Welcome to season two of the magnetic podcast. I'm your host, Steve Schmidt with me today is the CEO of Refine Labs, Megan Bowen. So right away, I just have to ask the question before we get into the great background. I need to know, is that so weird to hear your name after Refine Labs and does it suck every day to kind of look and be like, yes, I am the CEO, like the person you hear about all the time, like, yep, that's, that's I'm the CEO because I always say personal brands are great.
And then sometimes when you work with them next to them, you sometimes end up, you know, having to search for your own identity. And so I just want to come right at it and just ask you that question because it's been killing me and we had to reschedule twice. And so I'm like, I'm just going to ask you right away. Tell me, you know, number one, doesn't feel weird to be a CEO.
I always knew that I would be. It was just a matter of time. And number two, I actually get asked this question a lot relative to like, well, Chris is such a big brand, like, are you feeling intimidated or stepping into big shoes? No one's ever asked me on a podcast though.
So I appreciate the, the gumption there. There you go. But the truth is obviously Chris is an amazing marketer and thought leader and has cultivated a huge following and has made a ton of positive impact in the world of marketing and go to market and be to be overall. But I view myself at his level, right?
Maybe I don't know the same amount of LinkedIn followers and obviously my approach and my thoughts are different and stand on their own. But I don't view it as a competition. I view it as us having very different styles, different different types of thoughts and are on a level, a level playing field. I have a lot of respect for what he's been able to build and to cultivate.
And I have a lot of, you know, confidence in my own ability to show up and take over. And what I'll add to sort of close out this answer is Chris is such a visionary and a founder. I think when he is in his zone of genius, he is, he is seeing trends and patterns, he is innovating, he is creating. And Refine Labs has gotten to the stage where it's actually more important for that particular business to focus on operational excellence and scaling and evolving our service design.
And so for what the company needs right now, my experience and my skill set is perfect for it. And on top of that, I've been building the agency from the ground up with Chris so that the tribal knowledge, the background, the trust that I already have with the team is already there. And then Chris gets to go back and play at his own genius and focus on building the pace. I think I only have, you know, I have most confidence in myself where we're starting to be strong.
Obviously Chris is still evangelizing everything that we do at Refine Labs. And so he'll continue to positively impact the company with his, you know, his thought leadership halo if you will. Yeah. Yeah.
It's been going bright, but yours has been too. And you know, I started, yeah, I mean, you have to like drink your own Kool-Aid. I started. I loved it.
Can I tell you about how much I love your post? I just because I love you as a person. I think you're great what you stand for, how you work. I think it's great.
When I see your posts, the thing that makes me happy is that it doesn't have 600 likes on it. Is that it's a person who's coming through saying, I am not trying to be that or whatever, because as someone who is trying to be that sometimes, because that is the line of work I am, I have found that when you bring people into the company, it's taken me a while, like working next to that thing, whatever that is, can be really interesting to say at least. And I think for you, you could say, just like I'm a different person, Steve Schmidt, I am not that person, that person is not me. We are Refine Labs.
I think the question I want to ask you is, I mean, this is going to get us through your background here a little bit. You mentioned that you're planting into operational excellence. You've been a COO before. You've ran the operations of companies.
Without a doubt, agency's biggest struggle is the visionary comes and sells in the dream. They love that person. They've been following them on social media, incomes, the oom-boom delivery team. And they go, God, I hate Steve when he says that.
We don't really do it that way. Like we, he says we do it that way, but I mean, it's not there yet. And then all of a sudden there's this tension and it's delivery because that is your product. What made you all come to that arrive at that point?
Because it's usually not a fun point when you see the cracks happening and you need to make drastic change. Yeah. So I think there's a couple of topics I'll touch on in that question. So to directly get into sort of like the operational piece, I think the biggest disconnect often is when you have any type of like evangelist, thought leader, founder, CEO, you know, talking about those big thoughts on LinkedIn, you lose a lot of the nuance, right?
So you're communicating these big ideas, these new ways of thinking, new ways of measuring, different strategies and approaches. But the reality is when you get into the dirt, like the complexities matter, the nuances matter. It's not as simple as it as a LinkedIn post, right? And so I think really codifying what we really do best in comparison to all the other marketing agencies out there and really leaning into who we are and what we do best is the primary, like you have to put a stake in the ground.
