Peer Effect
As founders we’re sold a lie. The journey has to be tough. Isolation is normal. We have to choose between work and life. On this podcast, James Johnson, renowned coach to Series A+ founders, explores a better way. One where you build a great business and a great life.
It’s time to take back control. The answers are out there. Your peers have already uncovered hard-won insights, practical tips and people to look out for.
That’s the Peer Effect.
Tune in every Wednesday for 30 minutes that will inspire new thoughts, avoid expensive mistakes and keep you energised.
Peer Effect
Becoming a Strategic CEO and Empowering Your Team, with Rob Volk
This week, we’re joined by Rob Volk, founder of Foxbox Digital, a leader in tech consultancy and digital transformation.
Rob shares profound insights on the shift from hands-on founder to strategic CEO and the crucial strategies that drive sustainable business growth.
In this episode, we explore:
- The art of letting go of control as to empower and build trust within your team.
- Managing your energy as a founder for sustainable growth.
- Cultivating a culture of deep focus to promote productivity and autonomy.
Rob's experience illustrates the challenges and triumphs of expanding a startup into a thriving business. His strategies for fostering a culture of empowerment and focusing on scalable growth are invaluable for any entrepreneur stepping into a CEO role.
Discover more about Rob Volk’s work at Foxbox Digital or follow him on LinkedIn for more exciting insights.
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
Welcome to Peer Effect, the podcast that fuels you with new ideas and inspiration through interviews with founders and experts who have made it happen. I'm your host, james Johnson, and I coach Series A Plus founders to take back control, propel their businesses and live a fulfilling life. Today, we're privileged to sit down with Rob Volk, visionary founder of Foxbox Digital, a tech consultancy at the forefront of digital transformation and innovation. In this episode, he opens up about the strategies that propelled his company's growth and the pivotal lessons on leadership and adaptation. Let's dive in.
Speaker 2:So you know, in the beginning, right, we all were creating, we're doing everything and everything is in our vision. And what I found is, as you grow, you really have to learn to let go of control and you have to be okay with obviously empowering people, but then being okay with the decisions they make not exactly the thing that you would do. And that's all right, it's probably a fine decision. It's probably a better decision than what you would have done, because you've probably hired some great people to run the organization or parts of it.
Speaker 2:So, I found that really just letting go of control is critical, because you want people to be empowered they have to be. You also have to be okay with things failing, especially in the beginning beginning right, if you've recently empowered someone to take over, right, they're. They're going to make mistakes in the beginning, that's okay. Hopefully they'll be small. Hopefully you can recover, and you probably can in the beginning. So it's it's good to learn to let go of control I wonder whether you end up controlling in a different way.
Speaker 1:So sort of, there's control by how task is done and there's control by how a task is done and there's control in terms of what outcomes you're after. And I wondered you shift into that growth phase as a founder. You move away from controlling the how and a bit more into controlling the what and the outcome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, certainly that's the goal, and I'm not going to say that I'm perfect here and I want things done in a certain way. But you know, really to be an effective leader, you have to set the outcome here's where we're going and empower your team to come up with how are we going to get there? You know I brought in our chief operating officer, rich, who's an incredibly accomplished, impressive, awesome guy, and you know I'm fortunate to work with him. So I brought him into to run the day-to-day of the organization, which includes how we're delivering for our clients.
Speaker 2:It includes how we, how we manage careers at Fox Box and growth and that would free me up on the sales front to grow the company, set the direction and grow the company at the high level. Now we're 50 clients solving problems for 12 or 15 clients, and it requires a different skill set to do that. So the infrastructure he put in place and the positions that he even created to get us there aren't things that I would have imagined, but it worked and the results are there right, our clients are happy, our attrition is very, very low, and so I'd say the results speak for themselves.
Speaker 1:But it must be quite scary as the founder to kind of go to give up that control in terms of they're your key clients, they're everything, everything you worked hard for, and someone else is going to kind of sit in between you and them make those decisions.
Speaker 2:Might do things differently, could go wrong yeah it's, it's scary for sure, and I always can step in. You know, if something actually does go way off the rails, I can, will and should step in. It's more of a trust.
