Did Timcast Just Record His Last Show?

From Timcast.com: "TimCast has become a resource for individuals who are interested in news and information without the filtering and overtones."

He's built a strong following by discussing current news and politics. His show has millions of followers. Yet he is considering cutting back on the number of shows he does. Why? The answer may surprise you.

This episode is a discussion of the problems facing all businesses including some of the ones you wouldn't think are impacted. Join us to learn more and what you need to do to prevent the same issues in the future!

#timcast

[00:00:00.21] - Alice

Hello.Welcome to Books in the Biz, a podcast that looks at both the financial and operational sides of success. Please welcome our hosts, Dan Paulson and Richard Veltre. Dan is the CEO of Envision Development International, and he works with leaders to increase sales and profits through great cultures with solid operations. Rich is CEO of the Veltre Group and a financial strategist working with companies to manage their money more effectively. Now on to the podcast.

[00:00:30.14] - Dan Paulson

Good afternoon. Welcome to Books in the Biz. I am back here with my good friend Rich Veltri. Rich, how are you doing today?

[00:00:38.04] - Rich Veltre

I'm doing fabulous.

[00:00:39.19] - Dan Paulson

How are you? Excellent. It is a beautiful sunny day in Wisconsin. It is about 50 degrees, so it's starting to feel more like fall. But hey, life is good. Life is good. So anyway, I approach you about something. I tend to watch YouTube videos or at least have them in the background when I'm doing some other work and not talking to people. And of course, you see things pop up on your feed, and I don't think you are that familiar with this person. So Tim Kast. Tim Pool is somebody who, from what I know of his history, started in the skateboarding and doing videos, then got into more or less doing news stories, articles. I think he worked for Vice at one point, then launched his own news, video cast, podcast type thing. He's got a couple of different channels. But anyway, I'll pull this up here so our listeners who are on YouTube could see this. Let me get that, share it. All right, so you can see here, this is just his channel. I would play it, but unfortunately, we are not tech savvy enough, or at least I am not tech savvy enough to have it play and actually have the audio feed through everything here.

[00:02:03.29] - Dan Paulson

So you have to apologize with me for that, but we'll definitely post the link to the URL. But basically it says this may be my last Timcast IRL, and I'm doing some other work, and I figured, okay, is this just something to get me to bite? And I said, well, I'll just have it play in the background. And I listened to it. Now, keep in mind, this guy has a couple of different channels. I think his main channel has about five million people. Timcast IRL is a different channel of that. He does different commentary on there, and it's got listed here. It's got about 2.1 million people. So this guy is relatively well known. I think he's got a few more viewers than our podcast, Rich, maybe by one or two, but we're pretty close. And you listen to what he's saying. And what he's saying is pretty much what we've been saying for probably better than last year. Now, you had a chance to listen to it. What was your take?

[00:03:03.18] - Rich Veltre

Well, it was definitely interesting. There were comments about work-life balance. There were comments about trying to scale when you're alone, which is every founder's dilemma to start. You're a lone wolf. And so even though he had built a team, he at times felt like a lone wolf because things were not getting done because everybody expected, Well, you're the leader. So you do everything. And he's like, I don't want to do everything. So I think there was a bit of that work-life balance and trying to understand how do you scale and what makes sense. So his thought was maybe there were too many projects, cut it down to the one that would be still profitable, would still give him an outlet, and wouldn't require as much infrastructure. It wouldn't require as much background. So I'm not trying to tell everybody, here's my book review.

[00:04:21.02] - Dan Paulson

But that is your book review.

[00:04:22.14] - Rich Veltre

But I mean, the reason I brought those specific topics up were those are the things that resonated to, okay, so this is a podcast, but it's a business. It's a parallel to everybody else's business. It's a parallel to something that could happen to anybody who's listening to this podcast, who's trying to scale their business or grow their business or understand the intertwining between operations and finance. He was hitting all of it.

