In this episode of Executive Connect, Melissa Aarskaug sits down with Chris Nolte to discuss how companies can scale execution without exhausting the people they cannot afford to lose. Drawing from experience inside private equity-backed businesses and family offices, Chris explains why aggressive growth often creates a culture of heroics, where leaders work nights and weekends because critical knowledge, processes, and responsibilities remain trapped in their heads. Chris shares how Hire Kayana connects companies with highly skilled global professionals who can support executives, analysts, engineers, sales teams, and operators. He explains why modern offshore talent should not be viewed as basic administrative help, but as execution infrastructure that allows expensive employees to focus on their highest-value work.

The conversation also explores workflow design, global capability centers, AI, talent development, and why the future of work will depend on combining the right people with the right technology.

Chapters:

(0:33) Meet Chris and the hidden cost of rapid growth

(1:37) Scaling inside private equity and family-office environments

(5:57) When growth becomes dangerous for employees

(6:44) Designing workflows before pressure turns into burnout

(8:53) Why Hire Kayana was built around execution

(9:20) The hire that changed Chris’s view of global talent

(10:49) Finding overlooked talent in markets with limited opportunity

(13:17) How outsourcing and offshoring have changed

(14:04) What global capability centers reveal about modern work

(15:03) Why middle-market companies need a stronger remote model

(17:46) Multiplying high-value employees with the right support

(19:06) How administrative work ended up on executive desks

(21:11) Building modern execution infrastructure

(22:30) Helping leaders operate in their highest-value role

(24:47) Why professionals should receive support earlier in their careers

(27:29) The global talent and labor-cost opportunity

(29:40) Multiplying time through people and technology

(33:49) Chris’s final warning about the future of work

Chris

(0:00) When their kid gets out of school and starts ramping, they pair them with an exceptional partner for $15 an hour. (0:09) Incidentally, I think lifeguards in the United States make about $15 an hour, right? (0:14) But what we’re talking about is supercharging someone with the ideal partner to go through careers with.

(0:22) And can you imagine showing up as an analyst at 21, 22, having support in execution of brilliant MBA trained people behind you?

Melissa

(0:33) Scaling a company sounds exciting until your people are working nights, weekends, and quietly updating their resume. (0:41) Growth is supposed to create momentum, but often it creates exhaustion. (0:47) The faster you grow, the more pressure you are constrained on the exact people that you can’t afford to lose.

(0:55) Today’s guest, Chris Nolte, has operated inside private equity companies, managed operations within a family office, and helped scale businesses where growth targets are very aggressive and failure isn’t an option. (1:10) Now, through Hire Kayana, he’s solving one of the biggest problems in modern businesses, how to scale execution without breaking your team. (1:20) This episode is about growth and people, but more importantly, what it costs you if you don’t design it right.

(1:27) Welcome, Chris.

Chris

(1:29) Thank you very much, Melissa. (1:31) I could not have introduced me better. (1:33) That was fantastic.

Melissa

(1:35) I love it.

Chris

(1:36) Fantastic.

Melissa

(1:37) Well, let’s start at the beginning. (1:38) You operate inside a family office and PE-backed environment, and that’s a very different kind of pressure than most founders experience. (1:49) So what does scaling look like when capital and execution are tied together?

Chris

(1:56) Yeah, so pressure, because what you’re dealing with is scarcity, okay? (2:04) And scarcity creates all sorts of pressures because you can have all the biggest ideas in the world, but if you don’t have the resources or the talent to do it, it feels, ultimately, all that work moves up, and it ends up in the hands of the leadership, the managers, and it’s interesting. (2:25) If you think about the last 10 years and sort of business development and how people think about personal development, we’re in a world of extreme ownership.

(2:37) Everyone needs to be extreme owners, which really means suffering. (2:44) It really just means, okay, if you want to be successful, you need to suffer. (2:50) You need to work hard.