Speaker 1:But hey, I'm here when, when, you need me you mentioned how these later stage founders move from like startup into growth and I think this of this sense of lack of control is quite a pain point for people moving into this phase, this feeling of being out of control, like having management in between you and your team, like management between you and your customers, so things being done differently. It's quite a difficult mental transition which requires a whole different style.
Speaker 2:It does. Yeah, and you know, costs require more sales, and so it's you know, you've created this beast, this machine, and you have to keep feeding it and you really have to continuously grow, um, even, even, just to maintain sometimes.
Speaker 1:How did you come to that realization that this was the right time to do this?
Speaker 2:You know, it wasn't really by choice, I was kind of forced to. It was, uh, I realized that I was. I was in a position where we were growing like crazy and I'd never run a company this size. You know my experience with startups. Right, there's their startups. They're much smaller and so we've, you know, transitioned into a you know small business, and so there was a. You know, there's a situation where I had key leaders that were not, uh, we're not working well together, right, both incredibly talented people, but together just oil and vinegar.
Speaker 2:And I was trying to figure out how to how to get past this. So you know, I asked Rich for help and um and, and you did right. And then he came into to help and we collaborated on it. We came up with solutions together and just to some extent I said, okay, like I don't, I don't know if this is the right path, but I trust you and let's, let's do that, and I actually say that a lot.
Speaker 1:Don't you need people's opinions. That really matter Are your customers, when they give you the money and often actually, as the founder, our opinion. Sometimes it's really valuable and sometimes it's almost worthless because we're too far away from the customer.
Speaker 2:That's a good point. I mean it just sort of depends. It depends on what it is Like as you grow. You have to reserve your decisions and opinions on the bigger things. You know things that matter more and more and as you grow the org right, you have people. We have a chief human resources officer who is awesome and she is running our people organization and so if there's a decision around that organization, I'm certainly not going to make it.
Speaker 2:I'm not qualified to make that decision, so I will, will default, you know, to, to her and the people I've uh, you, you know put in charge of various things. But there are times when I do need to step in and set, set the direction, opinion, when, when it's when it's a higher overarching, you know kind of thing, more directional and I suppose you also have that ultimate control in that you're controlling who your team is.
Speaker 1:So if you, if you believe in your team, there's a high chance they're going to do something that you would agree with. Probably it's got an outcome that you would want.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true, but we're all humans, we all have our opinions and we're never going to agree 100%.
Speaker 1:So if we move on to sort of the second question, sort of an external insight that you would want to share with the network, what would it be and who's it from?
Speaker 2:One of them is from uh, from rich. So I'll just start with that one. And sometimes, when people bring him problems and when he sees this happen multiple times about the same thing, he'll just say very directly, as you'd expect from a new yorker it sounds like you're admiring the problem. Now what are you going to do about it? And I love that, because it really snaps people out of it. Like you've identified the problem. That's good. That's the first step is awareness right Now. Let's let's actually come up with the solution. Let's not focus on the problem and dwell and ruminate in it. Let's come up with this solution, and he might help, or he might just push you to come up with the solution, which I think is simple and brilliant.
Speaker 1:That's the idea of pushing the solution back. I really like that framing of it. Yeah, yeah, it's really nice. What's the second one?
Speaker 2:The second one is about managing energy. So I'm a big, big fan of managing energy and not like a productivity hack or anything like that. But I do realize that you got to have the right energy. You got to have positive energy to to get in the day and do this every every day. Um, it's, it's relentless. You know it's a marathon, right, and so in the beginning certainly I worked like crazy hours and stuff. But I'm six years in, like this has to be something that I can, a lifestyle that I can live, and so I read a couple of books in the topic. One is a deep focus and it's by a computer science like professor. He's really smart guy and he, uh, he's all about deep focus, deep uninterrupted focus.