[00:04:52.29] - Dan Paulson

Yeah. And here's what was interesting to me about it. These are the common themes I hear, I don't know if you hear him as much, but because I tend to be more on the op side of things. You got an owner. He started something, you grew something. He started getting employees. He expected those employees to do specific tasks related to his business. They did some of it, but they didn't do all of it, or they didn't do it to the quality that he expected, or they didn't do it to the degree of follow up that they needed to. And now he's sitting here trying to keep the machine going. Everyone's looking at him because they're collecting their paycheck off of this, but they're not taking any ownership in it. And that, to me, is the biggest thing I hear from multiple businesses. I had a conversation with the business earlier this week. Gal had created something that was pretty profitable. It was growing, but a lot of it was centered around her. And she had employees that are expected to do tasks and expected to do work, and that work feeds into the financial machine.

[00:06:05.11] - Dan Paulson

And they've got their own priorities. They got their own demands. It's like, well, this is my business. This is your business. And you make all this money, so why should I work any harder? And I hate to stereotype themes like that. But more and more right now, I seem to be hearing the same thing from other business owners, and they all struggle with how to deal with that. Many of them are getting to the age where they want to step back. I mean, I think Tim's probably in his 30s. He's a YouTube guy, so they tend to target younger when you look at that. So he's built something up over the last 10 years or so and created something that's pretty profitable. And now he's thinking about scaling it back because he doesn't want the headache. And to be honest, by the time we're recording this, I believe he has announced that this podcast will continue on, but he's restructuring it to streamline it a little bit more. So I mean, that probably means certain people are going to lose his job. He was also talking about he had employees. Well, the employees would take equipment home.

[00:07:16.19] - Dan Paulson

They would take stuff. And I think what disturbed me about all that is he's like, well, that just happens. And yeah, to a certain degree, but it's not that common. Unless you're a rather large organization, where people somehow think they're entitled or they're owed. And I don't believe he has hundreds of employees. I think he has maybe tens of employees. So you look at that and you go, how much of this is owner mindset?

[00:07:45.02] - Rich Veltre

Policies.

[00:07:46.11] - Dan Paulson

Policies.

[00:07:47.10] - Rich Veltre

I've seen companies that... Let's take it a different step. Contractor says to one of the employees, oh, well, you can take our truck home. You could drive it home at night thinking to a certain extent, like the knowner, it's a driving billboard. It's going down the highway. But then somebody like me is looking at it going, the guy lives 100 miles away.

[00:08:15.29] - Dan Paulson

And he likes to go to the bar after work and drink a case of beer and then drive home.

[00:08:19.27] - Rich Veltre

So you got that liability problem. Then on top of that, you got 200 miles that you're paying the gas because he's going to use the gas card on his miles home and miles back. And then there's no... This isn't a temporary thing. This isn't, well, the guy didn't have a car, so we let him go for a couple of days. This was like, keep going. This was like, part of his deal became, I'm taking the It's a dark home. And there's other reasons to look for things to say, being someone's friend isn't necessarily how the boss should be. I mean, the boss can be a nice guy. The boss can be. But there's a common goal. And the goal is to get to the end to the point where everybody makes money, and that's how you get a paycheck. It's not, well, the owner makes plenty of money. Why am I worried about him?

[00:09:17.13] - Dan Paulson

Exactly.

[00:09:17.26] - Rich Veltre

But that's the mentality that comes out of when you're too nice of a guy or when you're too lax on your policies.

[00:09:26.02] - Dan Paulson

Well, and this is leadership. How do we I want to say it? You weren't put in this role. It just happened. So it's like those business owners by accident. In his case, because, again, it's social media and everything, he started doing videos. The video took off. He built a reputation. He built an audience. It grew, and that was successful. How does that relate to a plumber, a contractor, a manufacturer that started something in their garage with one truck and then over five years, they're adding employees. Now they have a fleet, and all that changes. It's not necessarily that they looked at becoming a leader. They looked at building a business, and then the business actually was successful. So it was like success in spite of yourself. And all of a sudden, you're thrust into a position now where you have to do things that are more corporate. So one of the things that Tim had mentioned in his podcast, as he was lamenting about his situation, is like, well, we've talked about getting investors, or we talked about doing this or talked about doing that. But then it starts feeling corporate, and it takes away the fun that we all start with.