This is where we're going to be really good. We're going to do everything. So we're not going to do those other things. This is what we're going to do.
The secondary piece of that is in the sales process and in the onboarding process is being really transparent about expectation setting. And so I mean, I still take every single sales call at Refine Labs, people here from Christ, they come in, what's this? What's that? People also can misinterpret a lot of its kind of literally the same as you're here today.
They're like, Chris Walker says, never to do paid advertising. I'm like, well, no, he doesn't really say that. Let me clarify. Well, look at this post.
I'm like, OK, I get how you could interpret it that way. But there's a lot of nuance in his perspective here. Let me explain that. So the reality is, yeah, all of that's great.
And it serves an amazing purpose, right? He helps a ton of marketers. Obviously it drives inbound demand. I got a couple of DMs lately, you know, LinkedIn posting.
So it can work and you can do it. And he's the yo can do it. Yeah. But I think that's the other piece is just expectation setting and management and making sure that people really understand what they're getting and then are up in the clouds with all of the impressive, exciting, inspiring, visionary thoughts.
And it's like, well, what do you really need help with? What are you trying to achieve? This is the roadmap with how to get there. I think the last thing that I want to say is, you know, I've always actually had self limiting belief that I am not creative.
I am not a visionary. And in my 40th year on the planet, I am like kicking that belief to the curb. And I actually think I am creative. I am visionary.
I haven't tapped into it because of this limiting belief that I've had before. So we're going to continue to innovate and do new things and evolve. I want to continue to try to develop my own perspective on different topics that matter again, you know, that also help the business that I'm running and growing right now. So I'm all on LinkedIn.
It's okay. Yeah. I think, you know, I think that's probably the thing that I learned the most from Chris is really recognizing that being able to work very closely with that type of a person, that type of a leader, I was really able to observe, you know, how he, how he approaches visionary thinking and innovation. And it's really about observation, pattern recognition, talking with the market and assimilating all of those things into interesting and new conclusions.
Right. And so I think anybody can be visionary. Anybody can be creative. Some people are obviously, you know, more, more prone to that than others.
But I wanted to make that point because that's a big goal of mine is I kind of reinvent myself this year and embrace my new role. I think it's good. I think it's good because you're talking about human things. You're talking about creativity.
You're talking about, I think what we all crave in our day to day, even as a CEO is like, how can I create? And something I've always said, because I believe this and I've seen it enough to say that I believe in it and working is anything that has to do with content for a CEO or a founder, whether it is a video, whether it's a podcast, whether it's writing, somewhat therapeutic. I'm also very much a learning cycle to take the thoughts, put them on the paper and try to formulate them and get feedback on them. So I always say posts a lot of times are feedback.
Like, so you toss an idea out there. And if it goes and people start commenting on its hot topic, right? You kind of know that that's its own little beast. And I want to talk to you about something interesting that I've observed on LinkedIn.
We'll get tactical here before we dive backwards in your life is let's drill down into a tactical moment here and kind of get into the weeds, if you will, on LinkedIn, a post is a blip. It happens. It's gone. It's spotter on the internet.
It can exist later. Sometimes it comes back to life, but it's kind of gone. It's on a feed. There are things in LinkedIn that are called newsletters.
And I paid a lot of attention and I've done it for a year and took Chris Walker, your advisory, fine labs, test it. And I said, I'm going to keep testing this on me. Is there a pewter? Can we send a woke up, wrote a newsletter, hit publish, went back and edited the shit out of it?
Because I was like, I don't know what I was saying there. I didn't spell that right. And wasn't doing it how we would do it for a client, but thought, well, could we do this for clients and wouldn't be powerful? Because it's only powerful.
I can prove with the years with the data that I delivered something, right? And some Sundays, I was like, fuck this, man. I do not want to write this newsletter. No one even fucking cares.
Like I haven't got to lead into two months. And of course, that's not the way to think before you write a newsletter, right? I'd say it's been a good stream. But the one thing I like about it is, and I think about someone like you, so it's not dependent on the feed.