Speaker 2:So, like you're getting into a big meaty problem at work, you want to shut down all notifications Slack, text message, everything right. The smallest notification could snap you right out of it. You could lose your whole train of thought and then you're back half an hour and the flip side of that is deep relaxation. So when you're off work, do not look at email, right, just give yourself a point to truly relax and recharge, because the first email is going to put you right back into it. You're going to think about that email. Then you're going to think about something else, unrelated, but it's related to work and that's not restful at all, and so you want to make sure you're managing that. And the other book is called the powerful engagement, and that's an awesome book. It goes into managing energy as well, and, you know, having amazing sleep that'll set you up for a good day.
Speaker 2:I try to not use alarms as much as possible. I don't schedule early meetings for that reason, so that I can just sleep when my body is ready to wake up. Otherwise, you know you're relying on coffee. You're not, um, you're not thinking clear. I think there's a lot of science that has shown that when you're lacking rest, you make poor decisions. Right, you might focus on the administrative stuff email, just easy things like that. Right, you're going to eat worse food, which then has another effect on how you perform. So you got to think about you know, your body like you're. You're like we're corporate athletes, right, and some of us actual athletes too.
Speaker 1:So you got to treat yourself like one and it sounds like those two books fit together quite nicely in terms of just that theme of like deep focus, deep relaxation. So one's how you protect that state once you're in it and one is just like how you live your life so that you're operating at peak capacity anyway.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, certainly. You know, like, imagine you go out for drinks, right, and then you get poor sleep because the alcohol and you wake up and you're more irritable. And then you have an argument with someone on your team and now they're pissed off and then maybe they take it out on someone else. It has this ripple effect. You got to think about how your decisions kind of affect you, because it's not just you, right, it's a whole team together.
Speaker 1:And particularly as the founder. I think that you can dramatically impact the environment in a very short time, positively or negatively.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yeah, I feel like when I'm in a good mood, I feel like the company's behind me and we're all marked in the same direction, and if I'm not, I feel like the opposite. It's kind of strange, but I think there's some truth to it.
Speaker 1:So, let's say, staying in that deep focus, is there anything else apart from just removing sort of the intrusions around notifications? Is there anything else that kind of really helps you stay in that state?
Speaker 2:first you have to figure out, okay, how long do I actually need? Right for everyone. It's different. For every problem it's different. So if I'm trying to, you know, write a, write my quarterly update, or um, you know, come up with some kind of strategy. Right, there might be a different amount of time that I need to to to focus, um, and then it's it's the discipline too, right, it's?
Speaker 2:Uh, it's easy for us to get distracted and distract ourselves, especially with how phones are training us to kind of be all over the place, um, so you have to exercise some, some discipline to stay on topic. And you know, something I do is I come up with just things pop in my head all the time and you can't stop them from happening, but you can control what you do after that, and so I try to write things down. It's like, oh yeah, do that, do that, do that. I write it down on you know, my little bullet journal and um, and then that gives me a chance of letting it go for the moment and then I can get back to it later. So it's like you have to set yourself up to be in deep focus, but then you have to actually work to stay in it I went to an event a long time ago.
Speaker 1:This month we're talking about mindfulness and you're saying everyone thinks of meditation as trying to like clear your mind and actually it's not. It's just acknowledged like controlling what it's thinking about. And so I think this idea of just acknowledging a thought, jotting it down, kind of allows you to to put it to one side, then refocus back on on what you do, because the idea that you're not going to think about anything else apart from what you're thinking about for two hours, one hour, three hours, four, however long it is, if that is your success metric, you're bound to fail.
Speaker 2:I would have thought yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I didn't think of that. But, um, if you're trying to meditate, right, they, they, they teach you like you can't stop thoughts from going into your mind. That's's not the point. As you said, I read an interesting thing. It's like if you imagine you're looking at a river, right, and maybe there's like a log, you know floating through in the river, you can't stop that log from being there, but you can decide are you going to, like try to pull it on shore or are you just going to kind of watch it go go past and that's like what, the thoughts that come up? Yeah, if you're, you're getting into meditation or maybe deep focus, right, just acknowledge those thoughts are coming up.
