Process Wins: Why the Companies That Scale Don’t Feel Chaotic With Mikel Lindsaar

Mikel Lindsaar is the Founder and CEO of StoreConnect, a customer commerce platform that helps businesses unify e-commerce sales, services, and systems. As a seasoned technology entrepreneur, he founded multiple software companies, including Exec IO and reinteractive, and exited several SaaS ventures.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[3:18] How confident decision-making drives competitive advantage
[7:33] The role of founder belief and conviction in shaping outcomes and aligning teams
[11:38] Mikel Lindsaar’s early experiences with technology and how he developed an entrepreneurial mindset
[15:34] Why Mikel left university to build practical businesses
[21:23] Leveraging contradictory data to uncover hidden business problems
[24:55] Mikel talks about creating StoreConnect to give companies control over their operating systems
[35:56] How MetaPulse helps align teams through ownership, metrics, and policy
[41:21] The impact of decision-fatigue on throughput and growth
[56:01] How to coach problem-solving without creating frustration or disengagement
[1:01:24] What makes a company acquisition-ready and attractive to buyers?
[1:16:15] Mikel explains how he sustains performance through personal rhythm, health, and daily walking

In this episode…

Growth doesn’t just stall when the business is underwater; it stalls when everything appears to be working, yet decisions slow, complexity piles up, and momentum fades. Leaders often feel the weight before they can recognize the cause, sensing friction in meetings, handoffs, and execution. What causes companies to break, and how can founders remove barriers before they compound?

According to seasoned technology entrepreneur Mikel Lindsaar, the root issue is decision-friction, and he argues that leaders must design organizations to move decisions faster, not upward. He emphasizes replacing “maybe” with clear yes-or-no frameworks, pushing ownership closer to the work, and using simple metrics to reveal problems early. Leaders can also turn repeated questions into written guidance and coach teams to present solutions rather than just problems. These practices create speed, trust, and resilience at scale.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with Mikel Lindsaar, Founder and CEO of StoreConnect, about designing organizations that scale through clarity and speed. Mikel explains why indecision kills momentum, how policies and metrics empower teams, and what founders must do personally to sustain long-term leadership effectiveness.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

“As an entrepreneur, you're being paid to make decisions. The faster you can make those decisions, the more powerful and successful your company will become.”
“Never, never, never accept a problem any junior presents to you. Always demand a solution.”
“Money is an idea backed by confidence. People give you money if they're confident they'll get something in exchange.”
“Policy creates agreement. People read the policy and go, oh, well, that's what we do here.”
“The exact price of a company is what someone will pay for it.”

Action Steps

Eliminate “maybe” from decision-making: Replacing indecision with clear yes-or-no outcomes keeps momentum high and prevents organizational drag. Fast decisions compound over time, allowing teams to move confidently without waiting on unnecessary approvals.
Push ownership closer to the work: Giving team members authority to decide within defined guardrails reduces bottlenecks at the leadership level. This builds accountability, speeds execution, and frees leaders to focus on higher-leverage decisions.
Turn repeated questions into written policy: Documenting answers to recurring issues creates clarity and consistency across the organization. Over time, this reduces interruptions, aligns expectations, and empowers teams to act independently.
Use simple metrics to surface problems early: Tracking a small set of meaningful statistics makes issues visible before they become crises. Clear data enables leaders to spot contradictions, ask better questions, and make informed decisions quickly.
Protect personal rhythm to sustain leadership clarity: Establishing non-negotiable routines creates mental space for better thinking and judgment. Consistent rhythm supports long-term performance by reducing burnout and improving decision quality.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show.

William Harris 00:15

Hey everyone, I'm William Harris, I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond. As you up arrow your business and your personal life. Every growing company hits a phase where nothing is actually broken. Revenue is up, customers are buying, the team is working hard, and yet everything feels heavier than it should. Decisions are taking longer.

Questions are stacking up when simple things become complicated. Founders are at a fork in the road. You can either push harder or redesign how the business works. Today's guest has built an entire career around the latter part. Mikel Lindsaar has launched seven companies, sold four of them, and currently runs three more.

He's written software used hundreds of millions of times. He's helped build systems behind billion dollar companies and several organizations using his process frameworks. Haven't had a down quarter in seven years. Mikel is the founder of StoreConnect Media Pulse and the author of True Team. He's deeply opinionated about standards, flow, hiring, and why maybe is one of the most dangerous words inside a scaling company.

Mikel , welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast.

Mikel Lindsaar 01:24

That's an awesome introduction. I should I should use that. Can you send it to me afterwards?

William Harris 01:28

Absolutely.

Mikel Lindsaar 01:30

I just put that at the start of every one of my sales calls. Right.

William Harris 01:33

I like it, let's do it.