Number three, it has SEO settings that power the newsletter. And so they can become these hyper, you know, as long as it's not a shitty blog and like an authentic newsletter coming from somebody, I feel like that is a powerful mechanism across the world of demand and marketing to you. I want to get your thoughts on, you don't even have to drill down in LinkedIn, if you don't want, but just like that format of a newsletter in terms of creating that consistent content stream versus the blip of posts. Yeah.
I mean, they're clearly there's been a resurgence on newsletters over the last year or two, and it's funny how I feel like the world kind of goes in cycles and perhaps the BB ecosystem does the same thing as well. Just 10 years behind. Yeah, newsletters and email newsletters used to be super huge. They kind of went out of favor and now they're coming back.
And I think they're valuable for a few reasons. Number one, the ability to have sort of long form content really expand beyond what it is on a LinkedIn post. It's much harder to do with LinkedIn posts. Number two, you're also building at your own audience, right?
So if LinkedIn shuts down, you have your list of newsletters and triggers that you can continue to grow. So you're reducing your reliance on a particular platform. So I think there's a lot of benefits in doing. So we started testing a newsletter for refine lab specifically, like not me personally, where it's a little light right now or doing a roundup of content releases events, et cetera, with the intent to really sort of improve that and grow the comment.
I would read that. I would read that. I read Justin Walsh's. I read another cat who's really good at email.
I love the category pirate's newsletter because that it's a ton of great content. And then there's like funny jokes at the end. But the key here is I actually have been reading your newsletters as well. And I've especially loved over the last few months.
You really have been talking a lot about business building, like a founder ego. You've had these scenes that I think are really fascinating. I relate to I always get a couple of good nuggets. Awesome.
The quality though has to be there. Yes. So there are a lot of newsletters that just aren't that good. So I think it's harder than people realize, I think, to produce high quality content at that frequency.
But it's something to say. And I think in so many contexts as business and otherwise, I think it's a fantastic approach. The tough tactical question, I got one more on the dovetail of this. This is your wheelhouse.
I think the toughest thing for people when they're writing, as I was call it, writing a non-paid advertisement is a call to action. And we hear about it. We see people who don't just say, it's not that easy. Like it never is that ill.
You just click here and watch your visitors come in the business you're in. How much importance is placed on the call to action in the entire consideration of that lead? Yeah. So I think what I typically anchor on, whether I'm in my own personal LinkedIn post, when we think about how we're strategizing on campaigns for our customers, we try to anchor on the call to action being something that will benefit the reader or the buyer or the person.
Right. So you took a moment to read this, clearly you're reading this thing. You're interested here. Click here to learn more or to watch the next 45 minutes of this video clip that you've watched so far.
Right. So I think most call to actions, like really aggressive, like book a demo, buy this thing right now, give me something of yours, make a purchase, give me money. Like those types of CTA's should be not that they should never be used. They should be used, but very strategically and not as your default.
And so you could be thinking about putting yourself in your readers' shoes and what would they be interested to know more about? So like I mentioned this category, Pirates newsletter, Christopher Lockhead and Eddy Eun and one of their other writers. And a lot of their call to actions are they will write excerpts from different books that they've published on Amazon. And they're just saying, you know, Hey, here's an excerpt from this book.
If this topic is super exciting to you, you hear is where you can get the full book. Right. And so it's like that's smart because they're basically giving me 50% of the book. And I'm really intrigued and it's not that much more to like get the rest of it.
Right. So like I think that's a really good use of a CTA that is beneficial to the reader and beneficial to them for me to like potentially make a purchase. If you haven't gotten that all figured out yet, how are you bringing people back to value added digital experiences, videos, information where they're going to continue to build this affinity to you? Yeah.
So I think that's what people people don't people kind of skip to the like buy now by my thing. Or they don't have it at all. And I've realized that. So maybe if you're this person who has a big following, I'll use John Barrows, for example, back how in you, I mean, throw throw people in there who let's say if you post and you're not really asking for anything, right?
And because people have been taught well in content, you just want to tell stories and do this and people got it's great. I love making her posters so great or stories are so great. But there's not this. Oh, by the way, if you want to work with me to solve this specific problem, click here.
