Morgan: Hello. Hello everyone. Welcome to the latest episode of Client Horror Stories. I’m excited to have Wes Towers, who I think is my first guest ever from Australia. Good day, mate. How are you doing?

Wes: Yeah, good day, mate. Yeah, doing really well. It’s a different time zone for us, but I feel very similar countries in a lot of ways. We love steak. I believe you guys are keen on the mates.

Morgan: That is true. And southern hemisphere reversed seasons are to most other people.

Wes: Yeah, probably similar weather patterns as well, I would imagine.

Morgan: So, before we jump into the story, which I’m very excited to hear, I can’t resist a good horror story. What are you drinking for your strongly suggested alcohol today?

Wes: Yeah, so I’ve got a local brew. It’s a chocolate stout. Can you see that there? Bell’s Beach, which is a fairly recognized beach. If there’s any surfers listening, they probably are aware of Bell’s Beach. It’s just down the road from here. So, I thought I’d promote the local region. And I’ll crack that open right now.

Morgan: I love it. I love it. Keeping it local. And by the way, I’m not a beer connoisseur, but I didn’t even know chocolate beers were a thing, but it sounds amazing.

Wes: Yeah, only discovered it a little while back. So, maybe a month or two back and so loved it. So, they’ve got a brewery just next door here as well. So, good to support the next-door neighbor.

Morgan: By the way, I am winding down the night with some whiskey. But I am now using for the first time—so this is just showing off my latest acquisition—a coffee cup that says, “This is probably whiskey,” which it actually is. I thought it’d be funny to record podcasts and TikToks, whatever, with this not-so-subtle message here.

Wes: That’s brilliant. Yeah, I think there was a fair few getting around in COVID times with the coffee mug, the cooler mug with the alcohol in there.

Morgan: Exactly. A modern version of the same. And with our alcohol in hand, I’m so in the mood for a good Australian client horror story. Let’s go.

Wes: Yeah. So I’ll tell you a little bit about the backstory. So, I’m a website designer, developer, do SEO, all that kind of stuff. And typically we build websites in WordPress. We have done for a long time now. We used other software many, many years ago, but probably the last 15 years, I would say, has been WordPress.

But I’ve got a little team of developers and I had a team leader who I could see was getting a little bit bored with the work. There’s a fair bit of repetition because all the websites technically are kind of the same and we have a set process and we follow the process and the structure. The designs come out different and there’s different aspects of every site, but I could just see, because he’d been with me a long time, he was getting bored.

But this opportunity for this different kind of website popped up. It was something I’d never done before, nothing that the team had ever done before, but he was really advanced as a programmer. So I just ran it past him and said, “Hey, look, this opportunity has come up. Quite a large project, not really what we normally do, but would it interest you and is it something that you’d like to engage with?”

And he loved the idea.

It was a dating website.

Morgan: Yeah. So, before we jump into the dating website, I just want to discuss for a moment this really interesting question you bring up of key employees getting bored, because people don’t really talk about it. But for any owner-operator, VP, director, someone that’s managing people, this is an issue.

And because the way for companies to go, you need systems and processes in a repeatable way. But people who are creative tend to get bored fairly quickly when it’s just the same repetitive process.

Wes: Yeah. Super challenging. I mean, one of the biggest influencing books I read was The E-Myth, and that was all about systems and processes, about being almost like McDonald’s where anyone can do it from start to finish and it comes out the same every time.

Well, that’s great from a business perspective, but there is, as you say, the flip side of that is maybe the staff members, team members, are getting bored. So, and that was certainly the case with this guy.

Morgan: So, I don’t know what the good answer is with solving that problem of having systems and processes that are, by the way—this is such an important issue. And by the way, it’s never come up on Client Horror Stories before. It’s worth us discussing it for about two minutes before we figure out, before we hear what happened with this project.

So, because I faced this exact same thing as well, I’ve created different systems in my various companies over the years in order to combat that.

First, something that’s influenced me in approaching this problem has been Google’s famous—you can spend 20% of your time working on anything you want. Google’s just—and what’s powerful about that is creative, smart people want to do their own thing. They don’t even care if the company owns it. And famously, Gmail was created through one of these 20% ways.

So, to me, there are a lot of companies in the US that talk about the four-day work week. But what I personally prefer is, instead of a four-day work week so employees get the benefit of a day off, what I prefer is kind of a four-day work week, but having one day a week, often spread out—a half day here, a half day there, quarter day here, quarter day there—in order to do creative, different, experimental projects.