Mikel Lindsaar 01:34

That'd be fantastic.

William Harris 01:35

First thing they see is my ugly mug. There you.

Mikel Lindsaar 01:37

Go. That's right. Hi. I'm from the other world.

William Harris 01:42

Mikel , I do want to give a shout out to the person who put us in touch. The one and only David Brier, best selling author of Brand Intervention, which Daymond John wrote the foreword to and said that David is a branding genius, which I would wholeheartedly agree. David, thank you for putting me in touch with Mikel.

Mikel Lindsaar 01:56

Yep, the brand grandfather we call him?

William Harris 01:59

Yes.

Mikel Lindsaar 01:59

Yes, he's the grandfather. David. David is a unique personality, and I think that's probably the best way to sum up David Brier. I'm sure he'd agree if he was on the cast.

William Harris 02:10

Creative on another level. I always appreciate anytime I loop him into an email and I'm like, I can't wait to see what he replies to this because it's always so good.

Mikel Lindsaar 02:19

Totally random.

William Harris 02:19

Yes.

Mikel Lindsaar 02:20

But all with a with an insouciance in life. So yeah, I mean, any of your listeners, if you have not read Brand Intervention, highly recommend it. Just go grab it. Read it. It's a it's a book worthy of sitting on a coffee table and it's it's beautifully done.

So dive in.

William Harris 02:39

Agreed. Last interruption. Then I want to get into the meat of this here. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is the award winning advertising agency behind optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit.

In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that Ipo'd. You can learn more on our website at elumynt.com which is spelled elumynt.com Okay. You've launched seven companies, sold four, helped build billion dollar operators, and one of your companies hasn't had a down quarter in seven years.

That's incredible. What do those businesses understand about process that most founders completely miss?

Mikel Lindsaar 03:18

Summing it up in one. I think. The most important thing you need to do on process or understanding process is empowering your team to be able to make rapid decisions. And this is in your introduction. You mentioned the whole idea of maybe being the death knell at the end of the day, when you have a decision come up in front of you, you have 2 or 3 possible outcomes, right?

It's either yes, no, or maybe the people that succeed. Answer yes or no. Far more often than the maybe. And the people that really succeed never actually come back with. Maybe they'll come back with I don't have enough data yet to make a yes or a no.

Get me the data. And this is really the reason, I think, why small companies can outmaneuver large companies. You know, the innovator's dilemma, all of those sorts of things. It comes down to the fact that the larger the company that gets, the more maybes get injected into the decision making process, or the more missing data gets added to that list. And then by the time it gets to the person who has to make the decision, they're making a decision based on incomplete data.

So they might make the wrong decision, or they go in the wrong direction, or they shelve it and nothing happens at all. You know, and this is every company has this problem. So when you're just one person, you by definition, have all the data that you need to make a decision because it's right in front of you, right? You can get it or or you're at the coalface. You've got that information right there.

You can as a founder, you can just implement that gut feel, which more often than not is correct. Right. Just to say, and you can make these decisions very, very rapidly. I did a recent post on X, I think also on LinkedIn that basically said as an entrepreneur, you're being paid to make decisions, right. The faster you can make those decisions, the more powerful and successful your company will become.

And you need to protect your lines and your day to make sure that you have the mental capacity and space to make those decisions rapidly and to just keep iterating on it. So I think that's the difference. You get a company that has sort of ossified to, you know, it's getting creaky and the bones aren't moving, right. All of that stuff that's stopping it from moving freely are all the accumulation of built up maybes and built up. I don't knows and should we or shouldn't we and and all of that.

And that's what you want to try and get rid of in any company. That's that's hitting that limit. And there are ways to do it which we can get into.

William Harris 06:12

I'm a highly analytical person. I like math, and as a result of that, I felt as if at least early on in my career, it was easy for me to go ahead and really logically rationalize every decision. And again, it's just you. And so you you have the capacity to do that. You add more people to the mix and then it becomes, you know, death by committee or whatever this might be.

The more that I've talked to successful founders and people who've done things, in fact, the first person who really told me this was Dave Mortensen, he's the founder of Anytime Fitness or the co-founder there of Anytime Fitness, him and Chuck Runyon. And he said, You know your gut like you have to work on trusting your gut because your gut is more often than not, like you said, it's right. And then again, there's the whole like, I like the logic and science of things. And it was Will Leach who told me on the podcast that it's like your gut, basically your non-conscious mind processes. I forget the exact numbers, but it's like the difference of like 50,000 bits a second for your your conscious mind and like 500,000 bits a second.

And I'm probably off on the numbers, but it's significantly more data that your non-conscious mind is processing. And so likely when you have this gut feeling about something, it is because your brain, the non-conscious, has processed an insane amount of data already and is kind of nudging you in this direction. It's just not a conscious thought.