And I seem to be seeing more of that lately in the feed because I think people are trying to find ways to get there. And we're going to talk about that and dive into YouTube here in a second, but we're going to go backwards before we go forward. So for you, when I first started following you, you were at a little company called Manage by Q in New York, you're the COO and then you had a stint at Platters. And then you're over at Refine Labs now for four years.
Obviously, you know, blips, maybe the wrong word, but it was obviously a great career at Manage by Q and then a little bit of a blip leading that amazing CS where you probably said, oh, now somebody else wants me to work there. I'm going to leave Platters and go to Refine Labs. So all of that happened in a matter of seven years. And so that's a lot of change.
My guess is if you went back and said to yourself, although I love your competence, I always knew I would be, she said, it still has to happen. You know, would you think in 2017 that you would be the CEO of a demand gen agency? Definitely not. Yeah, definitely not.
Not only your dream board. I wasn't really sure to be honest. I probably thought I was going to just keep operating like in-house at some B2B Sasser Tech company, which has sort of been all of the chapters of my career. I've been at different industries and different types of products, but sort of in B2B SaaS overall.
Platters specifically, I had worked prior to Manage by Q. I was at GrubHub seamless for four years, pre-IPO on their B2B side. And I left because we had an exit to we work, in an acquisition to we work. And I was like, for the next podcast, I'm wondering, yeah.
And I went to Platters because it was in the same space as GrubHub seamless. I was very familiar with it. I got an amazing offer. The sad part about that chapter was the pandemic just decimated this business because it was 100% office food ordering.
So literally in March 2020, we went to January, I think we were bringing like $8 million a month to $0 a month. And so the company had to make a bunch of changes. I ended up hanging on for a while to see if we could pivot and then I decided, you know, the world might be ending. Not what's going on.
Like, best of luck. I'm going to like take a moment. I was actually planning to start my own consulting agency in the summer of 2020. What were you going to be?
What was your thing? What were you going to focus actually on like customer operations and go to market sales, focus more on sales and CS because at the time marketing wasn't really in my wheelhouse, but I had a ton of sales and CS experience and obviously like company operations experience. And so Chris happened to like his timing was impeccable. He reached out like days after I quit my job and he, you know, he convinced me to team up with him to build refine labs.
But I was intending to just, you know, I had the we work acquisition. I had a payday because of that. I had some runway and some time to figure it out. I was like, this is the perfect time for me to do this.
I really love working with people. So I think it was exciting to be able to get in at the kind of ground floor of a business opportunity and kind of partner with the founder to build it up. So yeah, you guys run a company. You wrote to 20.
I mean, you guys had 20 million plus in revenue in 2022, right? We did. Yeah. We've actually our revenue has dropped a bit because of some of the economy.
The shift in the economy would affect you too. But we survived and we're back to growing again and things are looking up. So I mean, and that's any business is going to go through those storms. That's part of running a company is weathering the storms.
Yeah. Let's talk about specifically what Refine Labs does because I think it interests me a lot. And I will say, I almost feel a little naive to say that when people would say, well, who is the best in demand and say, well, you should probably work with Refine Labs, right? I don't even know who number two and three are.
And that's to me, I go, well, they're, that's good, right? That's marketing and that's brand affinity and it's all those things. And I've taken successful lessons along the way from whether it was something Chris said or the brand was doing and just watching and observing that. So I want to say just good as you guys because whether it was just observing your website and going, man, that's really smart or that's not so smart.
But just honestly, if you like a little bit of the cheat code was given to me because I just kind of got your guys is testing and I go, well, that works for them. I'm going to try that. I never have been what you guys are in my business, thankfully, because we can work. I still dream of working together.
I've always fallen in love with the execution, not that you guys don't execute, but I'm just now finding that even running a small little, you know, 65, 70k a month marketing agency with all freelancers is the most joy that I've had in work. And because as the CEO with no board, mind you, for the pressure, it almost seems like when I went to chat GPT and did the thing that we kind of do when we start dreaming and said, well, what would 10% month over month growth be in 10 years? If I just keep this little number growing and it said, well, your monthly revenue would be 12 million. And that's what I was reminding that slow growth is a very good thing.