[00:10:39.29] - Dan Paulson

And I know you've done enough stuff with startup businesses. That's their stick. In the beginning, it's like, oh, we're all coming together. We're doing a collective thing. We're all enjoying what we're doing. We have this freedom because there aren't a lot of systems or structure in place to try and grow this thing. And then boom, you happen to be one of the lucky ones where it takes off, and now you need that stuff, but you don't have it.

[00:11:03.14] - Rich Veltre

Yeah. I think there are relatively few fun startups that get over that wall. They get over the wall, and they get the money, and they're running, and everybody's happy, and they continue to be... It continues to be a game. It continues to be fun. At some point, you wind up with those restrictions because you're going to take someone's money who's going to expect, Here's what you're going to do with my money. Even though they gave it to you, they consider it still to be their money. The language is key here. When you hear people talk about it, they're like, What'd you do with my money? It's still their money in their eyes. They're still looking at it. You now have used it to do something else, and their expectation is that you're going to give them back more money. Money. When you use it to become a bigger game, they don't usually take kindly to that. Go back and watch any of the movies that have come out now about WeWork.

[00:12:15.15] - Dan Paulson

Oh, gosh. Yeah.

[00:12:16.29] - Rich Veltre

Talk about one of the biggest parties disguised as a corporate entity. The only thing that I can put on it that actually puts a little bow on it is that the concept was good. The concept was relatively straightforward. Some place like New York, where they had the most facilities, it's very expensive to try to get even a thousand square feet. So if you go into something that allows you to share the space with a lot of other smaller companies like yourself, the concept works. When you add a Woodstock feeling a required retreat in the summer that has barely any food and a whole lot of alcohol. And then you've got private equity firms and institutional bankers that have invested in you are now looking at this Woodstock going on. And I have no idea how it went as long as it did. But that's the story you want to go back to and say, there's a point where everything flips, and there still has to be that back office. If you still want it to be a game and you can still produce, but that back office is built and solid, then I think you actually have something that would be rare.

[00:13:54.10] - Rich Veltre

But building that back office and being solid, I think, is exactly the thing that this guy didn't want to see. He didn't want that. He didn't want to be part of that. He wanted to go ride his skateboard and then show up to do his podcast. That's all fine, okay? But even as he said, you need somebody else then to take on the role because you don't want to do it.

[00:14:16.16] - Dan Paulson

And that's the key. I think he's come to the conclusion he recognizes that. And as you point out, there's nothing wrong with that at all. And you have to put then people and systems in place to allow you to do that, to give you that freedom. So freedom comes with structure. And you point out the WeWork example. I think when we look at business startups, whether it's a contractor, whether it's a manufacturer, whether it's a company like WeWork, WeWork is one of those examples because it was new and exciting. I think what hides it is they get a lot of good press. We can probably both think of some pretty colossal failures that started out on the right foot What's the medical one? The bloodwork one? I can't think. Theranos. Theranos. Yeah, we talked about her either earlier this year or late last year. I mean, she was a darling, and the media propped a lot of it up, and it was all smoke and mirrors. But for a while, they go and they live high on the hog until they run out of steam. Now, in this particular case, it's not the same I think what we see with the Timcast, it's just a larger example of what most small to medium-sized businesses face, where when you're early on, there's a lot of freedom to do your job in certain ways.

[00:15:45.23] - Dan Paulson

Because there's no structure yet, and there isn't really enough volume or people that you need that structure. Now you get to 0.357 years down the road, and you're all of a sudden put in this situation where, well, it It was fun when we were all creative and whatnot, but now there's certain things happening. There's more mistakes happening, quality is going down. Maybe certain service issues are getting missed. Maybe we're losing opportunities because we don't have a way to manage our sales pipeline efficiently. And now you got to put structure in place. And then people start looking at go, well, this is now becoming too corporate. It's taking all that fun away. I think the evolution of any business, if it's going to be successful long term has to move to where there is structure involved. And through that structure, you regain the freedom that you had earlier, because now that there are systems in place, there's efficiencies, there's steps to follow, people know what to do. They're not left to guess. And you get that point where you can start stepping back and doing other things or focus on different growth opportunities than you could before.