Mikel Lindsaar 07:33

That's an interesting way to look at it. I actually think it's a bit more causative than that. Okay. My my feeling around this is. You'll look at really successful founders And business people, and they have this just incredible self-belief that things are going to work out.

Don't underestimate how powerful that is. On making things work out. You know, it's it's not just oh, I believe it's going to go well. That's not what we're talking about here. It's having that belief.

But then doing the actions that make it go well. Right. And this is this is where sometimes I don't know if you've ever met these sorts of people. They're they're wannabe founders and they're like not really willing to do the work behind it. And they come up to tell you about this great business idea they've got.

And you just get this feeling from them that you want to as a, as a make it go right founder, you sort of you sort of keep your distance from them. You don't really want to get too involved because you can just feel that they're 90% show and they're not really willing to do the work required to get it done. That's a different thing, right? I'm not talking about being a rah rah person and going, yeah, everything's fantastic when the ship's burning, right?

William Harris 08:57

Sure.

Mikel Lindsaar 08:57

I'm talking about being the captain that's going. I know the ship's burning. We are going to make it through. And this is what we're going to do a, B, C, d, e. And then the founders out there doing a, b, c before even the team starting to do D, right.

So you need to lead from the front. You need to push it through. And I think that's where that gut feeling comes from in in my viewpoint it's a it's a postulated future. And the person's going, well, I've got this choice or this choice. That's the future I want.

It feels right. Let's make it happen. And because they have now put their significant mental and physical energy into achieving that postulated outcome, that the universe conspires to help them get there. And that sounds really metaphysical, but the way it works out in practice is really quite scientific. It's as the founder, the head of that pack, they're just like going for it.

The people around them can't help but go in the same direction, right? So now you're getting 30 people all pushing towards that direction, and you look at all the really massively successful founders and they have very clear directions. They're going down. The whole team knows which way they're going. So you get thousands, hundreds of thousands, however many people when you start, including the whole community around that company as well, are all pushing in this direction.

Of course, it's going to work. You know, it's it's a almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.

William Harris 10:33

I know you said that. It sounds metaphysical. I would actually say that the more that we learn about physics, quantum physics, etc., it almost seems as if it's just physical, that it's not metaphysical. It seems as if there are things that exist within the laws of nature that kind of make those things become more true. I'm even looking at things like wave collapse functions, things like that.

Right. Within quantum physics and everything different show. So we probably won't go down that path right now.

Mikel Lindsaar 11:02

It's getting pretty wild for the first five minutes of a business podcast.

William Harris 11:06

Sure. But I want to go back in time then to young Mikel . Were you always this way? Did you always think this way? Because if I remember, you talked about, like, dad leaves and IBM XT shows up, lights dim, like what was going on at this time of your life.

Were you also the person who was like, look, this is just going to work out. I'm going to make it happen? Or did you have to get there through these things?

Mikel Lindsaar 11:28

I remember a great story from my childhood. So my my dad did leave when I was a young age. My mom and dad divorced, mom got remarried, and I had a stepfather, and my dad sent me an XT and I started playing with it. And it was one of those computers that, you know, when I first got it, it had the the two, 5.25in 360 K floppy drives. I was like, in heaven, man, that was like more Ram and disk space than anyone on the block.

And after a couple of years, my dad shipped me a ten megabyte hard drive and like, it was this. Yeah. You know, it's yeah, they're massive. And I remember installing it myself and getting it up and running and turning it on one day, finally. And literally the lights in my room dimmed because it was just drawing power.

And it was such a visceral experience launching these computers back then. You'd you'd flick the switch. The switch was like a half kilo weight on it to flick it over, because the magnets had to click, right. Yeah. And then.

S4: 12:39

Run, run, run.

S5: 12:41

And the hard drive would boot up.

Mikel Lindsaar 12:43

And anyway, it was quite, quite a wild time. But I got into doing some programming myself. I got one of the first internet accounts in South Australia where I was living at the at the local university, and I remember I mean, back then it was all just Unix and email, and my name actually came out of that the way I spell my name, believe it or not, that's another story. But we got into the internet and I remember seeing. And Unix based ones I was also using and also dial up.

And as the internet was in this really nascent state, now I'm talking 1996 97, like it was really early times for it in general. I remember going to my stepdad who was a used car salesperson, and I said, you know. One day people are just going to buy cars over this. And he just said, don't be stupid, you know? And he really shut me down.

And a little bit later I said, actually, not only will they buy cars, but I've decided that the way I'm going to make money is I'm going to make a product where millions and millions of people are just paying me like $0.01 per month, right? And he said, you couldn't do that. Like, how would you collect the money? Like he totally killed it. Fast forward 40 years, 35 years, whatever it is, I now run, store, connect, and we have all of these companies that pay us.

