When Your Engagement Level Drops
David has 16 things for principals to try when they feel the need to do something different from running their firm.
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Transcript
Blair Enns: David, are you bored?
David C. Baker: If I was, I wouldn't tell you because it means you just give me some of your shit work to do.
Blair Enns: I'm really fascinated by this topic. When I read it, I thought, "Well, this is actually good," and--
David C. Baker: And David came up with it, what a surprise.
Blair Enns: Then my second reaction was, "Oh, are you writing this for me?" Because the topic is When You Need Something Different From Running Your Firm.
David C. Baker: Yes, we just spent two years of podcast episodes talking about your ants and your pants, and we finally got that solved. Now you're fixed.
Blair Enns: I changed the business model and now I'm engaged by the business again. I was just saying to the team the other day, I'm so excited about the change to the business model, but I'm a little embarrassed that I have to keep changing the business model to stay engaged. I don't know. This is about me, isn't it?
David C. Baker: This is about you. Yes. I got these notes from your people.
Blair Enns: You were going to change the title from When You Need Something Different From Running Your Firm to what?
David C. Baker: Something about when you are less engaged than you should be.
Blair Enns: The topic is the owner of the business gets a little bit distracted, bored with the business and they feel like they need something else to do. Is that right? What to do in case of that emergency break this glass. Is that what we're doing?
David C. Baker: Well, they haven't found the solution yet. They're just in this indefinite period of lack of engagement, and that's, I think-- I don't know for sure, but that's probably the most difficult time to be leading a firm when you're unengaged because you cannot hide that. You figure out why, and then try to solve it, and you have to be somewhat transparent as a leader, but you can't drag your people along this journey with you because that's not what people want in their leaders.
They do not want you to tell them all the time about your lack of engagement because that's just not the signal you need to send, but on the other hand, you've got to be really honest about it with yourself because you can't hide that lack of engagement. You just simply can't.
Maybe you need to shake some things up, which will make it a little more difficult in the short term, but might save your firm. There's no specific reason I thought about this. I don't have a particular client mind. It's not about you. It's not about me. I just see this from time to time and it feels like we need to talk about it.
Blair Enns: Okay, so it's not about me?
David C. Baker: It's not about you. Sorry. Are you still interested though?
Blair Enns: Yes, very. I'm actually deeply interested in this. I have a couple of friends, they're married to each other. They just left yesterday, they went to Boonton to go hiking, but she's a school principal and she's taken a year off, and then I have another friend, she's a school teacher, she's taken a year off, but my friend who's married to the principal, he's taken two months off.
She's got the weight of the world lifted from her. She's just so free and happy right now, and he's got this extra weight on him because two months isn't enough. He had to cram all this work in at the beginning and he's going to make up for it at the end. I think we did an episode on sabbaticals, didn't we?
David C. Baker: We did, yes, and there's a really good article on the website that Jonathan wrote on sabbaticals too. He took one. I haven't taken one yet. I really want to take one. Have you ever taken one?
Blair Enns: No, but you and I, and a couple of other professional friends were always telling each other, "You need a sabbatical." None of us has the guts to do it.
David C. Baker: If I had a bigger firm with people that could fill in for me, that might be easier, but yes.
Blair Enns: All right. We're getting distracted here. Where do you-- You've got a list of "is this right?" 16 pieces of advice.
David C. Baker: 16 alternatives to just jumpstart your brain. If you decide that whatever it is that got you here in the first place, so you look back at, "Wait, when did I start feeling this way? What happened? Is that when I had that divorce or I had that health issue or one of my parents died or something?" You start to make those connections and you decide, "Oh, now I understand this a little bit better, I can probably pull it back from the brink, right?"
But if that clarity doesn't come, then what you might do is just accept the fact that this shit is not getting better. I need to shake things up. I'm just trying to give people some not-specific ideas, even though they are specific ideas, more just categories to think about how they might find that new level of engagement.
Blair Enns: Or it could just be fear. I remember in March of 2020 when we're still wiping off UPS packages because we think that's how we can catch this thing. For six weeks, I thought my business might be done because I was traveling every week somewhere, sometimes two places a week. That terror forced me to reinvent the firm, and now I'm more engaged than I ever have been, except with a couple of clients, which will remain nameless, but more engaged than ever.
Sometimes it's not just lack of engagement, sometimes it's just terror or a business model that has to be reinvented because of the way the world is changing. Here we are recording this in October of 2022, and what's going to happen with the world economy? Who knows? My instinct tells me it's not going to be nearly as bad as 2008 and 2009, but there might be some things coming up that would require you to rethink your business.