And the only interest is there and it seems to me like from the outside looking in, I'm going to give you my guess and then on what's happening at Refine Labs. You know what I have to tell me? What's going on? But I'd say restructuring a little bit focus on operations and customer success, maybe bled a little bit due to too much growth too quickly.
And also the alert of a Chris Walker to the brand, maybe got some of the wrong people employed at the company who thought it was different than it would be and didn't maybe want to roll up their sleeves. And so you now said, okay, cool, we know we can do a lot of revenue. No question. We pushed that lever down and we did it.
We also know we can break. My job is to come in and make us profitable by making us repeatable, consistent, and a very low customer attrition and grow our existing base with new products and solutions. Is that an accurate statement from the outside looking in? Yeah.
And I think it's funny because, you know, me and Chris, both originally, one of the reasons I did team up with him was where we really shared, I think our shared passion was we really felt B2B, go to market marketing sales, customer success. We just felt it was all broken. It needed to be fixed. This growth at all cost mindset was killing companies.
The irony was because we were able to create so much demand and also like, you know, we're, it's not just like we're smart people. So we grew this fast, like the market conditions around us, right? It was just these seas were just throwing money at any startup and pushing them to advertise. So all of these things combined, we basically grew at all costs without trying to grow at all costs.
And we had all of the same sort of consequences as a result. We over hired, we had to correct. We, we raised prices too high that were unsustainable. So then when the market leveled out, we realized operating margins were not where they needed to be.
Yeah. I think in the constant desire to innovate, we were introducing new concepts to the market. Like, I saw all this happening for me. Yeah, people are confused.
Like, I love, I love you guys. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, there's community going on to build the software that's in 10 base.
I can't really tell what's going on. Yes. Yeah. And we did.
We built the vault. We tested a building, a Salesforce app called Watchtower to help with measurement of marketing programs, you know, in hindsight, hindsight, 2020, you know, we should have been more rigorous and steady with our growth, regardless of whether you're trying to sort of brute force growth or you just have so much demand, things will start to fall apart if you grow too quickly. It's just incredible. Every time.
You have to manage that growth appropriately. I think the other really interesting thing that I think heard us in 2023 was this market confusion, not really knowing who we were, what we did, what our services were. So, and it was because we were doing a lot of things, right? And so this was also part of the decision that Chris and I made.
It's like, refined labs, it would be a digital marketing agency, a demand generation agency, we're going to do demand strategy consulting. Made media execution, created content production. Boom. That's it, right?
The vault plugs in because it's an enablement for our customers. Yeah, we can monetize that as well for people that can't hire us, but want access to our frameworks and playbooks, but the software and some of these other exciting ideas that Chris was talking about and having, they could stand on their own and be their company. And so that was a big strategic decision we made last year because of a lot of the things that you're saying. So I think it was smart to do that.
I'm sure Chris will do great with Pissetto and you'll notice even with the website, with how I'm deploying my content strategy now, which is also continuing to evolve. I'm really focused on on clarity. Yes. That market achieving market clarion, people, I don't want people to just love us.
I want people to know exactly what we do. Yeah. Well, that's refreshing because I am, I feel like you are my partner Melissa talking to me about what I need to do with my company's messaging right now and coming into your two. And I think it's the, it's so hard.
It is so hard to distill it down to this. I'm going to ask you, what is it that you do? And it's simplest form possible because I, let me go first and then you tell me how I did. And then you tell me what the real version is because this will be interesting.
I would say that Refine Labs is a, well, I'm going to steal your words, a digital marketing agency that allows B2B, SAS and service companies to measure and monetize their growth. That's terrible. Like, see, that's, that's just where you get caught up in the cocktail party question. I know.
Well, so I always tell, I'll even do this on sales calls and people are like, well, when I tell my mom what we do at Refine Labs, I say we help our customers get more customers. That's really what we do. Yeah. Now the, the, the, the, the deeper dive into that is, yes, we are a demand generation, a digital marketing agency.
We will partner with B2B, SAS companies who have market traction, have it, have hit or exceeded 10 million in revenue. So there's enough market traction for this offering. We can help you maximize the ROI of your digital marketing budget. So we're going to come in audit and set your strategy.