But one of the things they pay us is I get a per transaction merchant fee on every sale. So literally, I now have a situation where that many people are paying me, you know, paying the company, but paying X cents per month on all these transactions. You know, and it's really funny, you come up with these ideas way back when and it turns out to be true 30 years later. That's it's always thought that was pretty wild in in how that can work out. But yeah, I've always been a, an entrepreneur.

I've always been interested in in building things and creating things.

William Harris 15:01

And apparently always had the mindset that you're going to figure it out.

S5: 15:06

Absolutely.

William Harris 15:07

Even when people are in your face saying, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard.

Mikel Lindsaar 15:11

Well, people of authority too, right? You know, he he ran the house. But yeah, it's and it's you don't know when that's going to work out either. You're just going to keep working down that path. And that's that's part of the journey.

That's what makes it fun.

William Harris 15:26

So fast forwarding in that journey, you quit university. Why? Like what was going on that you're like, hey, this is this is a good idea.

Mikel Lindsaar 15:34

I was I was doing a a degree program in the University of South Australia, which was fantastic. It was called Business Information Systems. I was on the most amazing wicket, so it was basically a scholarship program, and I got paid by the university to be at university, which was like, wow. Unheard of. And I was also able to qualify for full government assistance for being at university in Australia.

So I was on a fantastic wage, living wage, I think it was 30 or $40,000 a year tax free in 1992. Like it was just ridiculous. So and I'd made that all go right. And, you know, I actually didn't get the program. Like I wasn't selected to join the program.

And at the first point, and I'd already decided that I was getting into the program. So I went, that doesn't make sense. And I went in and saw the instructors and, and the, the selection board and said, you have to let me in. You know, this is the right program for me. And they made an additional spot and let me into the program.

So I was doing that program. It was intense. It was almost a double loading. So you were doing AA5 year, five year equivalent university degree in three years. So that's why they paid like the scholarship was, so that you didn't have to work another job because you just didn't have time.

Right. So I did that program, and about two years into it, I was just bored because I'd done so much work with computers and I'd done so much programming that one. At one point, one of the instructors came up and asked me how to do the final year assignment and if I'd already done it, because they wanted to look at it, to see how they could mark the other students. And I was I was also tutoring other students in my class and charging for it in my current year level. Right.

So it was getting to a point where, why am I here? And then an opportunity opened up to go over to Victoria and start another state and start an internet service provider. So I did that and started my own ISP and I was like, do I really need this degree program anymore? And, well, no, I'm going to be my own boss forever. I don't need to justify to anyone that they need to hire me, so screw it.

And I dropped out.

William Harris 17:55

You told me that you like to think before you speak. Why is that intentional? And how has that shaped your management style?

Mikel Lindsaar 18:05

Definitely makes you seem smarter. It's like an instant growth hack. If you the difference between pausing and then speaking and filling that space with words and sounds and then speaking is marked, you know you don't want to. If you're filling stuff with sound, that just means you're being indecisive. But the think before speak really doesn't have to take a long time.

I think this is something that people confuse. Thinking and thought is instantaneous. Problem solving can take time. But the the process of just making a decision or taking the data and coming up with the result that itself is instantaneous. What takes time is collecting the data, having space to collect the data, pull that data in.

Sometimes you might want to mull it over because you don't quite see the connection. And I do that in various ways. My favorite one is walking, which I'm sure we'll get to at some point. But the. It's really important when you're talking with your team that you are as a manager.

You're decisive. You give them clear direction. You tell them what you want and what you think and make sure that they're able to trust you in that.

William Harris 19:34

Because yeah.

Mikel Lindsaar 19:36

If you keep giving them the wrong output, they'll leave because they're sick and tired of getting wrapped around light poles because they followed your directions. Right? You really need to center yourself on that. And and again, go with your gut. You know, you're you're running a business.

You're in a situation where all these people are trusting you to do the right thing, make the right choice, make sure the business doesn't run out of money. As you're ramping up the scale and growth, make sure that it's hitting the right target markets and that you're doing the right sales pitch and that you hire the right people. And 1,000,001 decisions that you have to do. So before you actually give a direction. Make sure you've had a think about that.

And at least and again I'm really emphasizing here, don't sit there and going, okay, now I have to think about this for an hour before I say anything. That's not my point. My point is, you need to have the right inputs in order to make the right decision. The decision itself is pretty much instantaneous, so make sure that you have the right inputs. Make sure that you get the data.

A really great pro tip for anyone in business or anyone making decisions at any level, is if you get two bits of information that's come to you and those two pieces of information are contrary in some way, right? So they both can't be true. They they don't exist in the same universe. You only know two things. Either both of them are false, right?

Or one of them is false. You do not know for a fact that one of them is true, right?