This is a little bit deeper. This is more about your personal relationship with the firm where you feel like you have lost some engagement, and whatever that reason is, it can't necessarily be fixed. You need to shake things up. If you're in that boat, just don't take these as gospel ideas. Just think of them as illustrations of some things you might do.
David C. Baker: You're feeling weary or bored with the business or distracted, and you want to do something else?
Blair Enns: Yes, but you don't want to throw everything away, necessarily.
David C. Baker: You don't want to shut it down and go be a monk or something. These are some suggestions on things you might do that will help keep you engaged.
Blair Enns: The first one is just a product idea. It seems like every one of our clients would love to-- if they're a software engineering firm, they want to create an app that really takes off, or if they do product packaging, they'd like to sell their own products on Amazon, or maybe a greeting card company they want to start. These are all real things that all my clients have done.
Everybody dreams of doing something like this, and the problem is that they combine it with their expertise/service business, and those two things can't be combined very well. First of all, you got to use other people's money to do this. Don't tell them I said that, but you really need to use other people's money and you need to understand distribution and marketing and so on. The least important thing is the idea, but sometimes if you hook up with the right people who have the money and the expertise, and you do this separately, by God, maybe you ought to be developing a product. If I had the time, I could probably think of 50 firms that have gone down this path and they would never want to go back to what they're doing now, which is helping other people build or promote their products. They want to do their own. I just think this has got to head the list. You know clients who've done this?
David C. Baker: Yes. In fact, we did an episode on this called Be the Client you Want to See in the World, or we talked about just that launch your own product of some kind, be the client. We're talking about When You Need Something Different From Running Your Firm, you've got 16 different things that people might consider. First one is go all in on a product idea, but not with your money. Second one on your list is merge.
David C. Baker: Merge. You know in your heart you are done with this business, but it's really wasteful to walk away from it. Just acknowledge that in a traditional sale you're going to have to stay around and perform during the year and out to hit your target and so on. You're not really shedding all the entrepreneurial risk. You're not de-risking it so much.
Just merge with another firm and figure out some way to walk away with something, or maybe if you're not going to walk away, at least you can shed the parts of your job that you hate. Maybe it's managing people or maybe it's new business or maybe it's creative direction, or maybe it's the technical engineering or whatever it is, and just focus on something that you really do enjoy doing, even if you don't even continue to be a principal in this scenario.
If you're thinking about a merger with somebody, you don't need to go searching. This is some other firm that you already have in mind. I think a merger is something that needs to be done super carefully because they can be really bad or really good. If they're done for the right reasons and with the right people, they can really re-energize you. Some of you in great partnerships know that, you understand that.
In a merger, it's not so much about preserving the value in the business, although there's that too, but it's really about finding a partner that you're going to enjoy being in the trenches with. I think that's worth exploring for some people.
David C. Baker: I like how you framed it as viewing it as a step toward an exit, maybe. Certainly makes an exit easier when you have a partner like that. You made the point, you probably already know who this firm is. The head of that firm is probably a strong operator. You serve similar markets. I like that idea too. You see a lot of tired agency principals and you want them to, A, either find the excitement or, B, find a way out. This is an opportunity to possibly do either. Either of those options might be available in this suggestion of merging.
Blair Enns: You and I could merge. Could we ever work together?
David C. Baker: God, no.
Blair Enns: Yes, I don't think so. That was a bad idea before I even said it.
[laughter]
David C. Baker: Yes, of course we could.
Blair Enns: I think you and I can spend about four or five days together.
David C. Baker: Then we're done?
Blair Enns: Well, I don't know. We've gone on vacation. I remember like a year into the pandemic. Do you remember when you and I were asked to do a lot of speaking? We were asked to do a lot of like, "Hey, let's get the 2Bobs to come and talk. It was all done remotely and it was like at some point I remember thinking, "Okay, I love David, but does he have to be in every talk that I give? Does the market think we're joined at the hip?"
David C. Baker: People are always asking me to explain some of your shitty principles. It's like, "No, that's his. That's not mine."
Blair Enns: All right, so go all in on product idea, merge. Third?
David C. Baker: Go get a job. Take a job on the client side. Yes, a real job. You started this firm because you wanted to be your own boss. Then you woke up, you realized, now instead of one shitty boss, you've got 20 of them, or you started it because you wanted to make more money. That's probably not true. Or you didn't want to work as hard. That's definitely not true.