[00:16:58.24] - Rich Veltre

Right. Yeah. I think it also comes down to the things that you and I have been talking about, which is you want to be proactive about it, then your proactive part of it has to include some degree of planning around the fact that you understand that that's going to happen. Especially if you do have traction and you do feel like you're moving forward and revenues coming in and things are happening and there's potential investors, you You have to include some of the change that's going to happen inside of the business climate, the employee climate, everything that actually is going along with it. That has a bit of a cost. You're going to have to plan for how are you going to arrange for the fact that something's going to change. Are you reserving a little bit for, we're going to have to do some things for the employees because this is going to get a little stressful. How do we reward them for putting up with it and realizing that we planned for it all along? No one likes surprises. So the CEO here doesn't like surprises. But there's probably another side to this story as well.

[00:18:18.26] - Rich Veltre

Why weren't the employees doing some of the things that he was expecting them to do? Was it lack of communication from him? Was it burnout? Was it other things that were affecting the employees or the fact that they were always working with shoddy equipment? And so when the equipment failed, everybody threw their hands up and said, this is a typical day. He's not talking about that in the podcast.

[00:18:45.22] - Dan Paulson

He does a little bit. I don't think it's necessarily a shoddy equipment issue or that he was shortcutting anything there. There were a couple of different things that I caught, and I don't know if he directly said it, but he's in an industry that attracts a lot of younger people. And I know this because I have a daughter that's in the social media, and they all think they can do this on their own. They can be successful. And it's only really a handful of people that can pull this off. And one of the things that Tim said was, there's people out there that post videos or do stuff, and they do it once a week. Hello? That would be us because we got other things to do. But he's seven days a week, 24 hours a day posting videos 6 to 10 times a day. How many people are actually going to put forth that effort? But what he's found is they'll go hire somebody or they'll reach out to somebody to come on their team in some way, shape or form. And a vast majority of them just go, well, why should I do this for you?

[00:19:54.08] - Dan Paulson

I can do this for myself. And then the people he does get, I think all I'll have that mindset where, well, I'm helping you grow this thing. What if I want to do my own thing? So there's that whole disconnect of ownership. And I actually had the opportunity yesterday. So as the day that we're recording this right now, the day before that, I was at a conference and I was talking about how values impact your bottom line. Richie would have been proud of me. I was talking about accounting stuff without talking about accounting stuff. I almost feel like a politician here. I was relating, well, why do you need values and how does that relate to profit margins and sales and all this other stuff? And what I see here is, like I said, this is what I hear from a lot of people, clients and anyone else, is They have an idea of what should be done, but they haven't built a value set around their business, nor have they educated their team to that value set. And if you don't have values unified throughout the company and throughout the organization, you're not not feeding those values constantly, you end up in a situation where everyone works off their own value set.

[00:21:07.02] - Dan Paulson

So any company will create its own set of values. If you're not curating that, you often get stuff you don't want. And I think this is an example where he would talk about different opportunities. He even talked about where they would go out and they would essentially partner with other podcasters or other video casters, and they would essentially act as, I'll call it their agent He didn't use that word, but that's how I interpret it. He be their agent and help them grow and get that business thriving. They'd still have to do a lot of the heavy lifting, but through his name recognition and support, they would help them grow their channels. And a lot of people just wouldn't see that as an option. So you've got a generation of people here that all think, all this stuff is easy. I don't need the experience. I can just go out and do it. And there's really such a small handful, and this is true in any line of work, that actually become successful at what they do, because the vast majority of people just don't want to put in that degree of effort to get there.

[00:22:12.07] - Rich Veltre

Yeah. I mean, that's The employee level, it's just... I'm hitting one of those spots where it's just clicking around. But I think it's relatable. It's really relatable. And I think that's my biggest takeaway, because I had another meeting with someone that was in more of a medical field, and multiple locations, and then is now looking and saying, why is there no money in my pocket? And I'm saying, well, what reports do you get that show how everything's doing? If you have multiple locations, how can you tell me how everything's going? I don't really have anything. I'm like, so you're trying to run a company with five locations on gut? Yeah,. Oh, boy. So I could probably put her on Tim Katz podcast. Actually, they could just banter back and forth on What else is something that you have to be prepared for? Because if you're trying to scale and grow, you're just looking at, how do I grow my top line? And I'm saying, it's not the top line you got to worry about, it's the bottom line. Yeah. And how did you figure out what expenses you have for that bottom line? Because you figured out how to make funds come in.