William Harris 21:22

Sure.

Mikel Lindsaar 21:23

They probably either. They could be both false. So if you ever get contrary data coming in to you, your first job as an executive is to spot that and say, I need more data here because I need to work out which one of those two things is false, because you know that one of them is false, and maybe both of them are false, but you don't know either one of them is true. Right. So that's a really simple thing you can do as a business executive.

It also is a great way to identify areas in your company that need investigation. So if if sales is skyrocketing but income is flat, well that's a contrary datum. Like why. And then you go start investigating. Like that is a big red flag saying come and investigate me here.

Come and have a look at what's going on. So you go have a look and you find out that the sales person, in order to get the sales, is promising every client nine months free service before the first invoice.

William Harris 22:23

Sure.

Mikel Lindsaar 22:24

And you're like, what the. What do you mean?

William Harris 22:26

Yeah.

Mikel Lindsaar 22:27

So this is a this is a thing.

William Harris 22:30

I like that a lot. I want to jump.

Mikel Lindsaar 22:33

Have you ever hit that sort of contrary fact aspect?

William Harris 22:38

So, I mean, I'm sure there are moments I would say on our side, it could be CPMs are rising and but revenue is also rising, right? Or let's even say like Ma or Roas is also rising. And you're like, wait a minute. Those seem like those would be contradictory, but we've actually seen it to be, more often than not, the case. And I think part of the reason why we see that on the ad side is because oftentimes the CPMs rise, because that's moments when people are already ready to make buying decisions, let's just say Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

And so everybody's advertising them at that same time. So the CPM goes up. There's only so many eyeballs. But people are also ready to make a decision and make a purchase anyways. And so also at the same time, the meter goes up and usually would think that it's like, well, MMR and CPMs are inversely correlated or something like that.

And they're just they're oftentimes not.

Mikel Lindsaar 23:30

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And again this is a this is a thing. One or both could be false or you're just missing some data.

Yeah. And the missing data there is that everyone's buying on Monday. Right. And that's what's causing that contrary fact. And this is a this is something that I play with a lot in the business.

William Harris 23:51

I love it I, I really like logic and logic puzzles and going through. Right. Like 99 blue and stuff like that. Right. The 99 blue.

Like I do appreciate learning to think through that. And I've got daughters 15, 12 and ten. And you know, routinely they come home from like math class or whatever. They're like, when am I ever going to use this? Right.

Logarithms, when am I? And I was like, you're not necessarily going to use that specific math in your everyday life, but what you are going to use is the way that that has shaped your brain in the way that it has wired your brain to be able to think and solve and to see patterns and things like that that you will use in everything that you do. You will literally just make better decisions, potentially as a result of being able to wire your brain that way.

Mikel Lindsaar 24:35

Yeah, totally. Absolutely.

William Harris 24:38

I want to dig into Story Connect. Then I'm working my way into, let's say, process. That's the meat of what I want to get into. Is a lot of your thoughts around process. Before I do that, I really want to kind of unpack, store, connect a little bit for people to understand what is it and why did you create it?

Mikel Lindsaar 24:55

I was I was like really bored and yeah. StoreConnect is a natural evolution of me experiencing a problem with some of our clients. So I have another company called Re Interactive, which is a software development agency. I'm, I'm the founder of it. I don't run it particularly day to day.

I've got a team that look after that. but what really interactive do is interact with it. They create web based applications, be it mobile or browser based, and they're really good at connecting that to other systems, for example Salesforce. So if you're trying to build a mobile app or a web application and you need it talking with Salesforce Re Interactive Value or team that they're brilliant at it, easily one of the best in the world. And while I was in this company and working at day to day, I kept having clients come up and say, Hey Mikel , can you build us a bespoke e-commerce product?

And I'm like, well, I mean, yeah, I'll take your third of $1 million to build that. But Shopify, like, why aren't you using that? Like it's $13 a month? Like, what's the what's the missing Elumynt? And they kept coming back.

I had three of these in like two years. Like it was wild. And they kept coming back saying, look, Shopify, BigCommerce, whatever, it's all fantastic on the front end. Like it can do the transaction. But that's not the problem.

The problem we're having is how do we automate that business flow on the back end, how do we structure it, and how do we handle the refunds and the orders and the the CRM aspect, and how do we synchronize it with our help desk and all of this stuff? I want different types of reports. I need a thing going to the CEO that shows total products broken down by, you know, phase of the moon or something, which Shopify just doesn't provide because why would they? No one needs that. So they were trying to get control of the back end.

And one of my clients summed it up. They said, we don't want our e-commerce software to dictate how we run our business. And it was a really it was sort of one of those light bulb moments for me. Right? I went, oh, that's actually really interesting because I was doing all this work building on top of Salesforce.