In the past, you never would've suggested this. There was some switching between the two enemy sides. You would start somewhere. You decide, "Oh, this isn't for me." You join the other side. Now, there's just no stigma between bouncing back and forth and sometimes taking a job on the client's side where you have steady pay, you build your experience which can be used in your next entrepreneurial venture. You relieve yourself off some of this pressure. It's almost always going to be one of your clients. I think there's real room for this sometimes. Not for everybody. I am completely unemployable. You are, too, by the way.
Blair Enns: No, I know it.
David C. Baker: Some people are employable.
Blair Enns: Are you saying shut the firm down or just have others run the firm for a while while you go work for a client?
David C. Baker: Yes, more the latter. Let somebody else run it for a while while you're gone for a year or something.
Blair Enns: Ooh, because I was going to ask you, let's all round it down and say that you've worked with 1,000 firms. I know it's more than that. Of those 1,000 firms, we'll take a 10th as a sample. Of those 100, how many of those owners did you think, if not outright say, "You know what, you should just go get a job?"
David C. Baker: Oh, probably 3% or 4%, I would guess. Something like that.
Blair Enns: I thought it'd be a bit higher than that. Maybe that's about right. This came up at Win Without Pitching the other day. We were talking about a client, and I had said, "Yes, I feel like that person should just go get a job." Yes, it doesn't come up a lot, but it's not never. Product idea, merge, get a job on the client side. Be a stay-at-home parent is number four on your list.
David C. Baker: Or parent caregiver. If it's not for a child, maybe it's for a parent. We are so driven to climb from one experience to the next, and it always has to be bigger and better and more money and more. It's like, well, not necessarily. There are certain things that are really important to you, including your family, either your younger or your older family. I just think we ought to be making more courageous choices when those things happen.
Both of my parents are gone, and my father-in-law's gone. My mother-in-law is in her upper 80s, and we take turns caring for her. Although, most recently, she's been in the care of her other daughter, not Julie, my wife. There's a time when that might happen. I don't know. It ought to be an option. We shouldn't view a career, especially if we're running a career well where we keep debt down. We've got a decent cushion. Maybe you need to take 6 months off or 12 months off or whatever.
If you have a partner, this is a little bit different equation because you could just leave for a year, stop your compensation, you still get distributions, but no compensation. Then your place is there when you come back. We ought be a lot more flexible about what we're doing, the decisions we're making.
Blair Enns: Next on your list is take a sabbatical, but this one of being a staying-at-home parent or a parent caregiver is not really a sabbatical, but it is stepping away from the business to focus on something else. Even though that focusing on something else might be a lot of work and might be intensive, it's still a break from the daily grind, the tedium if that's what you're experiencing.
David C. Baker: Yes, exactly.
Blair Enns: It's a sabbatical where you're getting other things done, you're focusing your energy on other things. It's not just pure for the sake of enjoyment or restorative reasons.
David C. Baker: Right. This next suggestion is a sabbatical, and we've done an episode about it. Jonathan's written an article about it. We ought to do more of this. In fact, I think if I were going to start a firm again, I would have a mandatory sabbatical policy, maybe an extra month off for every four years or something. I'm not sure what it would be, but I think it's good. It's a good thought and we ought to do it more.
Blair Enns: What else do you have up your sleeve?
David C. Baker: Next is four-day workweek. If you've got enough engagement starting Monday morning and you run out around Thursday, well, just quit working on Friday, or limit your hours. What specific elements about work wear you out? Is it planning for meetings? Is it meetings? Is it phone calls? Is it new business? Whatever that thing is, maybe you need to stop doing it and find some other solution for it.
I think you can add years of engagement to your work life by just working less and you've got to be very specific about that. You can't just say, "I'm going to work less." If it's a small firm, maybe what you need to do is schedule all of your long weekends off and be very public about it so that, okay, you've already got the shame covered with everybody, now you might as well just do it since they know you're leaving.
A shorter workweek, maybe it's just five days still, but shorter hours, I don't know, but four-day workweek seems perfect. I switched to that years ago because I found that it gave me the mental energy to do more writing. I work more than four days, but I only take phone calls on four days. That's what I think of as work.
Blair Enns: This isn't one of those spoof episodes, is it, and you haven't told me?
David C. Baker: No, it's not.
Blair Enns: Okay, just checking. I like that too. I don't schedule things on Friday. I know at least one other team member doesn't schedule things on Friday. We're still working, not always. It's an interesting idea.
