Episode 818 | What Does It Take to Be Successful? with Russ Walling

Rob Walling:
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We talk about mindset, building blocks of success, overcoming pessimism and perfectionism, the two sides of being motivated to achieve and how that’s a good thing until it’s not. And we view it through the lens of two kids to adults now, but kids that were raised in the same household. And so we have these commonalities that have carried through for our whole lives. And my brother is extremely intelligent, he’s very thoughtful, and he’s hardworking and he’s successful. And he and I chat frequently. We do asynchronous voice chats, and we got on this topic of how did we both become successful? Why is that? What did you have to get over to do that? How were we set up to fail? How are we set up to succeed in this? And so this isn’t a walk down memory lane for us. It is more of an examination of mindset and the mental side of dealing with hard things in order to find success. 

My brother himself is an entrepreneur. He owns his own company as you’ll hear us talk about in the episode. And if you remember my story about the Armageddon beer that I kind of anonymized and said that it was my friend who that happened to, well, it was my brother, and you’re actually going to hear the firsthand telling of the Armageddon beer story today. I asked him to tell it. I wanted to see how right I actually got it and the things I missed. And it’s definitely fun to hear it. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. Before we dive into that, I want to remind you that if you are doing between two and 20 million a RR and you are considering selling that you should reach out to a R vol set@discretioncapital.com. Discretion is more than a broker. They’re an m and a advisory and they do an incredible job creating incredible outcomes for SaaS founders. 

They can help advise you on the best path for your exit and even look, if you’re doing seven figures, you should reach out and it’s probably not the right time to sell yet these days, so many strategics and private equity are waiting until you’re in that two to 20 range. But definitely reach out to a R if you are thinking about exiting in the next year or two because him and his team at Discretion Capital get some of the best outcomes for SaaS founders that I’ve seen. That’s Einar at discretion capital.com. And with that, let’s dive into my conversation with my brother,  

Russ Walling:
Russ Walling, welcome to the show. Thank you. It’s good to be here.  

Rob Walling:
It is after 800 something episodes over 15 years. I’m kind of surprised that this is the first time I’ve had any family members on, but especially you, right? We’re about three and a half years apart. You’re older than I am, but you and I have kept in touch and are really good friends and still talk a lot. It’s all async these days, right? Async voice messages. But what got me thinking about having you on the show is we were kind of in a conversation around, it was a combination of hard work and achieving results as well as we’ve known tons of people in our lives, whether it’s friends or family acquaintances, some who’ve been successful, some who haven’t, and you start to see patterns around how they think, how they operate. And there’s always been you and I, obviously growing up in the same household, both being athletes in high school and in college, then going on to work construction. 

You run an electrical contractor these days in California, and I did it for a couple of years and then said, I want to do tech stuff. But now we both run our own companies and by all measures, by all accounts, I would say we are both successful. And I’ve known people with very similar upbringings to us who maybe are more successful or less and there are patterns. This is what I do in my day-to-day life, is I evaluate people to hire and start a founders to fund through TinySeed. And so as you and I had started talking just an off the cuff thing, I thought this is a really interesting topic. I think that we could dissect a bit on the podcast, especially given just the history that we have growing up. I think I want to start with this idea of growing up as we were both encouraged to get good grades and we were both encouraged heavily. I would almost say a lot of my value as a kid was excelling at sports.  

Russ Walling:
Absolutely, yes.  

Rob Walling:
Heavy emphasis on that. And so what I guess as you look back at that experience as a kid growing up together and working hard, we were taught hard work is what it takes to get done. I just feel like that was said all the time, right?  

Speaker 3:
Yeah,  

Rob Walling:
You have the ability, but without hard work, it doesn’t get you. How have you taken that through your life? Do you think that has impacted you as an adult?  

Russ Walling:
So it’s real interesting because now we’re kind of in this new era where there’s people talking about not going to college. And for us, college was 100% going to happen. It was not just happening of the athletics, but it was going to happen because of the grades. That was how you got the good job. That’s changed a little bit, even to a point now with the grades. There’s sometimes I hear parents being less focused on the grades with the kids. And for us it was absolutely drilled into us, isn’t fair. It wasn’t that rigid, but it was definitely an understanding that you would get good grades and honor roll was the baseline straight a’s was where you were shooting. I look back and there are things that, there are ways that affected me that were certainly not positive, but overall it gave me a fantastic kind of base to build from. 

And the people that I met and the people that I worked with and the amount of collaboration that’s required to get those good grades, those are skills that you learn. I’m incredibly introverted, so I don’t know that I really would have, I wouldn’t have gained those skills as well or as quickly as I did had I not had to get good grades and rely on others and be part of a team to make that happen. With athletics, you are 100% correct. Competition was a huge thing in our house and sport was the way that you really kind of personified that, right? It’s very simple. The grades are empirical, right? I dunno if empirical is the word I want, but the grades are true. You either got an A or you didn’t, right? And sports is the same thing. You either beat the other team or you didn’t. 

And that level of competition, being able to compete at constantly higher levels and the amount of hard work that takes is man, it’s very, very hard to take somebody who doesn’t have the experience of working hard and have them finally figure that out later in life. And it wouldn’t have happened for me, let’s put it that way. No judgment on anyone else. If I hadn’t had that base to build off of, both from working hard to get the grades and working hard in sports, I wouldn’t have that work ethic today. The other thing that sports did is they really helped with me figuring out how to get through things when it sucked, when it hurt physically. I mean, there’s a lot of physical pain you go through. I played football, and you’re basically hurt from day one of practices. I think that’s probably true for every sport. 

