14: Working On & Working In The Business

Helpful links from the episode:

• Local Rank Tracker
• 
  

FULL SHOW NOTES

[intro music]

00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode 14, working on and working in the business.

00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges wins and losses, shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:44 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron and I'm back from vacation.

00:50 Darren Shaw: I'm Darren and I don't know when I'm gonna have a vacation.

00:56 AW: There's a clear separator between us. I feel your pain. So, how have you been man.

01:01 DS: I've been great, thanks how have you been? .

01:03 AW: I am newly relaxed after my first real vacation since earlier in the year, in March, my wife and I went to London for a week and that was definitely a vacation. We left all the kiddos, all four kids at home for that though. So this was a family vacation out to San Diego, so left behind 30 degrees in Minneapolis and enjoyed 75 sun and a perfect breeze every day in San Diego right on the beach.

01:37 DS: Wow.

01:38 AW: And yeah, had a great time. And finally, this is sad to admit, plays into our topic today. But I had my first two days straight of not opening my laptop in probably six months which is kind of scary right when you look back at it.

01:54 DS: It's pretty good to do that though. I find if I go away for two weeks, then I do always have to bring a laptop so it's like when you have it, it's easy to open it and get caught up on a few things. Maybe if it's just like for a half hour before bed or whatever. And it's just nice to not do that at all for a couple of days and really take a break.

02:14 AW: Yeah, no, my backpack was there and I set it in the corner, I basically put it in a time out in our room.

02:23 DS: That's right.

02:24 AW: I would walk by it and I would just look at it and I'd be like, "Not today, my friend, not today".

02:28 DS: That's good, that's the way to be, nice. So it was pretty short though it was how many days.

02:35 AW: Yeah Friday to Wednesday so, five days, travel time in there, but it is so fun... One thing that I love is I travel alone so much and when I'm traveling alone, I often look at other families in the airports, and kids are usually... They're going somewhere fun, they're excited and I can't help but wish my kids were with me, and when we get to all travel together to go on like a vacation, it's often somewhere warm to break up the monotony of Minnesota late fall, winter pre-spring kind of deal, and yeah, my kids just love it, they're happy, it's so fun to be with them. My little guy right now, my youngest is three, and everything... He met the pilot, and he got a sticker and...

03:30 DS: Awesome.

03:30 AW: And he's telling everybody, he's a pilot, and riding the bus to the rental car center, he was then their bus driver, and just watching everything through his eyes and the beach and the ocean, and everything else. So rewarding it's so fulfilling that. I just love it.

03:48 DS: Three is so cute. Oh man, I look back at videos of Violet when she was three. Just adorable, love it. That's a great age.

03:55 AW: Yeah, no, it's a fantastic age. I wish I could freeze them and I have all the others, my kids are 15, 13, 10 and 3. So I've gone through this many multiple times, but I am enjoying his threes more than any of the others because you just, it's known, you understand so many things and you realize just how fast it goes. I can't believe my oldest has her driver's permit and...

04:21 DS: That's crazy.

04:22 AW: Yeah, 10th grade and all of the... She's only gonna be at home a couple more years, which is mind-blowing. So.

04:29 DS: Man four kids and CEO of a really popular SaaS company. How do you do it?

04:35 AW: Because I have an awesome CEO at home that runs the ship there. So that's exactly how I do it. She makes my life easy. So that's how.

04:44 DS: Yeah, I've got a similar set-up here, so yeah, it works out pretty well.

04:47 AW: Yeah, you gotta have that support crew.

04:49 DS: Yup...

04:49 AW: What have you been up to?

04:52 DS: Well, I've just been busy with work stuff lately. Our next vacation won't be until March, we've got a four-day trip, planned to Jasper, we go skiing in the mountains every year, and so that will be awesome. We do that. I love to ski, yeah, but so at work, we finally launched a huge update to our Local Rank Tracker." It's a crazy update, because it's... The big thing we're announcing is, "Oh, you now have screenshots in our Rank Tracker, so you can actually look at the results on each day, right? But behind the scenes, we rebuilt that whole thing from scratch, it was a complete rebuild. So internally, it was a huge job, and we've got it out the door now and I'm really excited about it, because we can iterate so much faster on feature updates, now, so it's gonna be fast and furious pulling out new features over definitely one or two feature updates per month are gonna be hit in that Rank Tracker. So I'm excited about that.

05:51 AW: That's awesome.

05:52 DS: Really good growth potential for that software. And I know a number of people who are in the industry are excited about it. So I'm excited about it too. Sounds good, our GMP service continues to grow, it's we'll keep adding clients at a pretty decent pace and we're gonna have to hire again pretty soon. The next couple of months, so that's great. That service is doing very well, it just feels like I'm on the hamster wheel right now with all of this end of year work, and it's like all of my team is totally tied up, and so, I just find... Getting to our topic of the day, I just really feel like I'm working in the business so much right now.

I've got so many projects that I have to allocate time to and actually sit down and work on them, and it's just so hard because all day long, I'm just dealing with the business, and then so in the evenings, I have to sit down and actually work on the projects. It's just... It's been tough. Just lots of work right now, and... Which is great, 'cause work is great, but it's just been really busy.

06:53 AW: Yeah, and it's one of those things that... Oh man, it ebb and flows so much, right? 'Cause when we were talking before this and we didn't even have... Nailed down what we wanna talk about today. And you kind of alluded to like, "Oh, I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel." I'm like, "Perfect. That's it."

07:08 DS: It might be a good topic.

07:09 AW: Let's just talk about what's going on right here and right now with it. So tell me a little bit. Do... Other than having this conversation with me, creating some space for you to reflect and be like, "Man, I am just spending a ton of time working in the business right now." Do you usually realize that yourself and pull yourself out to work on the business, or does that only happen when you get a break from working in it? Like what does that look like for you?

07:42 DS: Yeah, it happens naturally. So it's not like I make some concerted effort to pull myself out, but it's just right now, a number of projects piling up that have to get done and I'm the person that is best suited to get those done, and so I'm just working a lot in the business. But when those wrap up, I think, I've generally got a pretty good set up in terms of company organization and structure, and I have people that can do all of... Most of the things, and so that allows me to just have a little bit of breathing room to spend more tim...