Sometimes crazy ideas I have. Sometimes I want to try this weird social media campaign. Sometimes I let people do their own thing. And this is an interesting mechanism to try to create, to keep creative people engaged.

Wes: Yeah, 100%. That’s brilliant. And the timing is perfect for that kind of thing. I’m definitely going to pursue something like that now that you say it, Morgan, because it just feels like, right now with AI and it’s transforming my industry and there’s so many opportunities. Absolutely. I’ve got some great minds with me. They should be exploring. They should have opportunities to explore and experiment within my business and maybe that’ll help us expand as well.

Morgan: Exactly. But I’m happy that the episode just began three minutes ago and we haven’t even gotten to the heart of the story yet and already you’re getting great ideas to implement and change our business. So the episode’s already a win, and that’s great.

Wes: Yeah.

Morgan: But this is what I do and I really believe it’s a win-win because it’s how you get the creativity out, how you learn new technologies, how you try different things. And guess what? In my experience doing this for over 20 years now, every once in a while, one of these internal experiments actually goes really, really well and you can spin it off into a business while it keeps people engaged and loyal and creative.

Wes: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got some ideas ticking over in my mind right now. So I better make sure I come back to those things after the podcast for sure.

But back to the horrific story. So, the developer loved the idea of developing this complex dating website. We’ve never done anything like that. It was a different type of business. It was different types of functions. He—I didn’t know how to do it. He was the only guy who had a remote idea of how to do it.

So he did the proposal. He did the scoping out. He did everything. And we submitted it, won the project.

But a couple of weeks into the project, he quit anyway.

So, he was the only guy who knew how to do it and he’d probably been shopping around for a different job already. And so I was lumped with this responsibility of building this website with no technical capability of knowing even where to start.

So, man, I burnt so many hours myself. I was able to hire a couple of people to help out, but realistically doing a lot of the grunt work myself, which was not ideal. Burning midnight hour.

We delivered the project. It was a great project. The client loved it. She had no idea. She had no idea the pain and anguish I was suffering through that whole journey.

And she sold that business, that online business, luckily because things sort of changed with online dating and Tinder and stuff.

Morgan: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Okay.

By the way, I’ve been in comparable situations where I’ve had key employees quit at the worst possible moment. I even had a worse version of that, which is I had a key employee die in a car crash at the worst possible moment.

So, this is a painful moment. Even if you don’t die, just quitting.

Wes: Yeah.

Morgan: For the project. So, just saying that, I’m like reliving the pain of different employees quitting. “No, no, no. I just need you at least four more months to finish this and find someone else.”

Wes: Yeah. Yeah. So, it is painful. So, yeah. It is good that you can rescue it, but I’m wondering, in business world, this is sometimes called the keyman risk. And I’m wondering what you’ve changed or done since then in order to lower the keyman risk, to use fancy risk-minimization terminology.

Wes: Yeah. Well, from that I kind of never walked away from our core skill sets. So, we’re sticking into our lane now. So, this project was quite different. It was quite—

Morgan: Yeah, it was completely different to what we normally do and I only took it on to help that team member out.

So, actually, there are two—that’s interesting. There are actually two different lessons or two different strategies that you are sharing to deal with it.

One, you’re observing that this was a problem because it was a bit different than what you usually do. Usually you have processes, checks, balances, repetition, multiple people. So, you’re covered.

So, this is a good example of venturing out from the one thing you do.

But you’re also making a second point, which is actually more interesting. You’re like, “Hey, I wanted to make him happy, so I gave him this concession of this weird different project just to make him happy.”

And guess what? You give him the concession and then he quit.

Wes: Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. So, lesson learned really. That’s the dangers. I mean, probably realistically, I should have realized the guy was probably already looking for other opportunities and having interviews and all that kind of thing.

But yeah, I really liked him. I’d had him for a long time. So, I suppose now we’re trying new things, but not to that level. So, taking on projects that still stretch the team at times, so they’ve got that, but they’re not completely out of the scope of what we have done before.

Morgan: Micro improvement or—you know, I want to share a different pattern that I’ve noticed in my career, but you’re gonna see in a second. It’s going to tie in to one of your broader points, which is this.

It’s happened to me far too many times because I’ve had companies with more than 100 employees. I’ve managed a lot of people. I’m older than I seem.

And it’s happened to me far too many times where, for whatever reason, someone asks me for a raise. I usually try to be ahead of the game and give rates proactively, be ahead of inflation, et cetera.

But it’s happened too many times where people ask me for a raise and I say, “You know, it wasn’t scheduled, but I really like you. I understand you need extra money. We happen to be in a good moment. I can afford it. Sure.”