I think that’s true in soccer and baseball, something’s going on where you’re not at peak health. So yeah, it just takes time. It’s putting in the time and taking the time to get good and to get, and then it’s working through those uncomfortable situations. And then even as an athlete, when you’re not in season, you’re lifting weights, you’re running, I hate running. I always did. I hate conditioning, but it’s something that you do so that you can be great on the field. It really teaches you how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. And I think that’s a huge skill and didn’t, it’s real interesting. I learned that skill as an athlete and as an athlete I was perfectly comfortable being uncomfortable. I didn’t pull that into my career, my family life, my personal life until much later in life. And that was a huge, if I could go back and do something different, that is certainly something I would do different is understanding how that translated the work ethic I had. And I worked really, really hard at work, putting in hours, grinding it out. I’m staying up all night when necessary to make things happen. But if I had partnered that with the being comfortable with being uncomfortable, those really would’ve worked well together and I would’ve gotten where I am much faster, for sure.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I agree with you on that. When I talk to startup founders, it’s a non-zero amount of time, or not non-zero percentage of time that I can identify someone as, oh, you played a sport when you were younger, didn’t you? Or maybe you were in the military or you did something that taught you to be okay with grinding is kind of what I say as you run your own business, you have to do a bunch of stuff that you don’t want to do. You have to, and even you’ll delegate it eventually. You can hire it out, but especially in the early days, if you’re bootstrapping in our world, it’s like I just have to do, maybe I don’t like marketing, but maybe I just have to do that to be successful. You don’t want to stay up all night estimating a job that you’re going to bid and then not get the job, but you do it anyway because that’s just what you do. 

And some folks write into this podcast and they’ll be like, I want to be an entrepreneur, but I have a pretty nice day job and I don’t really feel motivated to do the thing to grind it. And I typically say, I don’t know how to help you. I don’t know that I can change that mindset. Now maybe you can, someone wrote in at one point and said, oh, we did it easy and we did it over several years and probably got a little lucky and did it. And so that happens. But most of the folks I know who have had success as an entrepreneur and whether it’s in tech or any field, I think have done quite a bit of things that they’re just like, well, this is just what it takes, turning it back. So that’s athletics and what that’s taught us. And I think often about all the stuff that running Track taught me, but I also think back to what you and I learned maybe from our parents and what was instilled there, and it was a work ethic and it was an achievement orientation of get good grades, like you said, and win if you’re going to compete in a sport. 

But something you said I want to circle back on, which was some of that probably had a detrimental effect on you, and I know it did to me as well, and I spent decades of therapy undoing a lot of that. But what comes up for you when you think about that?  

Russ Walling:
The easiest one for me, and this isn’t just an athletics thing, it’s kind of the entire upbringing. The thing that I brought away from our upbringing that I shouldn’t have is rampant perfectionism. And I can remember a time when I was very young taking a test, getting a 96 or a 97 on the test and coming home, being really excited that I got that score and talking to our dad about it and him saying, well, that’s pretty good, but you may need those three points later in me thinking, okay, so 97 isn’t good enough. And that certainly wasn’t what he was trying to do. And this is one of the hard things in life is when people provide you with information or people provide you with guidance, it’s how you take it and what you do with it and what lesson you learn from it. 

Because the right lesson to learn there is don’t ever take anything for granted. I mean, that’s the positive lesson I took. Okay, I have to be perfect. And part of it is me. There’s a nature piece in there too. But from those types of interactions, I had rampant perfectionism. And one of the biggest mistakes, or one of the biggest drawbacks to that rampant perfectionism is that I spent a significant amount of time, I call it now, being an exceptionalist. And there’s rules and there’s exceptions, and most of the time if you follow the rules, you’re in good shape, stop focusing on the exceptions. I spent a significant part, especially of my early career trying to perform in such a way that I managed every solution and every situation. So as an example, an interaction with say a customer in which we went out and we talked about, okay, this is how we’re going to perform the work. 

This is what the job looks like, this is what I need. I would write an email and I would spend potentially hours writing some type of email back to this customer explaining exactly what was going to happen, but then I’d go through and think about if he says this clause in such a way, he might come back and say that I owe him more than I’ve put into this proposal. So I really struggled with that, and it wasn’t so much the time sucked, right? Because time is certainly the most valuable asset that we have, but I was kind of screwing up relationships too because I was constantly wary with everyone. It took me so because I was spending so long writing that email for that customer, something I could have gotten to ’em that same day. Maybe it’s two, three days later, and then when it comes through, it’s like, Jim Christmas, we walk this and you’re building out 10,000 square feet of space for me. 

Why am I reading a novella? And it crushes. So in trying to solve for all of those exceptions, I’d say I was a huge mistake, and I figured that out now, and I go with the rules rather than the exceptions. And that’s what I teach to my team. That’s what I teach to my kids. And there are always people who are naysayers. And that was the other thing that keeps pulling you back into it, is there’s always naysayers. So one of the things, my little mantras is success exists on the other side of fear. That’s part of that being comfortable with being uncomfortable. And then I always get someone who says, well, yeah, that works great, unless that thing that you’re afraid of is a lion. And it’s like, okay, dude, I’m not changing out lights at a zoo, so I’m not going to run into a lion. So why are we talking about this? Yeah. So because of that perfectionism, I became an exceptionalist. And again, the real problem was it was torching relationships. I was hyper stressed in every interaction. I was treating people poorly and not, I was a bad guy. I’ve always been a very collaborative person, but I wasn’t doing it. I was protecting myself so that I could solve for every exception.  

