a table nearby. Thanks, Alexa. Move! Shall I play that hangar management podcast again? Good idea, you cheeky... The all -new Alexa Plus gets you and gets things done. I made so many mistakes. So I was 22 when I started this agency. I feel like at first I didn't know how to hire, then I feel like I didn't know how to train people, then I didn't know how to leave them alone. So I just sort of made all the mistakes. And having started a business that I wanted to create so that I could travel, I created something that was just a job for me with all these dependencies. But it took me a long time of learning those lessons. I would say like three years of doing it wrong before I had to book a trip to Australia to get myself to systemize my business and to get a handle on how I got the people in it to own it. Have you heard the phrase, founder vibes? No. So I competed at the weekend and I got chatting to the person who was on the desk and it turned out he actually owned the gym. And it's like, you could just tell he just gave off founder vibes and I don't know what it was. And I wonder if sometimes we don't realize how much founder vibes we've got. Can you even train other people to have founder vibes? Unless you give them equity, they're not going to be part owner. So therefore, how do you do it? Well, I think you're right in that people can sense you must be the owner. Founder sounds nicer, but whoever started the company, you have a lot of power. I remember when I was maybe a year or two out of school, I went to this editorial company who I didn't know at the time, but it turned out to be a pretty big deal called Rock, Paper, Scissor. And I was there to either drop off a tape or meet with somebody about something I can't remember. And I was there, I was like in the lobby and this woman walks out barefoot and says, honey, are you okay? I'm like, huh? Because I was just waiting. Like I'm some lowly messenger boy, kind of a gopher, you know, something like that. She goes, do you need anything? Would you like breakfast? I'm like, no. Because I was just too shy to say yes. I did want breakfast, but I just couldn't say it. She goes, okay. And is somebody aware that you're here? I'm like, yes. And she goes, okay. And she walked away. I felt she was an owner. something like that. She goes, do you need anything? Would you like breakfast? I'm like, no, because I was just too shy to say yes. I did want breakfast, but I just couldn't say it. She goes, okay. And is somebody aware that you're here? I'm like, yes. And she goes, okay. And she walked away. I felt she was an owner. And I'll tell you something that owners do that non -owners don't do. Owners aren't process people. There are people who are very good at following directions, as long as there's a rule book or a guide, they will do an excellent job and the world needs them. But the minute something's not in a book, they don't know what to do because there's not a rule for this. The example is this. One day I was, um, I don't remember where I was, but I was walking around an office. It's a pretty big office. It's like, um, like 12 ,000 square foot and some alarm goes off. I can't remember what I was doing, but as soon as I finished doing what I do did, I ran into the room and every single designer and every person in the building was sitting there, like still working, but looking around, like, I think that's a fire alarm guys. Everybody get up right now. Get out of the building. Just drop what you're doing. Get out. Get your, whatever you need and just get out right now. And then they all got up and they're like looking around and then get out and we're outside in the street. And then the fire department came and said something got tripped, but it was not on a fire. Thank God they came in, reset the alarm. It was a false alarm. All was good. Everybody went back in. Then I had a meeting with my management team. I said, Hey guys, whenever there's a threat to someone's safety and you're not even sure, and you're not even like, it could be a 40 % threat. I need you to get everybody to safety. So that is process people because they just follow the rules. Like there's no protocol for a weird alarm sound and we don't know what to do. So they just, they just kept working because if one person doesn't get up, no one gets up. And I think what happens is what founders are able to do is just look through all the weeds or the forest. And like that, there's a tree right there. That's a tree. And this is what we need to do. We need to grow that tree or we need to chop that tree down. And we know. So when we meet those people, we can tell, and they have a confidence that they can't get fired. They have that confidence. Whereas your second in command, your chief fill in the blank officer, they don't have that kind of security. Here's the thing that's going to be really hard for people. And we know. So when we meet those people, we can tell. And they have a confidence that they can't get fired. They have that confidence. Whereas your second in command, your chief fill in the blank officer, they don't have that kind of security. Here's the thing that's going to be really hard for people to get their head wrapped around this, okay? Really, really hard. I say to my team who are frontline people, people who are interfacing with clients or customers, I say, you represent me. I need you to know that. They're like, what? You represent me. And I'll tell you what that means. I'm confident. I don't discount. I don't explain myself. I don't have time for fools. I just don't. But you're discounting. You're listening to their complaints. I won't ever do that. So you're acting like you. You're not acting like me. You're not a good representative of this company right now. You're a good representative of you. And you're unsure. And you're insecure. And every complaint sounds real and righteous to you. And when they want an explanation, you give it to them. Whereas a founder walks in and is like, what's the problem? Oh, we're not sure. Here's your money back. I wish you the best of luck. And they're like, how can we do that? Because that's what we do. That's what I would do. So when you're out there working, I need you to act as me. So when people are complaining, what do I do? I want you to ask yourself, what would Christo do? Yeah. That works. Yes, it does. Right? And that's the thing they don't understand. They got that relationship flipped. They think you represent them. That's not how this works. So when they're not playing big, when they're not being confident, they for sure don't have founder vibes, but they're doing the company a disservice. Acting in the best interest of this company based on the principles and philosophies of the founder. They almost need the psychological safety from the founder to act in the theme and the vibe of the founder. But then would you also say that they need the psychological safety, that they're not going to get fired? Yeah. So would you say you're not going to get, obviously you're not going to get fired for specific things, but would you ever blanket say, I will never, ever going to fire you so that they don't have that fear? Because we know that people don't do. would you also say that they need the psychological safety that they're not going to get fired? Yeah. So would you say, you're not going to get, obviously you're not going to get fired for specific things, but would you ever blanket say, I will never, ever going to fire you so that they don't have that fear? Because we know that people don't do their best work from a state of fear. No, because I will fire you. I'm not going to say that. I'll say something else, but I'm not going to say that because if you do something inappropriate, I'm firing you. I have to, otherwise I'm liable. If you misbehave, if you grope somebody, if you make it a hostile work environment, I'll warn you and then you're going to get fired. I just can't have it. We've done this before. We've lost good people because they didn't behave well. I did not want to do that. hurt me. It hurt us financially too, by the way. So what I tell people is this, you will never, ever get fired for taking a shot at playing big and rolling the dice. You will get fired if you play it safe and you just keep doing what you've done forever.
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    “It's hard to be a big company and have everything be about you.”

    — Chris Do

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    ENTREPRENEURSHIP

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