Speaker 1:Okay, great, let's just watch it, you know, float past on the river and then get back on task because I think I mean a lot of founders end up doing a lot of the deep focus work in the evenings, at weekends because it feels like distractions are minimized by opportunity, so team don't reach out so much, like there are fewer emails so it's easier to passively stay in deep focus. But it sounds like this is recommending like what steps you take to actively stay in deep focus during our normal work hours, ie nine nine to five.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and you're not going to stop that. I mean, as a founder, you do have to put in nights and weekends sometimes. I mean, like two days ago I had a proposal to write and for that exact reason, I couldn't write it during the day. There's all these other responsibilities and things that came up and so I spent the evening writing this. I got it done, it was great, but interestingly, last night I was completely exhausted right. The evening I worked my day, but then the evening I was just completely wiped and done and so it had an impact on me and you got to be kind of aware of that and plan for it.
Speaker 2:But what are the things you are in control of, right? So we, as a founder, you're gonna have a million meetings probably, especially in a consulting company. What I try to do is I try to have sort of Tuesday through Thursday my meeting days, and Monday and Friday are like minimal meeting days. So nothing, you know nothing every week planned. Some things might come up. I try to at least have a full morning block or full afternoon block to at least give yourself the time to do that, to possibly get into your deep work, deep focus.
Speaker 1:I've seen quite a few fans. I think we're slightly brainwashed to think that anything to do with team is high priority and that can be meetings, that can be one-off chats, it can be audio five minutes and I think often it's actually much more. It's actually low importance, sometimes even low urgency, but just feels like, oh, we can justify it, it's a team thing. I can do this Like it's a slightly more advanced form of like looking at Instagram for a founder.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's true. I mean, meeting with the team is obviously important, but you're not actually getting any work done when you're meeting. Right, You're planning to do the work later. So if all you're doing is meeting, you're not getting any work done. But I try to create a culture of promoting deep focus.
Speaker 2:And we have the Foxbox way, which is like a kind of handbook of how to work at Foxbox, and I meet with every single person who joins a company. They're on their first month to walk them through it because it's that important. And one of the things in there is we promote deep focus and I tell people, hey, we have Slack and Slack is a great tool, but it's also the downside is it's a distraction mechanism.
Speaker 2:And so there's a lot of pressure, especially when I message someone you know to, to respond right away. But I'll actually get mad. I'm like you're in a meeting. Why are you responding to me? Right, and I try to promote that. Hey, you're in control of how you use Slack. It's asynchronous. So if you tell people on your team, hey, I'll check in, I'll check Slack every couple hours, great, Now people know when they can expect to hear back from you and that gives you permission to shut Slack down. I'll give you just a quick example my head of client services, joseph. I messaged him something and he didn't get back to me until a few hours later. And he's like sorry, man, I closed Slack because I had to work. I'm like great, I'm so happy you did that.
Speaker 1:But it's quite powerful for you as the founder to model the behavior that you would like, which you think motivates deep focus and sort of tackles the unwritten assumption that if I message, I expect the culture of instant communication Like congratulations. You just turned your entire business into like Slack monkeys, they're not saying anything, there's staring at a screen, going cause. It's like how can you get any quality work done if you're expected to respond instantly to stuff?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's, it's bad and some people like that. I worked. I worked with two super high performing developers one at Foxbox, one at my last company and they responded to Slack immediately and I don't know how they did it, but it worked well. So I also don't force this topic Like. What we say is how you communicate is up to you, right, you can set your own rules of engagement just to communicate them, and you know we measure this too. In the beginning, I felt like I needed to be in everything at all times, and so when we looked at their Slack admin panel, I was the number one message sender of the past 30 days. And you know, my leadership team and I looked at each other and we're like this is a problem. You know, my leadership team and I looked at each other and we're like this is a problem. And so I actively, you know, tried to to not be so involved and just let people solve things Right, and and I and I just stepped back and I dropped down on the board.
Speaker 2:I'm still probably top 10, but I dropped down a lot, which is good. It's probably where I'm supposed to be.
Speaker 1:Well, that's really quite a nice to understand that, the practical tip or hack that you would share with other founders when it comes to making things happen.
Speaker 2:So this isn't really a hack, but it's be relentless.