Rob Walling:
So I want to say two things. Number one, the guy who said the lion thing is probably posts a lot on Reddit, totally is my first thing. He’s definitely a Reddit or a hacker news commenter, which is similar perfectionism and what you’re saying. I definitely took away the same thing as a negative. The other thing is I wouldn’t take risks in my twenties. I was afraid to fail. So that 97, okay, well, I’m going to get the a hundred then and now I’m going to get straight A’s in high school and I’m going to get to achieve, and I’m going to try to go to the state meet and win and everything. But as I get out and I start a day job, and then I start trying to be a startup founder, I want to own my own time and all that. I was so risk averse because if failed, I took failure very, very, very hard. 

Well, in school, but also especially in competition in track, if I lost a meet that I didn’t think I should lose, that ate me up big time. So I think that fear of failure and that because failure made me feel so bad that I was like, I don’t want to feel that anymore. So what I hadn’t realized is it caged me in. It was like, well, then I’m only going to do things that I know that I’m not going to fail at. I’m not going to do things that I’m bad at. So that’s my 2 cents on that. That leads us into this quote that I say very frequently on this podcast. It’s not every episode, but it’s got to be once a month. And I say, being a startup founder is making hard decisions with incomplete information. 

I didn’t know how to do that. I graduated with an engineering degree. You and I both did actually, and came out of school. And I was like, well, I have the equation in my head and I know I need all these variables, and then it spits out an answer, and that’s the right answer, and that’s what I should do. And that’s what school taught. And I came out into the real world and started working construction because dad, just so folks know, our dad was an electrician and a project manager for 42 years. You’re now in the, it’s not the family business, it’s not a business he started, but construction is kind of a family business for us. 

And I did it for a couple years and then decided to go do code, but I had to learn to deal with uncertainty and to make decisions without all the information that I wanted. And whether you are a foreman on a job, whether you’re an electrician, whether you’re an estimator, whether you’re a project manager, whether you’re a startup founder, you’re just never going to have all the information. And I guess, how did you, I am not even going to say, do you agree with that? I know you do, but I think the question is how did you learn to deal with that? And then how do you teach people? So folks know you run a construction firm, a contractor, so you have foreman and electricians and office staff and a lot of people that you are mentoring, advising or just managing. So you have to have up and comers. You have people twenties, thirties and forties that you’re teaching skills that, and I’m wondering how you dealt with it and then how you communicate this to other people who have that mindset.  

Russ Walling:
So I will say absolutely same experience, incredibly risk averse school just reinforces that, especially with an empirical degree, right? Engineering degree. It’s real simple. You either got the answer right or you didn’t. Right? And to be honest, what saved me, I guess, rescued me from that was the poker boom. So when online poker took off, I absolutely fell in love. There were a bunch of us nerds that started playing it together, really, really cool sharp people, some who had engineering degrees, some who were kids living in their parents basements that were absolute geniuses. And the feedback that I constantly got was, you’re too risk averse. And poker is an imperfect game. If you play the game at all, you can make all the right decisions. And then that wrong card comes on the river and everyone, oh, and then it’s a big thing, and all the poker tournaments that somebody sucks out on the river. 

And it’s just that kind of concept of being risk averse, having that pounded into me by my peers and them constantly telling me, you’re too risk averse. That is your problem. And then there’s one, without going too far down the poker rabbit hole, there’s a dude named Phil Gfo, a poker player, and he is, I’ve always admired him, always thought he was kind of a nice guy, just kind of a laid back guy. And the World Series of Poker was the big tournament, and the main event is the one you want to win. And Phil Gfo had a run one year where he got out way ahead, and he just had chips stacked up, and it just eroded away. And I watched him the whole time he played, he smiled, and he was smiling and smiling, and I went back with some of my peers and we were kind of analyzing those hands that he had played. 

And he was right most of the time. That’s why he was smiling was because he knew he made the right decision. So at that point, having my peers pound that, you’re too risk averse into me, had kind of helped to cure me of it. But that was kind of the nail in the coffin. But that was the big one where I was like, holy cow, this guy’s dream is crumbling in front of him because every poker player, their dream is to win that tournament, and he’s doing it with full confidence and a smile. What a straight up baller. And just he knew. He knew. And I haven’t had a lot of problems with making those decisions since then. And ultimately too, these decisions that we make, they’re difficult and they’re important, but what’s the worst? What’s the worst that can happen when you make this decision if it goes south? I’ll tell you another story. I ran a project that was the biggest project. I was working for a large electrical contractor. It was the biggest project that electrical contractor had ever run.  

Rob Walling:
Is this the Armageddon beer story?  

Russ Walling:
Yes. This is the Armageddon beer story.  