David C. Baker: Do you still make your team turn timesheets in when they're on Friday?
Blair Enns: [laughs] Yes. If you come in on Friday, you're doing time sheets. All right, next on your list.
David C. Baker: Do something really radical. Most of you are getting worn down, in part, by all the standing meetings you have, which made perfect sense when you started them, but now you don't know how to get out of them. It's just crazy. When I look at people's calendars, if they happen to share their screen and they're saying, "Hey, can we meet such and such? We're comparing calendars." It's like, "What? I could not live like you do."
Take your calendar back or disband your executive team. There are two people on your executive team that shouldn't be on there anyway. We know that. They never contribute, but you don't know how to get rid of them because of whatever. Maybe just disband the whole thing for three months and see if you miss it, and then start back up, or say, "Listen, I'm only going to have three standing meetings a week, so, y'all, we need to make these really valuable. If you don't deserve a spot on one of these three meetings a week, then we're going to ditch it. Make it a little bit more, not scheduled, but just more impromptu."
I think the calendar thing is a big one. I haven't done any research on this, but when I think about how busy people are from day to day and how much time they are in meetings-- There was a really interesting article, and I think it was Forbes that said the average person in corporate America spends a third of their time in meetings, which I thought it was actually going to be higher than that, but surely some of those meetings are not all that useful. You could take some of your time back by just simplifying your calendar.
Blair Enns: Next time you find yourself thinking, "What if I did this?" Just go ahead and try it. Do it. What if you didn't schedule anything for a month? If your business goes under, don't blame me. I'm just throwing it out.
David C. Baker: I've thought the same thing about a to-do list. If it's really important, I'll remember. I haven't had the courage to ditch my to-do list. Another idea is to switch firms with a colleague for a month. I've been suggesting this for years, and not a single person has taken me up on this, which is pretty much like the rest of my advice to you people. This would make perfect sense. Somebody you trust and, obviously, their family, your situation would have to be such that they could travel.
Just switch firms for a month and give them complete access and just see what they learn that they could apply to their situation, but also see what they could tell you because there's a fresh set of eyes on things that you're not used to. I wish somebody would take me up on this one and write a report on it.
Blair Enns: David, there's not many times when you're talking, when I'm like-- have my head in my hands and I'm shaking no, but this is one of those times. How would this ever work?
David C. Baker: Let's do it. Let's you and I do it.
Blair Enns: God, no. I wouldn't let you near my people.
[laughter]
Blair Enns: I would wreck your business in a month and enjoy it.
David C. Baker: Sort of the same idea at a lesser level would be a round table where there's complete transparency about everything you do. Maybe you find another principal of a firm then you just start sharing everything and see if you can develop this informal partnership relationship where you're advising each other. It just might raise your engagement level.
Blair Enns: We might do this where I say to you, "David, I'm going to let you give me one piece of business advice, and I will act on it without questioning it no matter what it is, and then vice versa."
David C. Baker: I would not recommend that.
Blair Enns: This is a terrifying idea. Sell to an employee.
David C. Baker: Yes. You've made money, you've got a decent retirement plan, you think it's a long shot that you're going to sell it to somebody else. You've got this number two that's entrepreneurial. You trust this person. They've demonstrated their commitment to the firm. Just see if they're an entrepreneur, have them apply for an SBA 7a loan, they're called.
Blair Enns: What's that?
David C. Baker: I think that's up to 5 million or something. They can buy the whole firm and the SBA, the Small Business Administration funds it. I think they fund 100% of it. It's called an SBA 7a loan. Then sell it to them. If that doesn't work, and if you still want to do it, then carry the note yourself. Just loan them the money. You may or may not get paid, but if you are not engaged in the firm, your firm is going to slowly go down.
The alternative is that you're going to create this leadership vacuum as you step out of the firm. This other person will in effect be running it without the legal recourse to actually run it, and they're not on the hook for anything and so on.
There's a lot of this stuff happening, and a lot of it is really good. It's really good. It's a way to preserve the firm, keep the job, keep the clients happy, you make some money, there's an exit, you get to tell everybody on LinkedIn that you've exited a firm and they think you got really rich by it, and you don't correct them. That's how that works.
Blair Enns: Sell the accounts to someone else in a fire cell?
David C. Baker: Yes. You don't have somebody to transition it to, you can't find a place to merge, just sell the accounts to somebody. Say, "Hey, I think I'm getting out of here. I'll introduce you as the next person." This works particularly well for a HubSpot firm where there's a system architecture to it. "You pay me X amount for some percentage over the time that you keep this client."