We're going to identify the channel mix and the approach. We're going to help build the creative content that we're going to deploy. We're going to drive more qualified traffic to your website. We will convert into sales conversations who will convert into opportunities and revenue.
But I don't know, helping customers get more customers is pretty, that's pretty good too. That sounds pretty dope. I like it. It's deep sea diving and you had a 40th birthday and you went scuba diving.
And I saw the picture and number one, I was like, Oh my God, she's on vacation far away. That looks fun. Then I was like, that's the one thing that I want to do. But I'm so scared of it.
And we can get into that. But talk to us about that first time. No. So I did my first dive in Cancun in February of 2023 and we're in Mexico where they don't give a shit.
If you are. Yeah, or not. Yeah. Just go.
So we did two dives and I was like, Oh my God, this is like the best. This is the coolest thing I've ever done in my entire life. And I was like, I have to do this again. Actually asked my dive master that day.
You stop it. I was like, you stop it. If you could scuba dive anywhere, where would you go? He's like Thailand.
So that's why I book the trip. I love it. My husband got formally certified, the online test, the pool sessions. We did four dives in the Atlantic Ocean in October when it was cold and dark and scary.
So cool. That was scary. Um, Thailand was gorgeous though. And it is scary.
What I will say is this is why I love scuba diving so much. You're, you're afraid, but you know what you need to do. And it's a relatively safe activity. If you are trained in how to operate the equipment and understand what could go wrong and what to do if something goes wrong, right?
And there's no better feeling to be really, really scared, just like your body, having all of this anxiety, to do the thing that you're scared of, to realize while you're doing the thing that you thought was so scary, that it's actually like the coolest thing you've ever done. And then to complete that activity and to feel this euphoria, this dopamine, this like insane confidence boost of like 40 minutes, I was so scared. And now I did it and that was so fucking cool. And now I want to dive again.
Let's go again. Let's go. I can't, I can't describe how good it makes me feel. And then when you're underwater, it's basically like you're in space.
You're in a whole nother world. All you can hear is your breath. That's all you can hear. You're weightless.
So my fifth, we did five dives on my fifth dive. I was so relaxed. I was barely using my air was my longest dive. I went 47 minutes on one tank.
And I was literally just like playing in the weightlessness, spinning your body around like you're not really supposed to swim. You're supposed to like the current take you. You're supposed to make very like sort of very specific movements to move yourself forward or up or down. Even literally you can the way you breathe, you'll go up.
Your whole body will go up or down. It's just it's this really cool experience that I think you can only experience underwater or in space or maybe something in this thing chamber or something. But I mean, I'll let you react because I could just keep talking about this because it's my new obsession. I know.
I think it's it should be. I think that I heard something one time that really made sense to me. They said, you know, has you on Monster? Maybe somebody else said, why are we putting all this money into going into space when the ocean's right here?
Yeah. And it's so unexplored. And there's so much to it. Yeah, we're like, ooh, let's go to Mars and let's, you know.
And so when I saw that, I was just reminded of number one, that is, it's definitely something I want to do. I was like in Vietnam, that's piranhas. Number two, it is the thing I'm most scared of. I have the rational fear of being killed by shark irrational.
It seems like dude, like I hear you. I'm like, yeah, he was here self-breathing. I'm like, yeah, you turn around. You're fucking killed by a shark.
Like, you can go to places where there are not known sharks, too. And of course, and I would still think I would be in my shark. That's the power of the mind at work. And so I want to go stare that thing in the face and just go, man, life's been part of me.
We'll get through some things. What will that feel like water scares me? And I think it's a symbolic thing for life. And maybe this is how some people approach their CEO role, the CEO role, but you get in it and it feels pretty cool.
And then you don't see everything under the surface. And you're just like, this is pretty. But the second you go to the surface, it can be beautiful. It can be treacherous.
It can be everything, but you can't see it. And that which is not seen takes belief and there in lies my problem, which is being a very science based kind of person. Like I, you know, struggled with a lot of things. That is something where I go, I know science.
I know there's a lot of shit out of there that I think is amazing. And I'm uncertain about it. Right. And so it's interesting.
It's scary. I'm scared every time I dive. Would you go to space? Yeah.