Rob Walling:
Please tell it. Okay, so I have told this on the show before and people love it, and I left you anonymous, and I said, it’s like a friend of mine because it involves a beer, and I didn’t want your name on it, dude, tell the story because I’m certainly, I got facts wrong and I really want to hear this from your mouth. Yeah,  

Russ Walling:
It’s pretty straightforward. There was a cat named Dave Shilling who was, and I’ll name him by name. He was 100% of all the people I’ve worked with. If I could keep working with one person, it would be Dave. He retired, rightfully so, great guy. And he had run some big jobs before. This was certainly a huge step up for me to run a job this size. And it was with a national general contractor who it turned out was a fantastic general contractor, but going into it, we thought, holy cow, these guys are going to be rough. So a lot of angst. And I come in one day and we had a fridge in the office there. We had an onsite office, and I opened the fridge, and I’m like, what the, and there’s food in there. I look at him, what the hell is this? 

There’s a beer in there. And Dave says, what? And Dave’s typical kind of goofy way that he was, goofy is not the right word. He was just a happy go-lucky guy. And he’s like, what? And I’m like this. I said, we can’t have a beer in here. Safety comes in. They’re going to kick us all off the job. He says, no, he says that that’s the Armageddon beer. And I said, what’s the Armageddon beer? He says, if this really goes south, if goes downhill enough, you and I are going to sit in that office, open that beer, drink it, drive to the office, and then throw our keys on his boss’s desk. I won’t name the bosses, throw our keys on his desk and say, we’re out of here. And I’m like, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the other thing that was funny was anybody who’d come in, they’d see the bear. 

What’s that? And I’d tell the story and they’d, oh, that’s really funny. But here’s the punchline to it, the big one, we had a time on that job. We had multiple times on that job that things went wrong. The biggest one was we had 16 generators that showed up. We got ’em into place, and it turned out that where they had been stubbed up was 100% wrong. And turned out that wasn’t our issue. But at that time, I didn’t know that. So Dave comes in, he sits down, he says, Hey, I want to tell you this. The generators, all the stub ups are wrong. I’m like, what are you talking about? We’re off by a few inches. He’s like, no, they’re on the exact left corner. They need to be on the bottom. And I went white.  

Rob Walling:
So this is poured in concrete. These are right, is huge amounts of pipe poured in concrete to run electrical through.  

Russ Walling:
I mean, these are millions of dollars of work to undo. I am thinking if we have to undo this, this is going to be big. Maybe not. Yeah, I mean, as big as the job was,  

Rob Walling:
It’s all the profit, all the profit on the job, plus you’re upside down, plus you’re literally losing money to work on this thing for a year or two,  

Russ Walling:
And it’s cata. So this is an epic failure. And he looks at me, smiles and says, should I grab the Armageddon beer? But what that did was I went from, oh my Lord, we’re done to, should he grab the Armageddon beer? Are we going to drink that thing and throw those keys on his boss’s desk? And I thought, we can intercept them. We’ll have to leave those existing stubs in place. We’re not going to cut ’em out. We can patch wood. So as my mind’s working, I look at ’em and I say, no, no, let’s think about how we’re going to fix this. And that happened half a dozen times on that job. There were times that he could tell I was starting to lose it, and he would just say, should I grab the Armageddon beer? And every time it was a no. And it was huge just to have that level of his insight into people and his insight into me specifically. 

That was pretty cool that he knew people that well. So at that point, again, I always think, would I grab the Armageddon beer? So when I’m making a decision, if this goes wrong, would I grab the Armageddon beer? And the answer is always no. And then when it does go wrong, I ask myself again. It’s been no so far. And then as far as how I convey that to my team, I do my best to be really, really positive with them and let them know you’re going to have to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. And there’s different ways that you do that. Construction’s very fast paced. You have people who are difficult people, and it’s about, okay, but how do we work with them still? Then from a decision standpoint, you’re going to get ’em wrong. That’s cool. Don’t make a mountain out of a mistake. 

And that was a mentor that you and I both had who used to throw that one out there. If you make a mistake, it’s okay, right? Don’t hide it. If you hide it, then we have a problem. If it happens and you tell me about it, we can figure out a way to fix it. So that’s really it. And then when it does go wrong and someone tells me a decision they made, and I think, how the heck did you come up with that? How was that your plan? I don’t ever say, how was that your plan? Okay, cool, so let’s fix it first, and then once we get past it, create that space. It’s fixed. Everybody’s feeling better. Okay, now let’s talk about how we got here. What did we do wrong here to make this happen?  

Rob Walling:
The reason I’ve told that story, the Armageddon beer story on this show is because I was so impacted by it when you said it, and it felt like a lesson encapsulated in a four minute story. I mean, I was already, I think you probably told that to me, if I were to guess maybe 2018, maybe it was six, seven years ago, 

And at that point I had sold, drip was unquote successful. I felt like I had my together and felt I’m a grownup now. And that it really impacted the way that I think about everything professionally, especially, and it’s aside from years of therapy and working on myself internally, that mental model of how bad is this really? Of being willing and able to ask that that’s all that does. Is this really that bad? If it is, the worst case is we just do the thing and we chuck our keys and you can just rates quit and shut the company down. And I’ve had that moment. Everything I’ve done since that time, that 2018 time has been higher stakes with more money, should feasibly be more stressful in everything I did before. And I have been less stressed over the past six, seven years. And it’s a combination of things, as I said, like it’s therapy and it’s just becoming older, becoming more confident in my own abilities. But I have asked myself multiple times as things have gone wrong, is it in my head like, huh, is it time to get the beer? I could just shut this entire company down, just burn it to the ground and I’ll be all right. And it’s a weird level set of, I mean, come on. It’s not that bad. It feels like that in my body that it’s that bad, but it’s not that bad. I love it. And I have definitely gotten feedback about it when I’ve told it on the show. 