(2:51) You need to be a hero. (2:53) Everyone needs to be a hero to make things work, and the reason is is because they’re just dealing with scarcity, and they can’t and don’t have the resources to design their way out of that. (3:05) Now, here we are in 2026, right, and there’s this thread of hope that is somehow sort of seeping its way back into the businesses around the world, really, which is AI, and yet there’s something that’s still lacking there, right, and so you need people.

(3:23) You still need people, and people are so important, and yet the minute you hire someone, you feel like you work for them, and then you feel like you’re coping, and you’re really not, you don’t get the right person. (3:38) Oh, and then you go and train them, and nine minutes later, they leave, and then you have to go do it again, and you just feel this sort of endless grind, and then you have to be the hero again, right, and the problem with this in any business, irrespective of size, is you’re just not compounding. (3:57) You’re not compounding.

(3:58) Your wins don’t lead to other wins, which lead to other wins. (4:02) It just seems to fall apart. (4:04) You have the greatest marketing person in the world.

(4:07) They leave for whatever reason, and suddenly you’re listless because you didn’t have a bench. (4:13) You didn’t have business continuity planning because you couldn’t afford it, right, and so I think about, I just wrote a book called Operational Alpha, which tries to connect to this idea of coping, and that we’re like boiled frogs. (4:31) We’ve been coping for decades now, and we don’t even see it.

(4:36) We don’t even see it. (4:38) The CEO of a company doesn’t see it because he has these grand visions, and for some reason, everything takes too long. (4:45) We don’t see it.

(4:45) The CFO of a company doesn’t see it (4:47) because they bring on an accountant or a controller, (4:50) they train them up, (4:51) and suddenly they leave for a competitor (4:53) for 30% more money, right, (4:55) or we have the marketing person (4:58) who’s supposed to be doing all this sort of acquisition, (5:00) but their salespeople are comfortable and are not, (5:05) or basically don’t show up on Thursday and or Friday (5:07) because they hit their quota, right, (5:10) and in the world of private equity, (5:12) you just can’t do that (5:14) because you’re always racing the clock, (5:17) and the entrepreneur is the same way, (5:20) so what we’ve been working on (5:22) and what I’ve discovered is it turns out, (5:25) and this is gonna sound like, (5:26) this is like when you have the sort of disclaimers (5:28) at the end of every like investment memo, (5:31) you know, past results do not lead to future performance, (5:35) but in this particular case, it’s true, (5:38) which is the world is full of talent, (5:41) you just have to know where to look, (5:43) it’s a really big world, (5:45) and in the United States, (5:47) we have a lot more opportunity than we have talent, (5:49) and in Asia, there’s a lot more talent (5:51) than there is opportunity, (5:53) perfect bedfellows for creating amazing things.

Melissa

(5:57) Yeah, and I think, you know, in my opinion, (5:59) I think companies often underestimate (6:02) the capacity to scale, (6:05) you know, on paper, usually the growth wins, (6:08) but inside these companies, (6:10) it can create some really serious stress on people, (6:13) so kind of to your point, (6:15) when does scaling start becoming dangerous for teams, (6:21) and what is some of these early signs of burnout (6:24) in these high pressure companies (6:27) when there’s companies are scaling? (6:29) Ready to lead smarter and invest wiser?

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Chris

(6:44) Yeah, so it really has to do with how you design the workflows, right? (6:49) And really knowing your standard operating procedures around all functions and departments. (6:56) Very rarely do leadership sit down and create the process design of how the business works.

(7:07) It’s all in people’s heads, right? (7:10) And can you imagine asking a colleague or one of your subordinates, hey, can you write down your standard operating procedures for this? (7:18) What are they thinking?

(7:20) If you ask them, what are you getting rid of me? (7:23) No, no, we’re not getting rid of you, we’re trying to understand how it all fits together because how else can we design a process? (7:30) This is going to be particularly important during the sort of, as AI becomes sort of more and more relevant, like what parts of this can we offload to AI, right?

(7:40) Similarly, what parts of this can we offload to remote teams? (7:45) Like why can’t we have other people do this so that we can move you up and have you do higher level work? (7:52) Until you jump in and are willing to design and to think in that regard, you’re not going to piece together these points of tension and pressure, right?