Would you go on a hot air balloon? Yeah. Would you skydive? Yeah.
You do it. You do everything. So yeah, I think that I would try anything. Yeah.
I have, I consider myself very brave. Yeah. I'm myself, but I have, but I feel fear. I feel fear.
You can still feel fear and do the thing. Would you climb Mount Everest? Oh, I don't think so. But you know why?
Because it's become like a zoo up there. You know, there's like a line to like get up to the main. Coachella and Burning Man. They're all like going to Mount Everest now.
Yeah. And then I'm doing like a big hike or, but you know, I think for me, it's doing something that's going to make me feel that feeling that I just described about like powering through the fear and having that sort of spectrum of emotions. But I think what I, nothing is ever as bad as you think it's going to be, especially if you're really fearful or worried about it. So we can go ahead.
Go ahead. We have a comment about like being a CEO like, oh, that feels so cool. And then this is not and it's funny because a lot of people, I got a lot of congratulations, which was really nice. Thank you.
I appreciate it. This is not. But I've been trying to implement like a morning meditation exercise and the meditation exercise this morning was a really interesting topic. It was basically like everything in your life is bad and good.
Everything. There is no one thing that is only good. Today, one thing will be good. A different thing will be bad next week.
It'll be a different good and bad, but there is always good and bad. Like that is literally life. And so being a CEO like, yeah, it's kind of, yeah, that's cool that I have the title. Yeah, I feel accomplished to a degree.
That's not to diminish the effort or the accomplishment there, but it's a hard job. And there's a lot of like bad about it, but there's a ton of good about it. But just like any other job at a company, it's going to. That fundamental balance of the good and bad will still exist.
So I don't know. I've been thinking about that a lot where it really like puts everything on a level playing field. If you look at it that way, you and I both listen to a lot of podcasts, I think, right? And it's safe to say my rich role, like he said, or missed for me, but I like this stuff.
It's good of all people the other day. I'd somehow end up at a playlist and Tom Green was on Joe Rogan. I'm like, I don't know. I don't really listen to Joe Rogan's podcast.
No offense. And I certainly Tom Green was like a guy in the 90s or whatever on a team. But I'm like at the gym, like to do and the treadmill. And I'm like, I don't want to listen to revenue.
Vitals right now is too serious because I've listened to all of those and all the cool podcasts and that's really the only cool revenue podcast I found. So that's kind of on my playlist. And anyways, comes on and he's talking and it's kind of interesting. So I'm like, this is weird.
Tom Green's been through some shit. Like he lives on a farm and raises goats in Canada, like is a member of the community, like sells hay and like barely gets by every year. Still those stand up comedy. And something he said, like was very, very like it just struck me and goes, you know, there's interesting.
He goes, Helen, he only has one way doors in there from the inside out. Um, and I remember thinking like essentially saying like, you get stuck in hell, you can leave any time. You got to choose to leave. No one enters hell.
There's no doors out here in hell now. It's like, no, you're in hell because you put yourself there. You got to get out and you just got to figure a way out. There's always a way.
And every single one, Megan, Steve, just push through the door. And as a CEO, a lot of us, I mean, it's not hell, but a lot of people go, Hey, idiot, I can see it from here. Like if you just knew that when we did this and this, then this happens and I feel like you're the kind of CEO that would say, I'm an open door all the time and I need to know that. Don't hold back from me.
Don't you're not offending me and break down our process and let me know every single crack increase in this so we can fill that out. Is that exhausting is my question because the other day you got to sleep and be you and go deep, see dive and you can't worry about if everything has been perfected on the back end at your day job. Yeah. And I think for me, I think when you think about a company, it's a group of people, like working together to achieve some shared goal.
Yeah. I am not a micro manager. I hold people accountable and I know exactly what everybody should be doing, but I give people a chance to do it. For me, it's clarity upfront.
Here are my expectations. Here is the bar. It's high by the way. So if you're not hitting it every day, but this is the bar.
If you miss it too many times, we're going to have to have a difficult conversation about that. These are the outcomes that I need you to achieve. And I want you to figure it out. If you need help, if you need more direction, let me know.