So you and I ended up both running our own companies, and I’ve started several from scratch, and you acquired a company. Why do you think that is?  

Russ Walling:
So growing up, that was something we discussed. We had talked about starting our own electrical contracting firm long, long ago to do our own thing.  

Rob Walling:
Oh, yeah, you and I did.  

Russ Walling:
Yeah, we ended up going separate ways. I stayed here and you ended up moving on to tech, which I tell everyone was the right decision because I am three and a half years older than you, and I’ll be working for quite a while. And that’s the nature of being in a construction firm. I always tell everyone that no one’s retiring early. We don’t get these big life changing payouts, but we do have nice steady income. You get good relationships, you’re able to provide for your family, and when you do retire, you’re able to enjoy that retirement. But back to the business question, to be perfectly honest with you, it was always something that was there. We had talked about it when we were younger. You were more entrepreneurial than I was as we were growing up. You were always looking for ways to make money, and you were looking for ways to make money that were entrepreneurial, whether it be selling comic books or something of that nature. 

And we did a little bit of that together too. But I was always looking at the job. I was going to get the job, and then I was going to work my way up through the ranks, and then I was going to be at the top of an organization if we didn’t start our own thing. And then over the years, what happened for me at least, is I realized that I wanted to have the ability to create an organization that was different than any of the organizations that either A, was working for, or B, were out there. And one of the big things that I looked at was how siloed the construction companies were. And that was always very frustrating for me. And to me it was a simple solution. Why don’t we just share KPIs? And every time I brought that up, I kind of got laughed at or side eyed and it’s like, no, we could totally do this. 

That person, the way most construction companies work is the pre-comm people. They are their KPI is. How much work did you win? And it’s like, well, you can win a lot of work that’s not very profitable. And I’m not saying their only KPI should be, how did the job do? But let’s look at that more across the board. And whenever a job went bad, that always came up. How was the estimate? But why aren’t we looking at that when a job goes well and kind of celebrating those wins together? So for me, it was being able to kind of create the direction in which the organization was going to go. And that’s fast forwarding to Wide now because I mean, just acquired the organization within the last few years had been buying into it. And it was finding the right person too. It was a person that I worked with who I’ve worked with for quite a while. 

And even when I was at a different firm, he and I still kept contact. Tim is his name, and Tim and I still were in contact, and it was a great relationship and which very symbiotic. And then the other piece was just that ability. I tell everyone, the purpose of my organization is to create environments in which everyone can succeed. It doesn’t mean everybody will, and that doesn’t just mean us. That’s everybody. So my vendors, people I buy stuff from, they have to succeed. Certainly the customers have to succeed. Everybody working here can have a good livelihood and can retire and not have to work somewhere else, and they can be done. We all have to work hard to take care of each other to make that happen. That wasn’t how I felt at these other organizations or that wasn’t how I felt at the organization I was at, and certainly not what I was seeing from the other organizations. 

It was a lot of non-collaborative, siloed, top down. We’re going to make people afraid to lose their job, and that’s not what I wanted anymore, and that was never how I interacted with others. Yeah, and it’s easy for me to say all of this. I’m a very small electrical contracting firm. Could I scale this to a billion dollars a year in revenue? I don’t know. I don’t know that that’s possible, but I do know that I was able to make it work like this, and we’re doing okay right now, so that’s good. Yeah. So that was ultimately why now that I’m here and I’m doing it, man, it’s great. It’s real interesting because there’s a lot of freedom in it. Not freedom necessarily to do what I want. I still technically have at least the nine to five. It’s certainly more than that. I own the company. 

But now it’s what direction do we want to go in? Who do we want to work with? Who do we want? And not just who do we want to work with? Who do we want to help? And instilling in my team, creating symbiosis, right? I always tell everyone we want to work with people who want to work with us, not who have to work with us. So one of the things we don’t do a lot of public works because in public works, you throw out a number, whoever’s lowest and has the scope, they get that job. Those people on that job have to work with you. It doesn’t mean they don’t want to work with you, but that’s not why they chose you. So it’s about going out building those relationships. So I guess a very, very long-winded way of answering your question, and that punchline is because you can make a difference. 

You know what I mean? It’s about adding value for people and for the people who work for me and with me, it’s adding value in their personal lives for the customers. I mean, some of them are doing some really cool earth shattering stuff. They’re next level. We’re here in Silicon Valley, it’s next level tech. It’s pushing into the future. And it’s like, I’m not the guy then invented that, or I’m not the guy that made that happen. But had I not been there to help them come up with this creative solution for how they were going to power it with the power distribution system they had, they wouldn’t have gotten it to market that fast. And it’s just being able to add that value is pretty fricking cool.  

Rob Walling:
I’m curious if you could name two or three things about yourself, like personality traits that you believe are responsible for your success or that have highly the 80 or 90%, or you can argue and say, no, I think there’s 20, right? But  

Russ Walling:
There’s not 20.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I know, I don’t either. I think there’s two or three, which is why I said it for me. And I’m curious how you think about that for yourself. You could have done all this and not bought a company, or you could have bought a company and run it into the ground, or you could have not had the relationship with Tim to where he wanted to sell you the company or you know what I mean? There’s so many steps along the last 30 years you could have up, and why not though? Why?  