(8:03) That create anxiety and stress and this sort of hero mentality of, I got to work this weekend, I’m up until 10 p.m. at night, I go home and eat and then I work again. (8:17) And you don’t have to do that as much anymore or shouldn’t have to do that because there is an abundance of high quality, low cost talent in the rest of the world. (8:29) And if you can design what we call the seat, the role for that person, which defines what good looks like, the gold standard, which helps manage priorities and which gives feedback to that person, anything’s possible.

(8:46) And I didn’t know this four years ago. (8:48) I was clueless to this. (8:50) And by accident, I figured it out.

Melissa

(8:53) And you know, it’s funny, I think leaders often push harder instead of redesigning these systems kind of to your point. (9:02) And so it sounds like to me, you didn’t build Hire Kayana to solve hiring, you built it to solve the execution piece. (9:12) And so what problems were you seeing repeatedly four years ago that launched this company?

Chris

(9:20) Yeah, well, I actually started out, my discovery of this was, I, someone made a promise to me basically in an email in LinkedIn. (9:30) And by the way, everyone should basically respond to at least one out of maybe 20 or 30 emails because there’s gold in those hills. (9:37) You just have to start, get a look every once in a while.

(9:39) And the email said effectively to me, you know, if you don’t have an assistant, you are the assistant, which is true. (9:45) And I thought that was very interesting and it was appealing to my entrepreneurial nature and it was a relatively low cost and I tried it. (9:53) Experience was terrible.

(9:55) Experience was terrible of finding the person because they didn’t really know what I wanted. (9:59) They didn’t understand. (10:00) I became the filter for them.

(10:02) I had to say no to everyone. (10:03) I didn’t even know what was possible. (10:05) I just kept on saying no.

(10:07) But eventually I said yes. (10:09) I said yes to a material scientist, an engineer who became my executive assistant for $15 an hour. (10:16) It was ridiculous.

(10:17) I’m like, how is it that you wanna work for me for this amount of money and be right there with me? (10:22) And you’re as smart as I am. (10:25) And that broke me, right?

(10:27) When I saw that, that broke me and I thought to myself, oh, I’m gonna, if I only knew this 10 years ago, I’m gonna go, you know, I was built totally differently and maybe I can do this for other people now. (10:37) Isn’t that great? (10:39) But what happened along the way is I realized there’s a bigger problem.

(10:44) And I’m gonna, this is gonna sort of solve this question that you asked. (10:49) The bigger problem is truly brilliant people in third world countries. (10:55) Let’s talk the top one to 3%, okay?

(10:59) These are all the smart kids that we all wanted to be, okay? (11:05) These people in a third world country without opportunity start looking a lot like everyone else because they’re only getting the top 40% of chances and opportunities, right? (11:18) And so there’s diamonds all along the beach.

(11:22) You just have to go start picking them up because they’re brilliant but they just haven’t had the opportunities. (11:28) And if you can see that, now suddenly you have something but these very same people have been commoditized and homogenized. (11:37) They don’t know who to trust anymore, right?

(11:40) They don’t know who to trust because everyone’s tried to take advantage. (11:45) So that is when we turned our company from a staffing company to a talent agency. (11:51) We represent them much like if you are a professional athlete, you have a managing agent, right?

(11:58) That’s what we do for them. (12:01) And what we’ve realized is if we take care of them and we advocate for them, we can basically hire some of the smartest people in any given role, okay? (12:12) And all we do is focus on supporting them because the rest takes care of itself.

(12:18) The scale happens, the interfaces get thinner, they communicate, they’re perfectly fluent, they’re smarter than the clients.

Melissa

(12:28) Yep, yeah, it’s interesting. (12:30) I had this, my quote-unquote rich dad told me a long time ago, know what your hourly rate is and hire and staff everything below that. (12:40) And so I’ve been leveraging outsourced resources personally for a large part of my 30s and into my 40s.