And almost every single time within three months of me giving people an unsolicited rate or raise that they asked for, that I didn’t initiate, they quit.

It’s like this incredible pattern that I’ve noticed.

And one of the lessons that I get from that, or that I’ve taken from that, is people sometimes—you get unhappy at a job for whatever reason. Sometimes it’s just time to move on, no matter how great the boss is.

Other times, the bosses of the company have problems. But for whatever reason, you’re unhappy because most people don’t understand their own emotions.

You’re in a job, you’re unhappy, you’re feeling frustrated, you don’t quite know what to do because they don’t understand themselves.

They think the most obvious thing, which is, “No, I just never have, at the end of the month, I never have enough money to live well.”

So people tend to misinterpret their own emotions to think it’s a money problem. Thus they ask for the raise, and then they get it and then within three months they’re just as unhappy.

So, like, the money didn’t solve the problem, thus they quit it or look for another job.

Wes: Yeah. Right. Yeah, that I can understand. So, people are really not as self-aware. So they’re just saying, “Oh, well, maybe money will fix it.”

Morgan: By the way, that is my theory, my explanation for this pattern that at least I’ve seen in my career, and your summary of it is just consistent with my experience of both living and being a manager and being an owner-operator, which is the vast majority of humans are not self-aware.

Wes: Yeah. Yeah. 100%. I think you’re right. Certainly if I look back on things, yeah, it’s probably the same.

It’s probably the maybe the other aspect of it. Sometimes the best people are a little more assertive, so they will ask for more money and sometimes that’s a good signal that they’re, you know, they’re pushing the boundaries for their own career paths, but they’re probably hopefully your best workers as well.

It’s always multiple things going on, isn’t there, with people. Dealing with people is the challenge of any business really.

Morgan: It’s the beauty and the challenge. As a New Yorker that likes to speak in an exaggerated way, it’s what makes it utterly miserable. And I hate humans and I hate managing people.

At the same time, it makes it this really, really interesting intellectual challenge. Okay, what’s really happening? What are they thinking? Let me try to model their minds and try to understand their emotions empathically.

Wes: Yeah. Yeah. Even in the sales process, I think, you know, having sales meetings and so on, it’s very rarely about price. Price is only coming into it when there’s no other way of, you know, thinking about a project or a proposal.

So maybe that’s the same thing. People just default to money when they don’t know what else to—

Morgan: They’re thinking should be thinking about a thousand percent. A thousand percent.

And I would make that same point in a stronger way, which is, you have a company, an institution, anything, and there’s a problem. The easiest, most obvious first thing that comes to the mind of any human is, “Oh no, it’s money. We’re charging too much. We should charge less,” and so on.

But it actually takes self-awareness, introspection, really understanding the situation to say, “Okay, okay.”

Actually, it’s always the same thing. It’s always like, “No, no, no. If people were more excited, you wouldn’t need to lower your price in order to attract them. How do you excite them more?”

And with employees, it’s a very similar dynamic. If they were loving it, enjoying the work, making enough and so on, they wouldn’t be causing disasters over a 2% raise.

Wes: Yeah. Yeah. 100%. I think it sort of ties back to what you were saying. If we can create opportunities for team members to explore creative endeavors, you’ll be able to keep the best people. They’ll be enjoying their work and occasionally there’ll be a fantastic outcome.

There’s actually a loose idea bouncing around my mind already that I’ll float with the team and particularly one guy. I won’t share it here because someone will steal my idea.

Morgan: Maybe it’ll change the world. Certainly in my—it’ll help our business.

If during the course of the podcast you feel like sharing a publicly accessible version of the idea, I’m happy to brainstorm on it in real time with Client Horror Stories. It’s gone in wild different directions. I had a recent episode where the guy took his phone—he was filming on—and walked over to his grand piano and started playing while talking.

So, I’m always up for a good business brainstorm.

By the way, my business instinct, however, I’ll tell you, is that it’s almost never the case—almost never the case, or never the case—that people actually steal ideas.

Wes: Yeah.

Morgan: So, the value you get of talking about it and the feedback you get and the words starting to make it real is much more valuable than theirs.

Because if you—because here’s actually how I would look at the risk if someone’s stealing the idea. It’s basically this: What is the chance that someone is listening to this podcast and hears it, and when they listen to it they actually understand it at a deep level? Then the chance that, once if they understand it, then they would be so excited about it they would then start doing it themselves.

Then when they start doing it themselves, they’d be able to have the money and the resources to put into doing it.

Then what is the chance that even if all those probabilities happened in the Drake equation, that they would do it as good as you do it?