Russ Walling:
So if I’m thinking about these, that perfectionism piece and kind of being the perfectionism was fueled by a pessimism as well, and that constantly being worried about what was going to go wrong. And I had somebody tell me one time, it was a superior at the organization I worked at previously who said, yeah, as project managers we’re professional warriors, and that is true when it was what can possibly go wrong in the anxiety? It was a detriment. Once I turned the corner to where I started to realize, man, I’m really, really good at seeing what obstacles are there, I got really good at removing them. So now if I can just get rid of this bull anxiety there, I’ll be really good. And I likened it to, I was talking to somebody one time, I likened it to a running back hitting holes. Those guys, the guys who are really good, everything’s in slow motion and they see the holes. 

I was never a good enough athlete to see that, but that’s what happens for ’em. And I was like, I do that in my professional life. Where I add value is I’m able to see those obstacles and I do understand how to either miss them or remove them. And now all I have to do is just stop being so damn wound up about it that I’m telling everybody to be either terrified of it or that I can’t get out of my own way and just do it. So that was a big one. The other thing is being collaborative. And I didn’t tap into this early enough. What I used to do. I was very selective in who I tapped into it with. And I was afraid that I would be collaborative with people who would burn me. And that was why I wrote those emails that took me forever and that were completely taken rightfully so as being non-collaborative, not antagonistic, but being non-collaborative. 

And I was always worried that someone was going to screw me over. And this is one of the things with my organization now that may happen, and I tell my people all the time, yeah, we’re exposing ourself here. Someone could screw us over with this. If they do, the damage will be X, and then we just won’t work with them again. And I was always collaborative by nature. When I ran that big data center job at the previous organization, I was at a point where I was really struggling. I was frustrated all the time, a lot of anxiety. And that was when poker was happening too. And I had my peers telling me, look, you’re too risk averse. You got to get yourself out there. And I thought, man, I have this great relationship with you guys and I trust all of you guys, and I don’t even know you. 

I haven’t met any of you, so this is really cool. On that big job. I said, you know what? On this one, I’m just leaving it out there. These conversations that we have, I’ll follow ’em up with a one line email that says, yeah, this is what we discuss. This is what we’re going to do. It’s not going to be a novella. And then being able to turn that corner on that job, everybody loved us as an organization. Everybody that I worked with personally, I got along with them really well. It was a great experience. I was like, wow, this is how it could be if I wasn’t so busy protecting myself and trying to stay in my comfort zone, what it was. Because to me, and this is that failure thing, if I had made a commitment to someone or if I had agreed to something and then I came back and got burned by it, then I was wrong. 

I should have seen that. And that’s the perfectionism. And once I got past that, I was just in a much better spot. And the whole point of this is what was so frustrating about that is once I did that, I was like, dude, I’ve been collaborative my entire life. I like to connect with people. I like to talk to people despite the fact that I’m an introvert, I still enjoy those connections. Why was I not doing this sooner? So I think that it’s part collaboration, connection. Yeah, I’m not exactly sure that there’s a single word for it, but that is certainly huge. And then there’s a concept of adding value. I had a guy that I worked with another electrician, and his thing was more is just enough. So no matter what you’ve done, you can always do a little bit more. His thing was with production, if you work for seven and a half hours and you got in way more than you should have, you can still do more. 

You can do 30 minutes more. I started taking that and challenging myself with how can I add more value on projects and how can I add more value to teams? And not just up to the customer, but across the board, my team, my vendors, my subcontractors, how can I help everybody succeed? And that’s where the concept of creating environments in which everyone can succeed comes from. But how can I add more value? And along the way, I’ve had these different things that I’ve done and it’s just like, okay, well, for instance, when you have a project, let’s say a kitchen is a big one, there will be kitchen equipment, and then there’s a set of electrical drawings.  

Rob Walling:
And just so people know these are industrial at huge office building, you don’t do residential. These are maybe the Facebook or the Google campus. If people can imagine a huge office building with a massive kitchen. So go on from there.  

Russ Walling:
Absolutely. These kitchens are huge. They have big pieces. It’s all commercial, high commercial grade equipment. There’s always something that doesn’t make it to those electrical drawings. And usually it’s not a power connection. Usually it’s some type of an interconnect. You have a dishwasher that comes, right, and it’s the conveyor type, and it’s got six different limit switches on it. Well, okay, cool. I can look at those drawings once I get the job and say, none of this stuff was picked up and have a big fight. Or I can look at it ahead of time and say, Hey, it doesn’t look like this is picked up. And just add that value then. And I may not, may or may not get the job. That’s not the point. The point is, by adding that value over time, what I’ve found is people want to work with us and they can’t always, but having people want to work with you is significantly better than having people have to work with you. 

And we are a commoditized industry, so you always have to be that best value, low price. So that’s part of the nature of our business, but you can still do it while adding value to people and making people’s lives better across the board. So that’s kind of a big piece is that, and once you start to challenge yourself with that, I want to add value, you come up with some really weird ideas. We had one where we ended up mapping out a bunch of, it was basically a bunch of work to support another contractor. I won’t go into all the details of it, and I gave it to the general contractor, and he looked at it, guy’s eyes got huge. He’s like, what the hell is this? And I said, well, I’ve laid out where we need all these walls cut open. It’s like, I’ve never gotten this before. Usually somebody puts tape on the wall and half the tape gets removed and blah, blah, blah. You know what I mean? But it was just that idea that we did that and the value that it added was huge. And then when I made a mistake later on in the job and the drywall guy could have crucified me for it, he’s like, yeah, you’re good. And so it comes back. So I would say that’s a huge part of it.  