(12:51) And it’s funny, a lot of people are like, you have like a household CEO and we pay this person a fair wage, but all this stuff that we don’t, I mean, it’s not that we don’t want to do, it’s maybe we don’t have time to do, they get to do for me, so it’s very helpful.

Chris

(13:10) So you only have to be a hero in some parts of your life, you don’t have to be in every part of your life.

Melissa

(13:15) Exactly, exactly. (13:17) And so one of the biggest shifts I’m seeing right now is kind of this growing output without growing the teams. (13:27) And so I think traditional outsourcing has changed substantially.

(13:32) I would say maybe part during the pandemic and maybe it was even before the pandemic, but talk to me about like what’s going on and how it’s actually working right now to your point about these really smart people.

Chris

(13:47) Yeah, so outsourcing is really, has changed dramatically as you pointed out because offshoring is onshoring somewhere else. (13:54) And so if you went to the S&P 500 and you looked at every one of those companies, these companies don’t outsource anything anymore. (14:04) What they do is they go like JP Morgan Chase has 45,000 employees in India.

(14:11) These are not all call center people. (14:14) These are engineers, these are system design people, these are project managers, these are analysts. (14:21) All, they’ve basically mirrored and replicated themselves across the globe.

(14:25) The sun never sets on JP Morgan, okay? (14:28) And all the corporations have done something similar. (14:31) It’s what they call a GCC, a Global Center of Capability.

(14:35) And they are a thousand people, 10,000 people campuses where people within Bangalore and or insert Asian country, no city here, within the Philippines, within Malaysia, within China. (14:53) And people commute much like everyone we do here in the United States. (14:57) And they are running these companies as mirror image, okay?

(15:03) And the problem is, is that the middle and the middle market companies, they don’t have the scale to do that, but they’re too sophisticated to go hire a VA, okay? (15:20) And so while the sort of entrepreneurs of the United States can go do that, and it’s kind of like, it’s a little too, it’s a little loose sometimes. (15:29) And every once in a while you get lucky and you find the right person.

(15:32) In a corporate environment where people, where there’s a lot at risk, you need to have infrastructure so that people are not, you can build with people that are remote, not with a series of contractors that are just floating around. (15:51) Because like, how do you bet the company on something like that? (15:54) You can’t, right?

(15:55) So what Cayenne has effectively done is manage the interfaces to a point where we have created layers of culture and accountability in a contractor network so that middle market companies who have a lot at stake and who are professionally managed and already have product market fit can build and scale with really high quality, low cost people. (16:26) And when people come to me, they say, they already always have an expectation or an understanding of what’s possible. (16:31) They’re like, well, I mean, is this admin?

(16:34) And they sort of start telling me about the jobs in their companies that they think nobody wants. (16:40) And I’m like, whoa, whoa, hold on a second. (16:43) We’re talking about the top one to 3% of a population.

(16:46) These people are smarter than you, okay? (16:49) What’s possible? (16:51) And I want you to have bigger thoughts.

(16:54) I don’t want you to trap yourself. (16:57) You get much when you expect too little, right? (16:59) You don’t have bigger ideas.

(17:01) You don’t know how to design. (17:02) And so no one’s really ever had this sort of immense amount of high quality, low cost talent. (17:10) And the way you can build with that is gets really wild because you can take like a B minus player and make them an A minus by adding support that they would otherwise not deserve or be affordable.

(17:24) I can put an engineer with a head of sales and have that person do appointment setting and force the head of sales to show up to the meetings even when they don’t want to. (17:36) And then actually have them do something that they’re really good at, which is closing, not prospecting or follow-ups or any of that stuff. (17:43) So you can start building totally differently.

Melissa

(17:46) I love that you mentioned that because I’m an engineer salesperson. (17:50) And with support, I 10 times multiply myself and I’m able to think and do things faster. (17:57) And it took me forever to get leadership to understand that.

(18:01) I said, if you want me in the weeds all the time, you’re paying me too much money to work in the weeds. (18:07) If you want me to multiply myself, you need me help to get me help on the things that are the hardest for me, which is exactly what you just said. (18:17) So you take somebody you’re paying six figures and you give them somebody that’s $15 an hour.