Now, Salesforce is a massive beast, but fundamentally, what Salesforce is from my point of view, is a completely programmable business operating system, and it has its warts and it has its bad UI in certain places and all sorts of things. And it gets it gets picked on. But it's a multi-billion dollar revenue business, right? It does a lot of things right in order to achieve that outcome. And I looked at Salesforce and I went, what if?

Because that's completely programmable, people can build their business to be whatever they want on that. What if we built Shopify and WordPress plus about 20 Shopify and WordPress plugins? And what if we just built that inside of Salesforce? Then clients could have the front end that they wanted, but also completely malleable back end to do whatever they want. And I prototyped this over about a two month period.

Me developing, and one of my other developers proved to ourselves that we could actually do it and went to market. And I think we sold our first client within a month or two. Like without a product and a very expensive and very high profile client. And it was like hundreds of thousands of dollars that I sold instantly. And I went, Holy crap, I didn't even have a product to show.

This was on the promise of a product to show. And I went, okay, this thing's got legs. So we we built out the first two clients and got them launched. That took us like six months because we had to build this thing from scratch. Sure.

And then once that was built, I went to market again, and we sold out our implementation capability again for the next six months, in like three weeks.

William Harris 29:12

Product market fit.

Mikel Lindsaar 29:13

Holy shit. This is just like going and then a whole evolution. And fast forward eight years and we're growing at like 150% year on year growth. Wow. Yeah, it's it's exploding.

And the most common closed lost reason we get on our opportunities is why didn't I know about you 12 months ago when I just replatformed, you know? So that's the position we're in now. It's a great closed, lost reason to have. But we now just need to get out there. You know, one of the other funny things about StoreConnect was that our first 50 clients did not compete.

And what I mean by that.

William Harris 29:54

Is, wow. Like like vertical overlaps or things like that.

Mikel Lindsaar 29:57

No vertical overlaps in our first 50 clients. I mean, we might have had two that were doing retail, but one was cosmetics and the other one was shoes, right. Or things like that. But the first 50 did not compete in anything. So our product is insanely horizontal, which as a marketing person frickin sucks, right?

Like, where do you spend your money? But as a product person, it's really great. The only problem is that it makes that tail before you really start taking off really long, because you have to get critical mass in multiple industries before it really starts exploding. But yeah, so, you know, having that capability and StoreConnect now, I mean, we've had clients come to StoreConnect from Shopify and discontinue more than 20 SaaS products in the process.

William Harris 30:55

It's a lot.

Mikel Lindsaar 30:56

And when you think that each one of those SaaS products is only really providing them 90 to 95% of what they actually want, you know, you start adding up those percentages. You know, this system only this system gets everything except the birth date. We really need the birth date. So now we we get this system which does the birth date, but it doesn't do the blah. But we really need the blah.

So we added this system which which hacks the blah but causes a slight problem in this one over here. And you keep building up this Rube Goldberg machine of SaaS products. And we get to just go and put it all in Salesforce and just build that automation, and the scale just goes ballistic. The client.

William Harris 31:34

First of all.

Mikel Lindsaar 31:35

Love.

William Harris 31:35

It. Don't don't hate on my Rube Goldberg machines because I happen to think those are a lot of fun to watch those videos. But I get what you're saying, and I totally agree with you. Like there's like all those little percentages can add up to something that is substantial. Then to a business that's large enough.

Mikel Lindsaar 31:52

We had we had one client. I mean, this is my favorite example. They were a import export business. So what they do is they're a distributor, sorry, not an import export business. So what they do is you're a company that sells I don't know these pens.

right? And you're based in America, but you want to sell these pins in Australia, and you don't want to set up operations in Australia. So this company comes along and goes we will distribute, sell stock, run the website, do everything for these in Australia for you. Right. So they then set up a warehouse and they set up the website.

And they do all the they go to the local Office Depot or Officeworks and sell them the boxes of pens or whatever's needed. Right. They had 73 websites running across 26 brands in four countries. 76 different big commerce websites. Right?

William Harris 32:50

Just daisy chain together.

Mikel Lindsaar 32:52

All well, not even talking to each other. So 76 different websites. Okay. And then on top of that, in every country that they're working in, which was four countries, they had a B2B store which only showed and stocked the products for the brands that were available in that country, because not all 26 brands were in all four countries, right? When we came to them, they had four people full time for marketing, people who weren't doing marketing, what they were doing full time was just trying to keep the product listing and price books up to date on those 76 websites.

That was their full time job.

William Harris 33:30

Insane.

Mikel Lindsaar 33:31

And I said to Rebecca, who was who was the client? I said, Rebecca, how do you how do you put together a sales report for your CEO for what you sold last week? And she goes, well, if we start Monday then. And I'm like, wait, what? What do you mean, Monday?