It's much better than walking away, but some of you are so unengaged that you ought to do something really radical, or something else is going to happen to you. This would be a last resort sort of thing in an M&A world, but it's better than just walking away from the firm. This next one you're going to love, building a personal brand.
Blair Enns: No, you skipped one.
David C. Baker: Oh, did I? Oh, Solo Consulting Route. Yes, yes. Let's say you're eight people and you're the board principal, not engaged, you love selling, you love the work itself, the strategic work, but you don't like all the stuff that follows on. Split the firm off and let all these people stay together under a different ownership and you just be a solo consulting firm with relationships that funnel the implementation work to multiple firms.
Maybe just the one firm you left if you have an agreement like that but a lot of you have inadvertently become fantastic advisors and consultants, and there isn't any education for that. It just happened because you're the right kind of person. You are bold, you're articulate, you're observant, and you have everything it takes to be an advisor. Some of you ought to just do that and sell your thinking for a living rather than your doing for a living.
Blair Enns: Then we get to my favorite, build of personal brand.
David C. Baker: Yes. This is something you really believe strongly in.
Blair Enns: Did we do a podcast in this?
David C. Baker: We did, and you hated every minute of it. One of the things that's changing in our world is that people are making decisions around which firms to use, not just based on capability and expertise but also trust. There is room for you as the leader of a firm-- Now, this is not so much true of somebody who is not an equity partner, but if you are an equal or primary equity partner in a firm, there is room for you to build your personal brand with, say, a book or a whole speaking career, or whatever it is that you would do or maybe it's your own podcast or something.
There's room for that. This can really energize you. It does two things. It energizes you-- Does three things actually. Energizes you, which really helps. Second, it forms a new business funnel, sort of a lead gen machine. Third, depending on how well it goes, it can become a bridge to your next life where when you disengage from the firm, now you have a pretty lucrative writing, speaking, maybe advising career in the middle of that. Some of you are really well poised to do that.
It doesn't mean you have to leave your firm, it just means that you have a slightly different approach to it. There's this firm that's led by this person who, up until this point, has tried to stay invisible but is now intentionally building a personal brand.
Blair Enns: I have a friend who's just done that recently since COVID, went from out of the implementation business, let all the staff go. They're in the events business, so basically had to. He's now a solo consultant building his personal brand, speaking, writing. Loves it. Says he's never going back. I wonder, I've heard this before. I've heard people fantasize about, "Oh, this would be so much easier to do without employees." Then I say, "Yes, it's even easier without clients." No employees, no clients. Doesn't that sound like heaven?
David C. Baker: Yes, dual heaven.
Blair Enns: I know you've encountered people like this who just think, "Okay, that's it. I'm going solo." How many of them end up building machines again, adding people back, or do you think most of them stay solo consultants?
David C. Baker: In my experience, they don't add the team back. They either fail and go somewhere else and get a job or they succeed. It's a little harder than people think. If you've been selling activity to sell thinking without a team, takes a unique different view. You could actually be a speaker and author without doing any advising. Lord knows a lot of people do that.
Blair Enns: That's consulting without clients.
David C. Baker: Right, consulting without clients.
Blair Enns: The name of my fifth book. The next one-- This is 13 on a list of 16 things to do when you need something different from running your firm, start writing even if it's just for yourself. I love this. This is such good advice because it can lead to many of these other things that we've already talked about.
David C. Baker: In fact, you probably don't want to make a commitment to make this public. It could just be your own private diary so that you can be totally honest with yourself and then depending on what happens, you could decide to start making it public.
I'm not talking about writing for publication, I'm talking about writing for clarity. I don't know of any better solution there other than just talking with somebody who is really observant, knows you well, and is not afraid to be candid, objective with you. That and writing just to get clarity would be a really good way to find out what's going on and hopefully discover your own engagement level rising again.
Blair Enns: Listener, look up morning pages as a way to get going on that. Three left, go back to school [unintelligible 00:27:59].
David C. Baker: Not real school. I'm talking about a week-long course at Harvard or-
Blair Enns: Oh, Harvard.
David C. Baker: -Yale. Then put that on your LinkedIn profile so that people don't know that you went to Bumfuck University.
Blair Enns: You can't say that.