And I just look at those calculations and I’m like, okay, a 2% chance of this times a 2% chance of this times a 2% chance of this times a 2% chance of this. Okay, there’s a one-in-a-trillion chance.

Wes: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. True. True. Yeah, 100%.

Yeah, I mean, yeah. Something—well, just really loosely, because it’s just come to my mind and it’s because of a particular need.

There’s a website—we’ve won a website project that we need to build in WordPress for the Australian entity, but it’s got international websites which were built in a different software, and they’re in proprietary software or something. And so they can’t give us access directly.

So, we have to manually copy-paste each product—which is hundreds of products—from the international site into the Australian. And I’m sure there must be a ChatGPT something or a way to scrape not only the text but the images and the PDF resources that go with the products, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

And then even to price-adjust to Australian. There’s a bunch of things that it needs to do.

So, yeah, there’s got to be a way. My team will know how to—maybe it’s best not to give them too much guidance. Maybe just say, “Here’s the problem. Who’s got a creative solution?”

Because if we can get a solution to this need, there’s probably a bunch of other applications for that same AI thing or whatever it might be.

Morgan: So, I have a couple of thoughts on that.

First, the probabilities work out and there’s a 0% chance that anyone hears this and they’ll steal it, and for many reasons, including there’s very few of the audience in Australia.

Second point I’ll point out, there’s some things I like about this as a WordPress nerd myself and a WordPress code contributor. I think WordPress is awesome. It powers a third of the internet and there’s such a rich ecosystem of paid plugins.

I pay probably more than $5,000 a year of—I need WP Rocket for $400 a year and this one and this one and this one and this one, and before you know it, it’s a real bill.

So, I like this space.

What I like most about the idea is my last company I did large-scale enterprise software sales and, how do I say—I’m trying to say, basically, there’s so much software. So much of enterprise sales is systems that are kind of easy and simple, like ChatGPT could probably do it, but what everyone pays up the wazoo for isn’t that simple course system.

It’s the 99% of the bells and whistles. No, you need granular access controls. You need this guaranteed backed up. No, it has to work in this currency in this particular way. It has to be on-prem and so on.

So even taking something as simple as just scraping the software and putting it there, for the people who really need it, if you take this ChatGPT piece you can create in five minutes, but then you put all the wrapping around it, then for the people who really have that problem, bam, like, yeah, magic.

Wes: So, yeah, that’s a great idea. And so creating a WordPress plugin—it’s something that I’d considered. I’ve never gone really into it, but if we made that into a plugin and people bought it for whatever the fee is, but just the brand—

Morgan: By the way, if you’re planning on doing this for yourself, it’s just five more minutes in order to make it a plugin.

Wes: Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So, as long as you’ve done the first 90%.

Morgan: Yeah.

My final observation on this idea for the tangent before we get back to the core topic is I just want to say I also like your approach of giving your team the general challenge and seeing how they do it.

Because I think that’s when you get the best results, when the team understands the big vision, the goal, the context, and then they figure out how and how to do it themselves.

Because that’s also not just—do you get the best results because they feel the ownership. They really want to understand the problem.

But yeah, see how we began this podcast after talking about our chocolate beer in the Australian morning, of keeping people interested, which is people don’t want to just fit into a process. They want to solve creative problems.

And, oh, we have this creative problem of the e-commerce information on this site. We need it on that site. That’s a creative problem. That’s kind of fun to solve.

Wes: Yeah. And the other reason I like all of those reasons—the other reason too, to throw it to them for their input, is I just hire people that are smarter than me in their field. So they know better than I do with creating the plugin and that sort of thing. So, you know, trust their skills.

Morgan: Okay. I love this. I love this tangent. I could talk about WordPress forever.

So, to go back to the main story, I want to talk about what you’ve learned and how you’ve changed as a result.

So, we did share two important pieces of learning from this, which is one: stay in your lane, and if you do leave it, leave it very, very carefully.

Secondly, making concessions for employees is just fundamentally risky because it’s likely there’s a deeper issue happening. So, the concession may not only not help him, it can create other risks, which is actually—that last point is worth emphasizing for a second, which is everything you do creates a risk.

So, when you took on this project, you were thinking about the concession to the employee, but you weren’t even thinking about the risk that he leaves.

So, it’s also a good reminder that just trying this, doing this, doing these other things—like, everything includes an embedded risk factor.

Wes: Yeah. And the other way I could have looked at it, just thinking about it now, having discussed what we’ve said so far, I could have—because we put all that work into building it. It was a niched dating site too, so it wasn’t just your general site. It was not like nothing else, but there was a need. There was a market for those sorts of niched dating sites.