So I think it's empowerment and accountability. I think a lot of times when leaders say that though, they don't take the time to really clarify the important things like expectations and outcomes. And then people don't perform and then they just blame the team instead of taking accountability for not playing their part in the process. Yeah.
Not everything's going to be perfect. Mistakes are going to be made. Balls are going to be dropped. Again, that's part of life.
Yeah. Just making sure the right balls are kept in the air for most of the time. Yeah. Spinning plates, right?
One of them is going to break. You just can't all the time. You got to let one fall and go, well, that's the least critical one. Yeah.
And I had difficulty. The last couple of years have been challenging for me personally and professionally. So I've learned a lot and I've gone through a lot of changes. But my new mindset is I need to focus on making sure I'm my best self.
I need to make sure that I'm doing what I need for all of the people on the team. So people have very clear expectations and outcomes that they're working towards. I need to keep thinking ahead to keep charting the course forward. And then I need to trust that the people that are in the roles that they're in are going to rise to the occasion and then deal with it when there are problems.
That's one of the things that I hold most of the year is my team will tell me anything. Yeah. So I always know what's going on. Good.
I want to know what's going on with this last question. It's going to be a weird one. I'd like to kind of double plant and flex a little bit of the personal stuff and just get a little bit out of business here before we tell everybody where they can find you and we can wrap so you get your next thing at the top of the hour. Thank you for coming on the podcast.
My question to you is if you could remove one part of yourself, what would it be and why? Remove one part of myself. You're not a physical part. Interesting.
So my personal, you brought up Mount Everest. Every year I like to have what I call my my personal development Mount Everest. The thing that I'm trying to improve or fix about myself this year, it is both during my self-worth. So if I had to get rid of something, it would be, I don't know what the opposite of that is.
My self-doubt, my lack of worthiness. I posted recently on sort of the difference between competence and worth, which has been a really interesting personal exploration for me to really understand the differences because not until I really internalize those and I realized I needed to use a different playbook to improve my self-worth and my self-love that the playbook I was using was building myself confidence, which is good. And that's part of it. But not the most important part, come to find out.
It's wild. And it's so refreshing to hear a confident, successful CEO get on and say, I struggle with that too. And I am a person. That's what you're so damn likable.
You're just very personable. I can see you walking into fires and saying, Hey, I'm here, like this sucks. What are we going to do? Solve it and there's nothing more soothing in a room than a CEO who will do that.
So I would love to work for you. I mean, I always say if I think it doesn't work out, I mean, I tried to hire you as a CEO before on a DM. So maybe someday just know, you know, I have the most of my most respect for you. I was talking about this.
She's like, she was super cool. I met her like six months ago. I'm like, yeah, pretty memorable, isn't she? She's like, yeah, you don't forget her.
And so thank you. People won't forget you for coming on. But if they do, where do they find you online? So, you know, I am not a social media person personally.
So the only social media I'm on is LinkedIn. So you can find me on LinkedIn when you can also check out Refine Labs at Refine Labs. Keep it easy. Keep it easy.
Yeah. Gosh, I feel like we're going to this era where a lot of people are going that direction. I can see where people like you are setting sort of that example. I've been off Instagram and Facebook for two months now.
I've never had it. I've never had Facebook, never had Twitter, never had Instagram, never had Facebook, just never set the accounts up. Just deep dive on this far. Do you like go kill wild boars with spears on the weekend too for fun?
You're just like kind of like, you know, that's something, you know, I'm actually an open book where I talk a lot about my personal, you know, things on LinkedIn and this amount, but I'm actually pretty private person. And so there's a few things that people know, you know, you know, I scuba dive, but actually keep a lot of things in my personal life. Most intelligent people do know it to self, Steve. Megan, thank you so much for all of our listeners season two.
We are thinking to our 10 guests this season. We have three more to go, but Megan at Refine Labs again, newly appointed CEO. Been running the ship for a while over there. Refine Labs have nothing but respect for them, for you, for taking the time to listen to this damn thing.
It's bringing about 50 minutes. We edited it down to 42 minutes. If you're one of the six people who made it all the way the end, thank you. If you want to the 100 or so who started out, we'll give you the big clips.
Thanks everybody for tuning in. This is Steve Schmidt with magnetic.