David C. Baker: It'll help your career too. I don't think those things actually help all that much in terms of your learning, but they can be engaging--
Blair Enns: Or stimulating. You go there, you're in a new environment, a bunch of smart people downloading a whole bunch of stuff. I think that's a great suggestion. Now I'm thinking--
David C. Baker: I did a week-long one at Harvard one time. Have you ever done one of those things, or you didn't get in, probably?
Blair Enns: No, they won't let me in.
David C. Baker: They wouldn't let you in. I was just blown away. I found it really interesting. It was very intimidating at first because you had to make a presentation every day defending how you would've solved something using Harvard's case study theory. What blew me away was having lunch every day with the graduate professors and realizing, "Wow, I'm here in the real world trying to solve challenges that are a little tough," and that's a lot harder than solving problems in an academic setting. I don't put that on my LinkedIn profile, but it really did give me a year's worth of additional engagement. I enjoyed it.
Blair Enns: Second last piece of advice.
David C. Baker: This is for you. Get a fascinating hobby that's so interesting it forces boundary-hugging at work to preserve your focus on it.
Blair Enns: What do you think of? Which hobby of mine are you thinking about? Are you saying I don't have one?
David C. Baker: You only have one hobby, and it's actually a very dangerous one, and that's experimenting on your body until you wear it out, and it fails.
Blair Enns: When you said to start writing, I was laughing. My wife said to me the other day, "You should write about all these health things that you do with your body." I said, "Yes, I have a blog. It's never been published, but it's going to be called Out of My Domain, and I've written the first post. It's called That Time I got Arthritis." I could mirror those two things.
David C. Baker: This is your hobby. Part of what happens when you lose engagement with your business is that you shouldn't have been looking for engagement in your business in the first place. That's the point here, that it is a job. It's okay if parts of it you don't enjoy. There have to be enough parts of it that you do enjoy, and you have to feel like you're good at what you do. That should take you through some of the rougher spots.
I really feel like you have to put a boundary around your job so that you have time to pursue other things which balances the deep focus that you have. In your hobby, you should be doing all kinds of strange things to learn. Then the other thing is that your job needs to be generating enough income so that you can waste it on a hobby because a hobby is expensive, not always, but sometimes it's expensive. It needs time, and it needs money.
Some folks are stuck in this mess because they don't have much of a life outside of work. I feel like the solution is to not just make your business more exciting but maybe to have really exciting things outside of work, so exciting that you get pissed off when your job interferes with it. That's the mark of a great hobby.
Blair Enns: I've heard you give that piece of advice for years. I think it's really strong. The last thing on your list of 16.
David C. Baker: This is yours. You got to talk about this one.
Blair Enns: Play Blair's constraint game. Pretend that you have no clients. You can't change your pitch deck for one year. You have no employees. You can only lease your services, et cetera. Play the game of constraints. I wrote a post, we'll put a link to it in the show notes. The game of constraints where you try on this idea of running your business with a certain constraint.
We have constraint-driven exercises in every training workshop that we do. They're really valuable at getting people to think creatively about something they thought they knew inside and out.
David C. Baker: The pandemic was a constraint, but you can artificially impose constraints to help stir some deeper thinking about your engagement level. You got to be honest about how engaged you are in the business, at least with yourself. What you don't want to do at the end of this is be running a firm unengaged. That is a terrible experience for employees.
All of us have been a part of it. Actually, I haven't, but I know of people who've been a part of a company that was run by somebody who wasn't engaged. You got to solve that. If you can't solve whatever caused it, then you have to be open to some radical ideas. These are all silly ideas, but you might come up with your own that might jumpstart things again.
Blair Enns: When you're feeling bored by your firm, disengage, take these 16 pieces of advice, cut them up into 16 pieces of paper, put them into the magic eight ball, reach in and grab the piece of advice.
David C. Baker: You have to do whatever you choose.
Blair Enns: You have to do it. Go get a job, take a sabbatical, go to school. If it doesn't work out, Blair's email address is switch firms with a colleague for a month.
David C. Baker: [laughs] That's my best idea. I wish you'd quit making fun of it.
Blair Enns: I still want to know, what was the impetus for this? Where did this come from?
David C. Baker: I had a client who was unengaged. I haven't told him this yet, but I thought-- I'm hoping he'll listen so I don't have to address this with him anymore.
[Laughter]
Blair Enns: It's always a client. We're always writing about and then talking about our clients at our podcast without ever naming them. Yes, listener, it's you. It's you we're talking about. Thanks, David. This is great.
David C. Baker: Thanks, Blair.