We could have made it a lane because by that stage we’d invested so much into learning how to do it. We could have done it again so much more simply.

So, because I was feeling so burnt out at the time of just getting to the finish line, I just wanted to see the back of it, never touch it again.

But upon reflection now, I should have been wiser and thought about how I repurposed the learnings into a new field. It would have been green pastures to explore that.

Morgan: That is a good insight and a good learning.

And there’s a subtext to what you said. You just threw at this point in passing, like, “I didn’t because I was feeling burned out.”

And burnout is real. And not like what happens all the time is you always hear talk about employees being burned out, but guess what? Management also gets burned out.

And I’ve seen that far too much. And when you have things like this—hugely stressful, huge project, new systems, new technologies, the one person that knows it quits—it’s so stressful for you.

You’re just like in this emotional state where even if it’s the best business decision to build on it, you’re human. You just can’t handle it.

So, watching and caring for your own burnout is really important.

Wes: True. True. Yeah. Absolutely. It’s hard to get the balance right as a business leader, isn’t it?

So, we’re typically so driven for success. So, you just throw so much at it. For me, certainly, it feels like I just throw so much at it that at times it’s like, “Oh man, I need a break.” You know, it doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while.

Morgan: Yeah. 100%.

Question. What—tell us a bit about the employee quitting. Like, did you get angry? Was he like—or did you hate each other now? Do you are you now best friends?

Wes: No, we didn’t hate—I didn’t hate him. We didn’t hate each other. I mean, we’ve lost contact. I could look him up. I think we’re on Facebook friends. I don’t know.

Morgan: I’m not—I last checked my Facebook account shortly after I last checked my MySpace account.

Wes: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s—

Morgan: So, what I like about your response is I feel like a younger version of me being in this situation where, like, I’m really dependent on one person and they freaking screw me at the worst moment. I would have blown up, been angry. Like, I would have probably never spoken to them again. Can’t believe this person did this to me.

Well, actually, it’s very mature of you that even if he’s lost contact, it was like—it was an adult settlement.

Wes: Yeah. Well, he’d been with me for many years at that point. So, it was disappointing, but I could appreciate he had a career path to pursue. And these difficult times, you get through them. It was a few months of difficulty. You know, it took a few months to build out, but yeah.

Morgan: Which actually goes to—this might be a nice way to wrap up another—we began the episode by talking about strategies to keep people engaged, and I mentioned the Google 20%.

Here is a different possible strategy. It’s interesting in traditional professional services firms, there was a path to partnership.

So, if you think about, like, 50 years ago, accounting firms, law firms, the Mad Men era of advertising, where people would be hired right out of college and then they would get promotion, promotion, promotion until they became one of the 30 partners, and then they have the rest of their career here.

And the interesting thing about that is, when you’re just an employee, there’s no path to partnership.

And that puts competent and ambitious employees in a very, very difficult position because without the partnership, like, where are you going to go?

Answer is out.

Wes: Yeah. Eventually out. And people don’t stick around very long at all these days, apparently. So, I’m lucky to keep people quite a while.

But yeah, I was at an accounting practice. They had a networking event and that’s their whole thing. All of the directors work their way through to partnership, and they were massively successful. So, to have people invested at that level, it’s a real gold mine, really.

Morgan: It.

And by the way, I think it’s a very underrated strategy. Like, I think it’s not common enough for software development, SEO, marketing firms to have this sort of path to partnership, but I think it is a very healthy and powerful structure for professional services.

So, maybe it’s something else for you or any listener who’s in a position to think about.

Wes: Yeah, something. Man, this has been such a good call, Morgan. There’s just so many good ideas for just me. It feels like just a coaching call for me and other people are going to listen and benefit as well. That’s really cool.

Morgan: Well, with every Client Horror Story episode, you never know where it goes. Sometimes it goes in a coaching call direction, sometimes musical direction. I had people recite poetry. I recently had a comedian and we’re just laughing. He was just being ridiculous the entire time.

And I’m happy it helped.

Wes: Thank you for your time, Morgan. I’ve enjoyed the coaching and it’s been fun.

Morgan: And from your seat of the story, it was a simple story, but it’s a simple story we’ve never had on the show before, or this situation had never been on the show before. But from this seat, we’ve gotten so many good insights and ideas and strategies.

So, it was very worthwhile. So, thank you for coming to us, and everyone who’s been watching, thank you for making it to the end. We hope you guys enjoyed it as much as we have.

Wes: Thanks.

Morgan: Thanks.