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Chris

(19:06) And then they don’t actually have to be the hero because now you have two people working together and they’re probably doing the things they’re best at. (19:13) You know, people, what is a misunderstood concept is that, you know, because of software, there are actually like 40% fewer executive assistants in the United States than were in the year 2000, 40%. (19:28) And yet the economy has grown wildly.

(19:30) And what’s happened is all of that admin work has ended up on the desks of some of the highest powered, most expensive people in the organization. (19:38) And that is just bad math. (19:40) Like it’s bad math, silly.

(19:44) But the reason why this happened is one, people walked away from those roles, right? (19:49) Two, the roles themselves got overly expensive. (19:52) And three, it’s really hard to find really great support these days.

(19:59) And I’m just talking about like the highest level of executive assistant. (20:03) Like that’s the bottom end of everything else that’s possible within an organization. (20:08) We’re putting mechanical engineers in support of other mechanical engineers.

(20:12) We’re putting, I mean, and these people have work ethic. (20:16) So not only are they less expensive, they’re working twice as hard. (20:20) And they’re working in the middle of the night.

(20:23) And they’re totally uninterrupted.

Melissa

(20:25) I was blessed at one point in my career with two administrative assistants, one in Europe and one in the US. (20:32) And every time the Europe administrative assistant outworked the US administrative assistant, because their attitude was work till the job’s done, not work till the hours are done. (20:45) And it was just built into their DNA.

(20:48) And so I was removing pressure and burden of myself without slowing the growth of the company. (20:55) And I scaled three at some point 700% by leveraging two people. (21:00) When I was sleeping, another person was working.

(21:03) So when I showed up, I was in constant execution mode. (21:07) And when I ended my day, they got back online. (21:11) And so I really think, if we zoom out here and we think about, this isn’t just about hiring.

(21:20) This is about how companies are operating. (21:23) And I would call this modern execution infrastructure. (21:29) And really looking at your bottom line.

(21:32) So if you’re gonna hire 106 figure people in obviously large companies, and you gave all of those people an administrative assistant or administrative help from another country, you’re basically hiring double the manpower by being able to offload the pressure of things they don’t need to do. (21:59) Like simple tasks for me, Chris, were getting sows out the door and the process of putting it through our company process and the follow-up and the CRM documentation and the meeting setting up and dealing with boosts and travel and all that stuff that is easily offloaded to admin support. (22:20) I was just focusing on closing and executing and closing and executed and made the company hundreds of millions of dollars by default.

Chris

(22:30) Right, and you were doing your highest and best use. (22:34) That’s the critical step of getting out of this trap of heroics. (22:41) So isn’t it interesting that there are some things that are extremely high level that you were like, just like now, when we’re talking to another, this costs us zero energy, I know.

(22:54) Like you can do this all day long and still feel refreshed at the end of the day. (22:59) But if I gave you like administrative tasks and I caused you to have to do some sort of like very detailed things, even though it’s in you and you used to do it, I get it. (23:09) It’s beneath you and it costs you, it might take 30% of your time, but it takes 50% of your energy.

Melissa

(23:15) It’s so true, I love that you said that because I was and have been for a lot of my career terrible with expense reports, with emails, with all these things. (23:27) I was always in trouble with this kind of stuff. (23:31) Because to your point, it would exhaust me.

(23:34) It would take all my energy away and I only cared about being in my zone of genius all day because I got energy from it. (23:44) And that zone of genius was being in front of my clients and my customers. (23:48) I love being around them.

(23:50) I love talking to them. (23:52) I love solving their problems. (23:54) And I didn’t start my career funny enough.

(23:56) I didn’t start my career as a salesperson. (23:58) I was an introverted engineer designing bridges, but I was really good at problem solving. (24:04) And that is how I ended up in sales as I was solving so many people’s problems and communicating with a high EQ to senior leadership.

(24:16) But the point of all that is not about me. (24:18) The point was I was so good at that because I had support to offload things that I didn’t want to do. (24:26) And it’s a no brainer.