Why are we using calendar days? Don't you mean 9 a.m.?

William Harris 33:49

Oh no.

Mikel Lindsaar 33:50

And she goes, no, you don't you don't understand. We have to sign in to all 76 BigCommerce stores, download a CSV, make sure we don't miss one. So we have this grid where we tick it off as we go. Then we take all of those csvs and cut and paste them into an Excel spreadsheet. Then we hit go on the pivot table at about 11 a.m. Friday.

Go to lunch, come back and we'll have the report. And I'm like, holy. Anyway, fast forward they're now on StoreConnect. So they have one Salesforce org. And their websites are all running out of that one environment.

And their B2B sites are all running out of that one environment. Their CEO now can click Refresh on Salesforce Dashboard and get worldwide sales all converted to his own currency. All live, all updated instantly. But more importantly, those four people that were working on it, three and a half of them went back to their standard job, which was expansion and marketing, and they now spend one hour a day doing the same job maintaining that site. Right.

So this is where StoreConnect is like evolution of bring it all into one local, one location that actually works really makes sense, and it really enables this growth for our clients.

William Harris 35:09

Well, and to your point, then that makes it easier for the CEO to make decisions because they're not saying maybe. And so the whole business moves.

Mikel Lindsaar 35:17

Waiting for data. Yep.

William Harris 35:20

A big part of this, like you said, was them being able to fix the process to run the business, that they want to run it. So they're not focused on these things that don't work, obviously improve the processes. We talked about the maybe you you've mentioned before about like other things, I think what is it? Meta pulse. Right.

Am I remembering that's the name of the other thing that you have that helps to start seeing things that can basically improve the process. Take me through what menopause is and how that's doing that menopause.

Mikel Lindsaar 35:56

Com is the website. Menopause is the world's first growth management system. And it's a it's my baby. It's something that I'll never sell. I'll keep it forever.

I built it literally so that I could build my other companies. And, you know, StoreConnect is exploding and it's taking off. And at some point, something will happen, I'm sure. But meta pulse will always be mine. And menopause really provides a few really key things.

So the first one is it has a team chart in there so that you can actually put who in, who is in your company and what do they do. You know, this is one of those things that as you grow, you lose track of, you know, one day you walk in as a founder and you passed 50 staff. Once you get past about 50, you will see people that you don't recognize or you just don't know the name of. And what are they doing? Like what's their job?

And because the layers start improving. Even if you're involved in every single hiring decision, you will lose track of this. Sure, as you grow. So the team chart is a really key thing. You know, you create the team chart.

You who reports to who and how does that hang together. And what you find when you build that team chart is sometimes you find that one person's got two jobs that are on opposite ends of the organization, right? And you start that becomes an inefficiency because they're having to deal with the with different particles and different things coming past them at different points of the, of the structure. Or you might find that someone actually doesn't really do anything in the company. You know, they don't have any deliverables.

They just happen to be there because they knew Joe and Joe talked to Joyce and there we go. So the team chart is very important. The next thing that it does, though, is that when you're creating the team chart, we get you to assign statistics. So as a statistic fundamentally it's also known as a KPI. But the reason we call it a statistic, it's just fundamentally a measure of what you did.

Now compared to a previous period. And there are some obvious statistics that every company needs to keep. You know, how much income did they make? How much service did they deliver? You know, count it as an actual delivery metric, which could be different to the income.

You know, you might over deliver on a client. There's all these sorts of different statistics that you need on a very, very simple dashboard. And all you want to see on a statistic is a simple graph and a line graph. Is it going up or is it going down? Right.

And again you want to simplify this input data so that you're not making really you know the pie chart is 2% off on the left. You can't do anything with that. No. So you want to you want a line chart. So we we add statistics.

And one of the key things is you really want to get everyone in your company running on some sort of a metric which objectively shows whether or not they're working productively. Once that's in place, you then also have inside of meta pulse policy. And there's quite a few other features. But the last one is knowledge and policy. And this is where founders, I think trip up the most is they don't put their prior decisions in writing.

So the way you get around. Staff constantly asking you how to do something is whenever a staff member does ask you how to do something, if it's unusual and it's a new thing and you know how to solve it, but the staff member doesn't, you should go write a policy, and the policy can be really short. It says in case of a do be right, and you put that policy in writing and then meta pulse actually makes sure that the people that need to know about it, according to the team chart, go and learn it. So when you write the policy, you assign it to areas of your company. So you go, well, this is a sales policy that needs to go to everyone in the sales division or area of my company, and Metapost will keep that tracking.

Now, if you hire a new salesperson. Metapost will make sure that that person reads that policy because it's part of that division, right? So you start creating job descriptions and hats effectively, of all the policy that's needed for that person to put on the hat of train conductor and drive the train. Right. So or a chef's hat or whatever.

