Latest / Glovisor Podcast / Entrepreneurs, Are You Leading Your Family Like You Lead Your Business? - Blake Allsmith [Ep 84]
Transcript
- Blake and Chandler Allsmith: What if the leadership ability that you have been given, which is truly a gift, what if that was actually meant first and foremost to be deployed in leading your family like an organization? Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Welcome to the Glovisor Podcast, where we explore business growth, communication, and personal development through real conversations with people who make an impact. Our guest is an entrepreneur who has built, grown, and exited a tech company, led marketing teams, and now the co-author of The Family Framework, written with his wife, Chandler, Glovisor Welcomes, Blake. Allsmith Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Thanks for having me. Excited to chat with you today. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: likewise. All right, Blake, before we get started and talking about the book, who are you and what do you do when you're not writing? Blake and Chandler Allsmith: I do a lot when I'm not writing. I feel like I'd like to write more. I am a father, first and foremost. So Blake Allsmith, father of seven kids, ages fifteen down to one. So we're still in the thick of it. And I'm also an entrepreneur. So I've founded three companies, sold two, and right now working in AI. So I'm working on the marketing side of an AI company called synthweave.ai. So we're kind of like a marketing AI technology, essentially you like a marketing Jarvis, if you will. So I spent a lot of my time on that. Outside of that, from a hobby standpoint, I do Brazilian jujitsu. with two of my sons, we do that together three or four days a week early in the mornings. And I don't know, we just like playing outdoors, doing kind of the family thing. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: you're saying I was into the tech and I built these companies and I sold them. Now I'm into AI, but by the way, I also authored a book. So how do you have the time to do all this? Number one, with seven kids. And what is it about your brain that it's it's putting you in all these different places in and you're successful to tap it all off? Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Yeah. Well, first off, to write have the time to write a book is really how did I have the time to write a book two years ago? Because the process of writing a book versus publishing a book is kind of interesting. So if we go back two years, summer twenty twenty four, I was running a marketing agency. We had a little bit of a dry spell. It's kind of like that August period where everybody's on vacation. And so I was like, I have time right now available. So rather than bang my head against the wall trying to do sales while everyone's on vacation, maybe I should just write down these questions that people have been asking. So I've been writing a newsletter for four years. And on it, I always give one thing from an entrepreneurship I'm thinking about, one thing kind of like from a life hack kind of personal growth standpoint, and one thing about family. And what I've noticed is as this newsletter's grown, it went from, you know, a couple hundred people to now over seventeen thousand, the number one thing I get replies about is always that third point around family. And I guess I had an epiphany 15 years ago where I realized that my my role as CEO of a startup. actually is beneath my role as CEO of a young family. Like I'm the leader of this family, an organization that will actually last far outlast any company I start. So what if I were take the same level of intentionality that I put on my business and put it onto my family and start treating it more like a the organization that it is. And that has shaped a lot of the way my wife Chandler and I have done parenting, have led our family and the rhythms that we have. And it's actually led to a decent amount of thriving. And so I think that That framework seems to be resonating specifically, I think, with maybe founders of businesses, leaders of businesses, or just executives who experience this, the enjoyment of competence in the workplace and maybe want to have that same level of competence at home. Because the truth is that a lot of people who are incredibly smart, incredibly successful, still struggle in the home. And that's that's puzzling to me. And so I this I'm trying to present a framework as maybe a way to have success in both. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: No, I totally get it. So here you are, August, you have a little time, you jot these things down. Did you just like drive home and say, let's have a board meeting and this is why we're gonna do things moving forward? Blake and Chandler Allsmith: that happened, gosh, I guess 15 years ago when my son was born. That was also six months later, I quit my job at a hedge fund and started a company. And so for me, the path of leading a company and leading my family has gone hand in hand the entire time. And so every time I got a new framework, you know how it is, leading a company, you're like Googling how to fire somebody and then firing somebody at 8 a.m. the next morning. Like you're like, You're always learning on the fly. Every framework I received, because I mean, entrepreneurship is filled with these frameworks. Everyone I received, I was like, I wonder if I could fit that on our family in some way. And some of them worked, some of them didn't work. Actually, some went horribly wrong, like the time that I tried to time block my wife's schedule by 15 minute increments when she was nursing to, you know, a child. she didn't love that. That did not work well at all. But but we just kind of kept trying and trying to see. And what we found was that just kind of increased our capacity and gave us more energy. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: the kids don't know any different, right? This is it. They were born right into this framework system. And Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Yeah. Yeah. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: this is how they see the world. So how how are they, when they interact with other children, are are are they having board meetings with their friends? Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Right, right. I mean in reality, children are children and the vast majority of their life is just like the life of any other kid who, you know, we we live in northern Kentucky, we homeschool our kids, the kids are outside most of the time. Like they're just kind of living the free wielding life. Our our family does not feel if you were to come over, it doesn't feel like a company or a startup. There are a handful of rhythms that they're used to. so for instance, every day at breakfast, can I do a morning stand-up? And so it's like, okay. Hey, I'm gonna do a quick reading, you know, kind of talk about a couple things. And then from there, I'll say, okay, here's the plan for the day. You know, we'll look at the calendar, here's what everybody's got. I'm does anybody is anybody blocked on anything? Does anybody need anything from mom or from pop before we kind of start our day from a school day standpoint and that sort of thing? It's like that's a very basic thing. I I happen to learn that by doing lean startup and doing stand-ups you know, with my company. But the truth is though like that's just a helpful rhythm. So I don't I don't think that they feel especially different or weird. It's just these little rhythms that kind of help create clarity and maybe remove some chaos, especially in a large family. when you got seven kids, you kind of need to do that or die. So Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: You have to be a little bit more efficient in order to make sure you you address everyone, for sure. Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Yes, exactly. Yeah, it sometimes it feels like a presidential press conference. You know, soon I'm like, does anybody have any questions? And everyone's like, Mr. President, Mr. President, Mr. President. Like, I'm like, no more questions at this time, no more questions at this time. I to just leave the stage. Otherwise it'll go on forever. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: I want to look behind the curtain a little bit. You co-wrote this with your wife. How do you do that? I mean logistically, Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Yeah. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: because here you are, you have your thoughts and your mindsets, your frameworks and your experiences from work, but she's also a co CEO of the home. And she's been Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Yes. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: doing her process and her framework. So how did you put those together? Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Yeah. I I'd say first I'd say the idea of the book came from her. we actually were on a camping trip. you and I'd mentioned earlier today that we go camping only once a year. So but we were on a camping trip and she was like, Hey, I just feel like we've got these concepts. It seems to be working. We should at least write this stuff down and share it to somebody, you know, maybe a Google doc. So it was her idea. So I I took the lion's share of the writing first draft. So I would go to a coffee shop every morning, you know, eight AM to ten AM, and I would just write. and I try to I almost pictured it like a bunch of blog posts. And then once we put the kids to bed at night, you know, call it 8 30, we'd sit on the couch and I would read it all out loud to her. Whatever I wrote that day, I read out loud to her. And then she would kind of edit in time, real time with me. We would discuss it together. And then every chapter, I left like a big chunk where I'm like, all right, I want to hear from your perspective on this framework. How have you made it your own? Where has it been difficult for you? And so there's kind of like I would say the vast majority is written by me, edited together, and then she has a part that's purely hers, where she kind of writes her kind of two cents on each of the tools. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: So who did you write the book for? Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Yeah, I would say probably parents of elementary age kids in particular, I think is that's where a lot of the logistics i is really important. and I would say especially if you're a startup founder, you're gonna be really familiar with a lot of these frameworks. And so it's like one to one. That's the prime prospect. If you're not a startup founder, if you're just an executive who likes getting stuff done and work and maybe enjoys competence and struggles to get that same level of satisfaction in the home, it's for that person for sure. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: when was that defining moment when you started your startup companies and you Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Mm-hmm. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: decided that you wanted to grow and eventually exit? when was that moment that you decided to exit to make that change and shift? Because you've done a couple of different things. So I want to know what made that turn. Because some people Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Mm. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: sometimes do startups and that's their baby and they want to stick with it for life. But you've exited. Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in reality, I ours was a venture backed startup called Cladwell. Started it in twenty eleven. And w the moment you take venture capital, you are essentially saying, I'm gonna either go public and exit or I'm gonna sell and exit. Right. So this is it's a pre written commitment. And venture capital is kind of like the worst bank on earth. The name of the game is you give a hundred times their money or it within seven years, or they fire you and find somebody who can. Right. And so it's it's a very difficult kind of high stakes game. And so we received venture capital from some of the best VCs in the world. So Science Incorporated, who backed us along with like Dollar Shave Club, Me Undies, Liquid Death. And so they're coming off of a billion dollar exit with Dollar Shave Club, like they're expecting the same thing from us. And so in reality, is you know, we we were able to get to a place of kind of default alive and like a decent amount of revenue, but we were so far from being a billion dollar company. And so, you know, after trying to pivot and break the model and figure out what's our kind of breakout way, it ended up being our the Mike Jones from Science, who was on our board, kind of made the call. And he's like, hey, this is not going to be a billion-dollar company. It is a thing. We should let the team exist. We should let the product exist, let the customers exist, but this is not venture worthy. So he refused to put any more dollars in. And so at that point, he's like, We're already partnered with 90% of the people who would potentially buy us. Let's run a quick process. You know, no, no harm, no foul. You know, let's let's try again. But that's kind of the name of the game. So that exit was. In many ways, not a successful exit, right? it didn't return the fund for anybody, but it was kind of a base hit, right? It's kind of like, all right, sold that company, let's get on to the next thing. And so I'd say it was kind of pre-written. Now the agency that I just sold to Synth Weave, that's a little bit different. And that was fully boot bootstrapped, fully owned by me. And that really came down to I did not want in this era of AI, I don't want to just be a consumer A of AI. I want to be a purveyor of AI. I want to benefit from the upside of this. This is the biggest opportunity I think we're gonna see in our generation in terms of a new technology. And I'm an entrepreneur. So I need to be a part of this thing. And so when they kind of I started using their tool and it greatly increased my capacity as a marketer. And so I was like, heck, like this is amazing. You know, I'm Brian Bigelow, the guy who founded it, he and I have been friends for a decade. So as we started talking through it, we were like, hey, maybe it makes more sense for us to kind of combine and work together. So that was an all-stock deal, but it's something that's totally worth it for me. From an upside standpoint, I'm very excited about it. And I I need to be playing. I Y Combinator, they always talk about this thing of like ninety percent of the growth that you're gonna experience is depending on which river you jump into. And if the ripper river's moving fast, you're gonna move fast no matter what. And this is the fastest moving river I've ever seen as an entrepreneur for now fifteen years. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: how do you benefit as a purveyor Blake and Chandler Allsmith: our neck technology is essentially a marketing department AI. And so what happens is that anybody who's in your marketing department can now, rather than having just like a co-pilot alongside them, I which is I think how most people are using AI with ChatGPT or Claude or something like that, but there's not a shared context layer. There aren't shared skills that are going across the entire organization. And when a person leaves the company, they take their knowledge with them. This is essentially one shared AI that is actually layered on top of a Chat GPT. or a Claude or anybody else. We layer it on top, but it's a shared context layer that then gets smarter and smarter the more marketers who are working on it. And you can train these skills to essentially increase your capacity. And so we're selling that, which is essentially an agent harness that's on top of that. And so because of that, I'm I'm selling AI. I'm not just using AI. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Interesting. Now, Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Yeah. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: during those different projects that you worked on, what would you say was the biggest challenge and the biggest lesson that you picked up from those two? Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Goodness. I I'd say in the first company, I I would say that I really did a lot of delaying of a good life because I was shooting for a billion dollar exit someday. And so I'd say that in terms of my prioritizing of our our life at home, what I did was I essentially said, Hey, we're gonna hold our breath. You know, we we took out a HELOC in our house. We like, we're fully to the hilt to try to push this thing so that we can someday maybe get this thing over the horizon. That thing over the horizon didn't actually pan out. And so after looking at eight years of being a CEO, I was kind of like, man, was that really worth it? Was that a good idea? Or did I kind of was that maybe a fool's game? And so I think there's a big pivot that happened after that where I started saying, no, I I owe it to my family and to my marriage and to this world to like build and structure a good life here and live good weeks on repeat as I build something new. And so I think I started maybe prioritizing thriving in the here and now. while aiming towards something together. And I think that was probably the biggest lesson that I learned there. On the agency side, the biggest lesson that I learned was it's really easy to scale an agency. All you have to do is lower your bar for who you're willing to work with and lower the bar of who you will are willing to hire. And you can scale real fast and then you explode and nobody likes you and nobody wants to work with you. So scale is not the issue. The issue is that the only thing that matters with an agency is you have to grow the company's bottom line. If you can grow their revenue, everything else works out. You get referrals. You won't grow maybe super fast, but you will build a compounding rhythm. But that takes a lot of attention to the customer's business. And so I had to learn that the hard way in some ways. I think I scaled a little too fast and then had to back off and say, no, I we have to serve the c it's a services business. You have to serve the customer. And that's kind of the true north. And if you can be highly skilled, top 10% in the world at, you know, whatever type of service you're providing for me was marketing, everything else works itself out. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: I like that how you went right back from quantity back to quality and it's the focus. Well, but lowering the bar you can really get some serious numbers. Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Yes. Yes. you can get a lot of customers real fast. Yeah. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: how your newsletter. I find that so interesting that you went from hundreds to thousands. Was that something that you followed along from the your first ventured and and you had people just following you through that process and then moved on to your next venture? How did that work and how do you grow a newsletter? Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Yeah, the I I've tried multiple times to figure out like what's a con I I do think having an owned audience is a very powerful thing for an entrepreneur to have that stays with you throughout every organization you build. Owning your own audience is huge. So like what you're doing here, incredibly powerful. It is an asset. It and it's what even better than most assets is it doesn't actually take any cash to generate it. You just have to kind of put yourself out there. And so I'd say The best time to build an audience is about 15 years ago. And the second best time to build an audience is today. And so if anybody's thinking about it, they should do it. the reason I chose a newsletter and the format that I did was that a friend of mine asked, What is something that you could do every week for the rest of your life effortlessly? And if you come over to my house tomorrow, I'll have three things on my mind. And then I'll be like, Hey, I've been thinking about this thing from a startup standpoint. I'm thinking about this life hack, I'm thinking about family. These are the things that I care about, and I'm constantly pitching my friends. on stuff. And so it is just, it's an extension of my personality. This is something I will do for the rest of my life. And I want to do that. And so that because of that, the consistency could stay on there. And then just paying attention to what do people respond to? When do people, you know, get offended or when do people get bothered or people have clarifying questions. And you kind of learn over time to, you know, to make this of service. And so for me, I literally write my newsletter every Friday in real time. So I write and then I hit send right then. And so I don't pre-schedule it. I don't have it scheduled out months in advance or anything like that. And so it lets me stay kind of connected to these actual people. And when they reply, you know, there's 17,000 people. When they reply, it goes straight into my email inbox. And so I actually am in constant conversation. It's a way to build kind of relationships at scale and the find commonalities with people at scale. in terms of you asked how to build the audience in particular, the biggest thing for me was finding a lead magnet that actually resonated with people. And so my lead magnet is our family dashboard. So if you go to theallsmiths.com, you can put in your email address. Look at my pitch right here. Put in your email address and you can get our Google Docs, you know, a Google spreadsheet of all the frameworks that are in our book, as well as videos that explain everything that we do, how we do it, and you can try to implement it with your family for free at theallsmiths.com. So I run ads on Meta to get that that spreadsheet, and I'm getting new emails for like ninety cents a piece and I've been doing that for, you know, she's two years and it kind of keeps on building and building from there. I have a couple, you know, courses and stuff that I kinda sell to pay for those ads. And so it's it's not I don't see a world where I'm getting to a million subscribers, but it kind of has been slowly compounding and there are people sharing and it kind of keeps on rolling. And so I I see it as a very good use of time. It takes me what, an hour to write it every week. And what an asset. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: It sounds like it's a private book and your journaling on an ongoing basis and everyone gets to peek in and and see Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Yeah. Yes. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: what you're thinking. Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Yeah, and they always say, like if you really want to understand something, you need to be able to teach others. And so for me it is a way of kind of chewing on my learnings every single week. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: going back to the book, have you shared the book with anyone? What are the reviews you're starting to hear What's the feedback? Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Yeah. It's one of two. People either absolutely love it. my gosh, this is what I've been looking for. I can just implement these things right away. Or this is the worst thing I've ever heard. You might be Satan and like family should be spontaneous and should not have any structure or order. And I'm offended you even exist. Like it's one or the other for sure. And I think that that's like the key to a good idea. A good idea needs to be a little bit polarizing. And so I would say, The folks who maybe are familiar with these frameworks, maybe they tend to see the value in it. But those who maybe have maybe had like we recommend having a mission vision values for your family. If you've had to make a mission, vision values for an organization, you know how powerful that is. If you've got some lip surface version of a mission, vision values in your big company that was kind of thrust upon you and you're like, this is all just marketing speak, that person is maybe a little bit more jaded at some of these tools. And they're like, why would I even do that? And so I think some of it has to do with a person's experience with some of these frameworks beforehand. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: is this something that I can read and start instituting into my family life immediately, or is this something that I have to read the whole book through and then plan out for the next six months? Blake and Chandler Allsmith: right. No, this is a list of sixteen tools. These are all tools that have that have been proven to work for multiple years for a family of seven that I think can be used right away in your marriage and in your family to help create order, combat chaos. So I'd say it's absolutely useful. I would not recommend reading the book and implementing every single tool in order. In the same way I would re not recommend going to the hardware store and just going down, well, let's go through aisle one and buy everything on aisle one. Let's go through aisle two, but these are tools. And so tools need to be mapped to a problem that you have. So identify the problem you have and implement that tool that is appropriate to solve that problem. Right. And so we we end up mapping out kind of four main areas of problems, which are, you know, relationship, direction, which is are we on the same page going the same way? I'd say systems of you know accountability, like are we actually making traction? And then finally operations, which is, you know, kind of the clickbaity stuff of like, hey, are we can we get in the car? in an efficient amount of time, or does it take us forty five minutes to get in the car, right? You know, meals, dishes, that type of thing. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Now I always like to have that other side of it, the devil's advocate side of it, Blake This is what some people may think. You have a young family. They learn from the beginning. As soon as they were born, they were ready to sit at the boardroom and get started. What happens now for me? I have a 14, 15-year-old. We've already gone through our process. We have our ways, the way we run our family. How can I now read your book and roll this out into my family? Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Yeah. I mean, so in order, we actually roll these out in order for a reason, which is the number one thing is relationships. If you look at the study that was done by Google, I think in the early 2010s, they found that there was one attribute that actually results in teams operating the best together. It was not IQ, it was not pedigree, it was not even shared language or something like that. It was what they called relational safety. And so when a team has relational safety, they can entertain different ideas and the outcome of the team ends up being better than any other outcome. So we start with relationships, which is like, okay, how do we make sure we're connected on a weekly basis? And so we recommend having one-on-ones with your spouse and also one-on-ones weekly with each of your kids. And so in that, this is some of it's just unstructured time of like, hey, do I have 30 minutes, 45 minutes an hour where I can just have open conversation? I would say if you implement that with your teen, they've never had anything like that. That is not going to go poorly, or it might go poorly from time to time, but it is it is going to benefit your relationship and help you get on the same page more and more. So that'd be an example of that. we talk about how to conflict well in a relationship, which is what does it look like to always have the person's back in public, right? A unified front, but then also have radical candor at home, right? So inviting, you know, your 14 or 15 year old, saying, Hey, I want you to have radical candor with me. I don't want you to worry about, you know, disrespecting me or hurting my feelings or worrying about how I perceive you. I want to know the truth of what you actually think when it's behind closed doors. But when we're out in public, we always have each other's back, right? Because the world is filled with people who are going to shoot each other down in public. There are very few people who always have each other's back, and I've got your back, and I want you to have my mine. These are talks that I think midstream in a relationship are still beneficial for sure. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: do you have any final thoughts that you want to share with our listeners? Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Hmm, final thoughts. If there's one, this is the idea that kind of blew my mind, which is what if the leadership ability that you have? I'm I mean, we're we're talking to entrepreneurs, right? We're talking to founders, we're talking business owners. What if the leadership ability that you have been given, which is truly a gift, what if that was actually meant first and foremost to be deployed in leading your family like an organization? Like what if your family was not just a place that you retreated to to get away from the rest of the world? But what if it was the vehicle that you actually used to enact your vision that you have for the world? Like what if your family was your team and you said, what could we accomplish together multi generationally over the course of decades or eventually centuries? What would the world look like? Because if we really look at what shapes the world today, at the end of the day, who are the final stockholders of every Fortune 500 company? They're families, right? They're families who caught that vision that, if we work together multi-generationally, we can accomplish a lot of things. And I want to see a world where everyone steps into that role just a little bit more. So that's the idea. I want you to just ask that question and say, if you led your family like you led an organization, where would you go? What would you do? I I want to see that world. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Blake, where can people connect with you? Find the book and continue this conversation. Blake and Chandler Allsmith: check out theallsmiths.com. Allsmith's our last name. So theallsmiths.com. you can get that dashboard. It links to the book, links to some of our e-courses. our book is available everywhere books are sold. so whether it's Amazons or bookstores or anything like that. And so it's available now and would love for you to check it out. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Awesome. Now, Blake, thank you so much for your time. I can't wait to read the book and looking forward to connecting with you soon. Blake and Chandler Allsmith: Yeah, thank you very much, Joe. This has been great. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: It you're welcome. Thank you everyone for listening. If this episode inspired you, make sure you share it with someone. And do not forget to follow the Glovisor Podcast for more conversations that make an impact. Till the next time.