Speaker 2:Every business is different, but for my business, right, we're a consulting business it's all about, you know, sales and bringing in clients and then keeping them happy, obviously.
Speaker 2:So what I've really learned is you have to be relentless, you always have to be selling, you always have to be networking, meeting people, meeting new people, rekindling old relationships, even when, even when the times are great, right, there was, there was a period where we're growing like gangbusters and I, you know, I let up on that because I was like no, I got to focus on, you know, everything else, that the day to day, and by doing that, when we're at a different period in our journey, right, uh, then it was like okay, now I have to start all the networking, and then there's a delay effect, and so a better approach that I've learned is more like just a little bit each week. I would love to say a little bit each day, but even that's too hard sometimes, so it's a little bit each week. You're always selling, and that could mean you're always selling. That could mean you're always recruiting, right, but when you need to make hires, you have people that are already warm.
Speaker 1:So it's linked like what is, what is a founder role? Different founders approach differently, but it feels like so one is always be networking from a business developer standpoint. There's always been networking from a people standpoint. Is anything else that you sort of put in those sort of like core elements that are just worth doing always?
Speaker 2:I mean, I think everyone's business is different so I can only speak to mine um, but I mean, for for me it's it's sales and marketing, it's uh direction, it's um, it's seeing where the market's going um and so you have to kind of keep a pulse on all of it.
Speaker 2:Um so, yeah an example is ai. I mean, ai has been around for decades, but it's recently become very popular because of all the generative ai, the large language models, and when it, when the buzz first started happening, you know one to two years ago uh, I didn't jump on the bandwagon right away because I wanted to. I take a more pragmatic approach about it. I'm I have a healthy dose of skepticism and I wanted to see where this is going. I knew immediately it was groundbreaking technology, but I wanted to see what are the practical applications of this? How are businesses?
Speaker 2:actually going to use it for their businesses. And so I went into sort of research mode to really just gather information and I spoke to a bunch of tech leaders to understand, hey, how are you leveraging this for your business, for your products? And then through these conversations, the light bulb really went off Like, oh, wow, okay, there are some really really interesting use cases, some things that we would love to help companies with. So we built an AI lab to help companies decide is AI right for their business, for their products? So, getting back to it, that's something that I'm always doing. I'm always looking for opportunities and technology to help our clients.
Speaker 1:The common theme there is almost like the external element. It's like there's probably this temptation, almost like your first point, like letting go of control. You've got to win clients, but you've just got to figure out your process. You've got to figure out the link between product market fit. You've got to just really crank that out. I feel like the second stage is about really being a lot more external. It's still continuing to win new clients, but it's building that network of new hires, speaking to people, figuring out what the next five years look like. You almost earned the right to look further ahead. You've ticked the survival box. Now what next? And so maybe when I'm feeling this shift of internal time versus external time that really moves between, let's say, phase one as a founder and phase two, yeah, I think that sums it up pretty well.
Speaker 2:And as you grow, I mean, you have decisions to make. Do you want to create a small business and keep it small, right, and then the way you set up your organization is going to be different from if you want a growth business, where you're going to have more leaders, you're going to have more infrastructure, more processes and more, more, everything.
Speaker 2:Really to really support that growth because you know you hit different stages and then you need you need different levels of that to really be able to operate, so kind of with that. If you decided to grow, you always have to be growing because survival is dependent on it. So in the beginning, survival, but you always have that survival right. You, you know you want to keep keep growing.
Speaker 1:Uh, to make that happen, and and you've got to go and find your riches, and by that I don't mean the money, I mean your, your coo, find your rich. It could be the could be the subtitle of this episode.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and it's about Rich Megan, joseph Wesley Barrett all my key leaders.
Speaker 1:Today's chat with Rob Volt has shed light on an essential phase for any growing business the shift from hands-on management to strategic leadership. Rob's experience demonstrates the necessity of empowering teams and trusting in the collective strength of the people we choose to drive our visions forward. Thank you for tuning in to Peer Effect. I'm your host, james Johnson, inviting you to join us next week Wednesday for another enriching episode filled with strategies and stories from those at the forefront of innovation and leadership. See you then.