Rob Walling:
And I think there’s another one that maybe I would put as your zero because you just named three, right? But I think one that maybe Well, A, I agree with you on all those, and I feel like I have learned those lessons as well through my own entrepreneurial journey. But the thing that I don’t think you mentioned is your willingness to grind and work hard. I asked about personality traits, why you’re successful, and I think that’s foundational. In fact, growing up in high school and college and such, I was not the best athlete, just not that physically gifted. But I worked very, very, very hard. And I took pride in that. And there were very few people that I knew that I considered either at or above my willingness to work hard. It was you and Curtis. Listeners won’t know who Curtis is, but he is my best friend for 10 years, lived with him in college and stuff.  

Russ Walling:
Curtis was  

Rob Walling:
Above both of us,  

Russ Walling:
By the way.  

Rob Walling:
I think he was too. Yeah, that dude’s work ethic was brutal, but it was a model for me of being around someone. I’m like, man, I feel like I work hard and I’m proud of myself and this mother. I would do twice the stuff I would do. All that said, though, I Do you agree with that assessment about you that without that you could have these other three things you said, but without. You did literally used to pull all-nighters to estimate jobs. And I would be like, dude, I’m super both impressed and sad for you to have to do it, but you would just do it. What? Because that’s what you just had to do it, and then you’d bid the job and not get it sometimes. And sometimes you get it and you were just like, yeah, this is what it takes. Is kind of I think what we were brought up to say.  

Russ Walling:
Yes. So I totally agree that is a foundation, a foundational piece. It’s funny I didn’t bring it up because to me it’s just second nature now, and I’ve got people that I work with that show it, and when they show it, when they do it, I’m really, really impressed with them. And when I do it, it’s just like, yeah, that’s what you got to do to get it done. But yeah, you’re totally correct because if you don’t have that, you’re not going to make it through.  

Rob Walling:
I do want to say, people hear me talk about this on the podcast, but I haven’t had that every day of my life. It’s waxed and waned. When I had young kids, I wanted to work less. There are times now when it’s like I can’t do the hours that I used to do. I’m not that old, but I’m a little too old to be working as hard as I was personally when in my twenties and thirties, I just don’t have the energy. I don’t have the desire anymore. So it’s not, and there were times I never worked 70 hour weeks. There were months when I worked 60 hour weeks, you worked a lot of long weeks. Kind of like the startup grind people talk about, it’s the hustle culture in Silicon Valley. That was almost, I would say, almost a necessity in your role to be good at it, to run these huge jobs when you’re just kind of understaffed and you just have to put in the time to do it. Well,  

Russ Walling:
One of the dad sayings was, you got to make hay when the sun shines. Which is kind of a really neat sounding way of saying, dude, you got to get the work done. When it’s there, you don’t have a choice. And when you’re on that big data center job was the one where it ground me down. It was a lot of long, long weeks. And you’re doing it for the team at that point. You’re doing it for other people and not other people in a negative way, a toxic way. It’s like, dude, if I don’t get this done, the people who are working for me aren’t going to be able to get their stuff done. Or if I don’t get this done, that guy who’s delivering the generator, he’s going to get pinched. You know what I mean? And that’s not cool. I don’t want to be the guy that made that happen. So it’s having everybody’s back.  

Rob Walling:
Yep. Alright, well man, appreciate you taking time to come on the show and walk a little bit down memory lane, talk about motivation and all that. Thanks for spending an hour with me today.  

Russ Walling:
Yeah, I appreciate you having me, it’ss. Awesome.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Russ for taking time out of his busy schedule. And I mean that honestly, he’s got a lot going on to come on the show and share his knowledge. I really appreciated it and I had a good time recording and I hope that you enjoyed the lessons that we tried to pull out of our experiences. Thanks for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 818, listener, if you made it this far, what’s coming? This is the Hidden track in this episode of Startups For the Rest Of Us where I ambush my brother with trivia questions six in total, I’m going to pick three topics, two questions each. The topics today are Blade Runner, the film Made in 1982 by Ridley Scott, the thing made in 1982.  

Russ Walling:
And  

Rob Walling:
The third topic is Dungeons and Dragons.  

Russ Walling:
Okay.  

Rob Walling:
How do you feel equipped? Yeah, I handpicked, these are things you and I have in common,  

Russ Walling:
Hopefully giving me softballs here. If I fail at these, talk about perfectionism and feeling like a failure. I don’t get these,  

Rob Walling:
If you don’t get all six, you’re just like, rage quit. I’m never going on that podcast.  

Russ Walling:
Well, and this teaches me I should listen to a podcast before I go on it, right?  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. I only do this with people that I know really well.  

Speaker 4:
I  

Rob Walling:
Don’t ambush like new folks, so I do it like co-founders and stuff. Alright, so let’s kick it off with the Blade Runner in the final cut of Bladerunner, the director’s cut. Okay, so this is one without narration, which subtle visual cue reinforces the implication. And this is a spoiler. If you have not seen a 50-year-old movie or 43-year-old movie, I guess that Deckard is a replicant. So which subtle visual cue reinforces that implication?  