(24:27) I think of all these small companies that are starting right now in the United States. (24:32) And they’re like, well, when I sell this much, I’ll get an administrative support. (24:37) Or when I do this, I tell every one of my friends, if you don’t have administrative support in another country, you’re missing out on something spectacular.

Chris

(24:47) Day one. (24:48) And you know, it’s funny. (24:50) Like everyone like really wants the most for their kids.

(24:53) And what if every parent, if they could do this, when their kid gets out of school and starts ramping, they pair them with an exceptional partner for $15 an hour. (25:10) Incidentally, I think lifeguards in the United States make about $15 an hour, right? (25:14) But what we’re talking about is supercharging someone with the ideal partner to go through careers with.

(25:22) And can you imagine showing up as an analyst at 21, 22, having support in execution of brilliant MBA trained people behind you and delivering a sort of product and excellence in a way that no one at the company has ever seen because no one’s ever been supported that way.

Melissa

(25:43) Yeah, and you know what’s funny about that? (25:44) I’m a big fan of reciprocation. (25:47) So I’m getting something from them.

(25:50) What they’re getting, every administrative assistant I’ve had, all of them I’ve kitted up for things they never had experience doing. (26:00) So some of them were in a flight attendant or in jewelry or a babysitter. (26:07) None of them I’ve ever had were technical, but I’ve left every single one of my administrative support with technical knowledge, i.e. be it cybersecurity and now AI. (26:20) So our home administrative assistant, to your point, that helps us coordinate summer camps for our kids. (26:28) What are we kitting for food? (26:29) All the things that I want them to have healthy meals, I want them to have summer camps, but I don’t have as much time to go in and research and figure it out, so I let them do it.

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Chris

(27:29) Yeah, I, you know, this is all about ARBs. (27:33) These are arbitrages, all of them. (27:35) These are really talented people, and if you can spot talent, like, and I think that’s a skill I have, and I could do it within 30 seconds, pretty much.

(27:46) Like, I challenge myself because I watch, I go to the candy store of Human Capital every day. (27:52) Like, it’s just this big funnel, it’s coming onto my desk, and I get to look at all these people, I’m like, wow, love this person, love this person, love this person. (28:00) Look how she said this, look how he said that.

(28:02) That is, that’s actually really brilliant. (28:06) But you, like, MBAs in India, and I, you know, India is not my sort of, my market of choice. (28:13) I think the Philippines is, like, remarkable.

(28:16) But, like, MBAs are $20,000 a year. (28:19) It’s a salary. (28:21) You don’t have to think of it in assistant terms.

(28:23) You can think about highly skilled analysts, trained, skilled business professionals, for not very much. (28:33) And that is sort of, like, mind-blowing. (28:36) Just like you can buy a custom suit in Asia for a fraction of the cost of what you’d cost to be here.

(28:44) And so somebody’s playing this arbitrage all the time. (28:48) And if it’s not you, you’re just, you’re paying the rack rates for someone else. (28:54) Like, so anyway, labor markets are no different.

(28:58) That gap is gonna be wide for a really long time because the cost structures of different countries are very different than the United States. (29:05) We’re kind of bloated, we’re kind of slow. (29:08) Our healthcare is too much.

(29:10) You can buy healthcare in other countries for a fraction. (29:13) You can get trained as a doctor, eight years, fully trained, room and board, 40, 45 grand total in the Philippines. (29:24) Here, we need billionaires to give people money because it’s too expensive.

(29:30) And so what are the doctors gonna charge you? (29:34) Here, a lot more because it costs a lot more. (29:37) Yep.

(29:37) And it’s not everywhere, so.

Melissa

(29:40) Yeah, it’s so true. (29:42) I’m not gonna touch that because I can unpack that for another hour, but it’s so true. (29:47) It’s thinking about your time.

(29:51) And the most important resource to me is my time. (29:55) And with more time, I have more optionality to do things. (30:00) I don’t think there’s probably a week that goes by in my life personally where people are like, how do you accomplish so much in a week?