[00:23:40.24] - Rich Veltre

But your cash requirements are way higher than what you're actually bringing in I think. So now we're trying to figure out, can we get a report? She was relying on her outside accountant who said, you spend too much money. That's the whole advice they got was that they spend too much money. So what's gut feel? I don't know. It's pretty hard to educate someone who's in the middle of that on, what do I say? Here's what you did wrong. I mean, is it wrong? I just feel like I'm rambling a little bit here, but there's a big relatability here to how much of what you don't know is what's coming back to bite you. Because for a long time, you could run along thinking you're making all kinds of money. But if you don't prove it with numbers, you have no proof that what you did was correct.

[00:24:43.07] - Dan Paulson

Well, and to me, to bring this back full circle, this is a sign of the lack of experience that's out there. We have, maybe we have employees, but they're filling roles that are above their pay grade right now. They just don't have the tenure or the C reasoning that others have that can really look at what's going on, what's wrong with those options. I mean, I'm sure the accountant's right that they spend too much money, but the accountant's probably a tax accountant. He's only looking at the P&Ls and he's not Involved in the business, he's not strategizing, well, why do we spend too much money? Or how do we get better reports? It's just this is what it is. You deal with it. And I see more and more companies that they struggle to find that help, is why we're pushing for what we're doing here is we really need to get that level of experience into the hands of people who maybe can't afford a full-time person to do that. You need to find somebody to help as far as the guidance goes. So that way you do get good reporting, you do build good systems.

[00:25:52.13] - Dan Paulson

Unfortunately, you may get a little bit more corporatized in the process, but with that discipline comes more freedom.

[00:25:59.28] - Rich Veltre

I 100 % agree with that.

[00:26:03.28] - Dan Paulson

Well, I'm glad you agree. That's good. I would actually love to have Tim Kass come on our show, but we mean nothing. We have our five views a month or whatever it is. It's relatively small. I mean, a lot of people listen to us on different channels, but it would be nice to talk with him more about that and understand what challenges he's faced. Because like I said, if you listen to the podcast, it's two hours. I don't think you need to listen to the full two hours. But within a half hour to 45 minutes, you really get a feel for a lot of very similar themes to what we go through or what business owners go through to try and grow a successful company. And oh, my gosh, it is successful. Now what? So it's the whole dog that caught the car situation. Okay, we got there. Now we got all these other issues we need to deal with. What are we going to do about that?

[00:26:54.29] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, totally agree.

[00:26:58.25] - Dan Paulson

Well, if they If you need help, Tim, if you need help, I've already sent an email. Give me a call. Should you actually see this? But if anyone else needs help that isn't a podcast host, Rich, how do they get a hold of you?

[00:27:12.24] - Rich Veltre

Best way is by email. Send me an email to rveltre@veltregroup.com.

[00:27:17.13] - Dan Paulson

Excellent. If you need to get a hold of me right now, you can go to danpaulsonletsgo.com and set up a meeting. We can definitely help you out. If you are feeling the same level of frustrations with your employees, with your systems, with your profitability, with your sales, any of that we can help address. And next week, Rich, we've got an exciting announcement to make, and I think that's probably going to take up most of our podcast, but we'll keep you hanging for that for at least seven more days. And if you want to listen to other podcasts here, if you want to catch up on maybe some other things that we've been talking about related to this whole Timcast situation, you can check us out at booksnbizz.com. That is B-O-O-K-S, the letter N-B-I-Z. Com. And we will see you there. Rich, it's been fun? Absolutely. We will let you go and you can do your accounting stuff, and I will do my business stuff, and we'll see you next week.

[00:28:13.25] - Rich Veltre

All right. Sounds good.

[00:28:15.12] - Dan Paulson

All right. Thanks a lot.