Russ Walling:
So I’ll say unicorn. Part of me wanted to go into some big, well, gaff has the, he says, you’ve done a man’s job, these different animals.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah.  

Russ Walling:
And in the original.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. Yeah. And then I’ve seen things people wouldn’t believe you wanted to do the whole  

Russ Walling:
Thing at the Yes. Roy’s monologue,  

Rob Walling:
Man. So this is funny, interjection actually, we were talking, I’m hosting some folks at an Airbnb, friends of mine to play DD like weekend or two from now. And they’re like, what movie should we watch? Because when we get tired in the evening, we just put on a movie and we watched the thing, 1982, we watched the DD movie. And this time someone was like, well, let’s watch Blade Runner. And I was like, well, yeah, this is my cannon, right? These are my films. And I said, they said, oh, you like that film? And I said, I’m going to give you a hint. I literally watched it yesterday and I would watch it again, and I just said yes to watching it. That’s how much we enjoy this movie.  

Russ Walling:
So not to drag this out, but here’s an interesting thing. In Android, do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep, there’s like a, which is the Philip k Dick short story.  

Rob Walling:
Yep. That the movie’s based on,  

Russ Walling:
There’s like a whole bunch of, is Deckard a replicant? It’s really, really driven home. There’s he and I forget who the other guy is, but they’re giving each other vo comf tests and it’s really heavy. Heavy. That was why the director’s cut was cool of that piece. Right,  

Rob Walling:
Right. Because he made it. Yeah. He was able to do that. So I’m not going to ask you this. The other, well, I have, I have eight different questions about blade memory, but one of them is, what is the name of the test? Used to identify replicants and you just answered it, so I’m not going to ask you that. No, you get no credit.  

Russ Walling:
You give my one dude, give kids. You threaten my threaten people with VoIP comp all the time. Kids have no idea what I’m talking about.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, yeah. What specific model number distinguishes the replicants that come to earth from earlier generations in terms of emotional development? What model number or number? It’s a  

Russ Walling:
Number. Nexus six is the Yeah, that’s what it’s, yeah. And that’s what the replicants that the stories about, they’re Nexus six,  

Rob Walling:
Right? Correct. That’s it. Yeah. That’s the question I asked for extra hard questions. These are not as hard as chat. GPT thinks.  

Russ Walling:
What would get me is if it was things like the actors’ names or stuff like that,  

Rob Walling:
That who did  

Russ Walling:
The production. I mean, I know Rucker Hower and obviously Harrison Ford. But yeah,  

Rob Walling:
Moving on to the thing, 1982,  

Russ Walling:
A movie I watched yesterday and would watch again today.  

Rob Walling:
Did you really watch? I watched it like three weeks ago. My problem with both of these movies we’ve talked about this is I’ll be like, you know what? I’d love to see that. Just the opening scene of when the dog’s running and I kick it on and then you smash cut to me two hours later being like, man, I still can’t tell. Is McCready not a replicate? Is McCready the thing or not?  

Russ Walling:
And getting ready to watch it again. Right? You’re ready to watch it again? Yeah. Oh, I  

Rob Walling:
Can watch it.  

Russ Walling:
Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. Alright. Here’s my question. Why does McCready destroy the and vehicles midway through the film? Wait, McCreedy doesn’t Cha Bte? No,  

Russ Walling:
No, no. It’s the doctor.  

Rob Walling:
Blair. Blair. That’s right. Not, yeah. Re-asking the question, why does Blair destroy the radio and vehicles midway through the film?  

Russ Walling:
Because he’s done, he’s going to kill everybody. He doesn’t want the thing to get to population. There’s that whole scene where he’s looking at the computer and it’s talking about how quickly it’ll take over everyone in the world. I think it’s a year if, yeah, it gives a reason to go back and watch it again.  

Rob Walling:
I know to go,  

Russ Walling:
Aha, that’s a good question. How soon after first contact with population would. Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. I like that. Alright, second question on the thing. What real world paranoia or historical fear, is the film commonly interpreted as reflecting  

Russ Walling:
Xenophobia?  

Rob Walling:
I would say yes. Now the Chad GBT says Cold War Paranoia and Fear of Infiltration.  

Russ Walling:
That’s a good one,  

Rob Walling:
Which makes sense. It was eighties, but I think xenophobia is honestly an acceptable answer. So, so far you’re at a hundred percent, four of four living up to your reputation Nerd Crab baby. It is. And finally, Dungeons and Dragons. Oh yeah. Who co-created the original 1974 DD Box set alongside Gary Ax.  

Russ Walling:
Is it Arnison? It is,  

Rob Walling:
Yep. Dave Arnison. Dave Arnison. And then just so you get six for six, I’m going to ask this one in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, what does Theo stand for?  

Russ Walling:
Oh my, that’s extra. So interestingly enough, not only can I tell you what Faco means, I can tell you how to calculate it on the fly because we don’t need this current system to hit Armor Class Zero baby. And then it’s just an adjustment from there.  

Rob Walling:
Yep. All right. Well done, man. I don’t know that anyone has ever gone a hundred percent on my trivia. So you really have lived up, your reputation has preceded itself to being a complete nerd. It’s  

Russ Walling:
Good. It’s good. It’s good in the best way possible.