(30:09) You have this and this and four kids and that and that and that. (30:12) And it is all about duplicating myself with talent and with technology. (30:19) And when you can put those two things together, I truly believe you can have the life that you want and you wish.

(30:28) And when I’m sleeping, my health is working. (30:32) And so when I’m in and I wake up, this morning, I just had to make decisions on what I was doing. (30:39) And those decisions took me five minutes.

(30:42) And to your earlier point, if you can spot talent, which I’ve always hired a lot by attitude, the resume I always felt like was a dating profile. (30:54) It’s full of BS, right? (30:57) And if you can hire somebody- More now than ever, by the way.

Chris

(31:00) You what? (31:01) More now than ever. (31:02) More now than ever.

(31:03) Because the AI is like, give me the job description, tell me what resume I want. (31:07) Here’s my resume, make this seem relevant.

Melissa

(31:10) Right, but you gotta sift through that, right? (31:13) And you gotta sift through it. (31:14) And it’s all about the attitude and the people that want to be coachable and teachable that have that work ethic.

(31:22) And I think, I would say I’m somebody that’s a good teacher of people with the right attitude. (31:30) And to your point, some of the best students I’ve ever had in my entire career of over 20 years managing people didn’t necessarily come from the US. (31:40) They came from other countries who were hungry, who were driven and who wanted an opportunity, but they weren’t given an opportunity.

(31:48) And I think that’s the conundrum is, I remember trying to get my first job and I couldn’t get a job without job experience. (31:57) So I had to, I’m like, okay, well, I need job experience. (32:00) So I would go work for people for free so I could get the job experience, so I could get a job.

(32:07) Right, and that was great, right?

Chris

(32:10) Yeah, and now TikTok tells you, oh, you know what? (32:14) Like there’s these boundaries and you have to really manage them and otherwise people are gonna take advantage of you. (32:20) And like, everyone’s like micro, like everything’s a microaggression.

(32:23) It’s like, well, is it? (32:25) No, it’s called like learning and being at the bottom of the totem pole, working your way up.

Melissa

(32:30) And that’s kind of how it looks, but- It is, you know, and I think about the attitude of all of it. (32:38) I, you know, I remember working, starting working at eight for a dollar an hour, babysitting three kids, which was a crazy amount of work for a dollar. (32:47) But how I learned about what we’re talking about was from my rich dad.

(32:52) He had people over people helping him do. (32:56) And that was back in the day when there was no like, you know, Instacart or, you know, in the nineties when people had to drive to the grocery store, he was paying people to go grocery shopping for his three kids to get his meals. (33:10) And all I had to do was serve it to them, right?

(33:13) But I think about how much he replicated himself. (33:16) He had multiple businesses that were run by administrative people and me eight years old running his house, right? (33:25) I think about the magnitude of that, right?

(33:29) Granted, I lived next door and my parents were right down the street, you know, so it wasn’t a child labor thing, right? (33:34) But the point is what we’re talking about today, if you could leave kind of closing up and final thoughts, if you can leave our listeners with one, you know, takeaway or something to ponder, what would that be?

Chris

(33:49) How and where work gets done is gonna change so dramatically. (33:53) And I want everyone to sort of check their perceptions between let’s say domestic talent and remote talent. (34:04) And remember, when you add AI to both these things, it’s the great equalizer and it exposes the underlying cost structures of these things.

(34:15) If you’re not experimenting with this, you’re crazy.

Melissa

(34:19) Yep, I would agree. (34:22) I really appreciate you being here today and sharing your knowledge and your insights with our listeners. (34:31) And, you know, my takeaways is scaling isn’t just about the revenue, it’s about the systems you’re building with your people that they can actually support it.

(34:41) And whether that is through administrative support, offshore or a system, you have been there, you have seen what happens when execution breaks and what it takes to fix it. (34:53) So thank you for being here. (34:55) And if you enjoyed this episode of the Executive Connect podcast, share with a founder or an operator who’s scaling now and looking for staff for more conversations on leadership growth and building your company that actually lasts, visit us on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform.

(35:13) That is the Executive Connect podcast.