So they, they put the hat on. It's got all the policy in it. They read the policy and now they're just bam they're up to speed. And this takes so much confusion out of the organization. Because the other thing about policy is that it forms agreement.

Policy creates agreement. People read the policy and go, oh, well, that's what we do here. Now I understand. And then everyone's sort of going in the same direction.

William Harris 40:43

Which is huge. There's the story that I've used on here multiple times that I borrow from iOS. You know, that idea of rowing the boat and it's like, even if some people are rowing close to the same direction, like some rowing this way, some rowing this way. It's like not even rowing in opposite directions, but it's just enough that it decreases the efficiency of that boat moving in the direction you want it to go. And so having already rowing in the same direction, this sounds like this helps a lot more with decision making as well.

And so I do want to talk a little bit about some of your decision making things that you've explained to me. You told me that every decision costs throughput. Can you help founders see how decision fatigue compounds like interest?

Mikel Lindsaar 41:21

Yeah. Decisions are. They're hard when. How best to describe this every time. So you put a person on a post right.

You say Joe you're the salesperson right now. If Joe if you were Joe and you as the founder, you're able to make sales way faster than any salesperson that you ever put on the job. And the reason for that is client says, oh, I need blah. And you just quickly go, yep, we can do that. No worries.

Right. Or hey, can I have can I have a discount on this? But I'll pay you more over there. Yep. Done.

No worries. The salesperson at every time that comes up doesn't have the authority. So they're going to go, let me get back to you. Now, the number one thing that kills deals is time.

William Harris 42:20

Momentum. Yeah. Gotta have that.

Mikel Lindsaar 42:23

The more time you add to a deal, the more chance you're going to lose. It can be investment. It could be a sale. It doesn't matter. So your job as a salesperson is to take time out of things as much as possible in order to get that job and project through the line.

And that's why salespeople get a rep of being pushy. It's because what they're trying to do is remove time from the cycle, because they've realized that every time they add time, their percentage close goes down. So it's the decision on an unusual outcome or an unusual set of circumstances that's costing you that sale because you're having to pause. The way you combat that is twofold. Firstly, you tell the salesperson they're responsible for the job.

This is your job. This is the metrics. This is how we measure success. And you're going to try and get that as clear as possible so that they know that it's their their job. What you don't want is a salesperson calling you every day.

Is this okay? Is this okay? Is this okay? Yeah. That's just going to kill everything.

Secondly, every time your salesperson comes to you with some sort of decision metric or, hey, this is a bit unusual, what do I do about this? Write a policy around it. Maybe not every single time, but if you can. Even better, write a policy around it and put that into writing, and then give the policy back to the salesperson as your answer, if you can. If you can do that, loop that fast.

I've done it a couple of times. I've had I don't get to do it all the time, but I've had staff send me an email saying, hey boss, what do we do about ABC? And before I reply on the email, I've written the policy because I've just gone. And then I've attached the policy to the email and just replied.

William Harris 44:03

So good.

Mikel Lindsaar 44:04

Right? And I haven't even attached it. What I've done is I've written it in Metapost and Metapost has emailed them the policy saying, hey, you've got a new study assignment, please read this. And it just handles right because the client, the staff member goes, oh cool, that's what we do. Boom.

And they do it. So that's a really twofold aspect. You want to put the person on the post and expect them to own that post and come up with the goods. Right. Treat them like an adult.

Say, hey, this is your job. I need you to achieve these outcomes. Tell me what you need to do it. And on the second side, you give them the guardrails and the guidance on what's acceptable and what's not. And with those two things together, an intelligent person will be able to boom their their production and expand from there.

William Harris 44:54

So we run off of EOS traction, and one of the things they talk about is, you know, 80%, right, like 80% of your policies and your processes written down 8% of it. Right. And that's kind of like the goal. It's like, just find that spot. How do you prevent, let's just say standardization and process from becoming bureaucracy and slowing things down then.

Because there's so much process.

Mikel Lindsaar 45:18

Because you need a senior policy. And we have this in our company, which is any policy broken in the selfless service to a client is fine, right?

William Harris 45:28

So policies like the rules of a robot but like human Edition.

Mikel Lindsaar 45:31

Yeah. That's right. And you know, that's that's part of policy is there to guide expansion. And this is like a fundamental thing on policy or procedures or whatever. They're there to ensure the efficient operation of an organizational unit in order to guide expansion.

If policy is no longer causing expansion, then by definition it's not policy. So I empower my team like I have a policy that says what is policy? Or why do we have policy? And within that policy, that's one of the first references that they read when they get onboarded. Right.

And within that it says if you ever find a policy that's outdated or causing problems or not able to handle the current situation you're in, it's your job to propose an edit because you've got more data. And that edit will come to me, I'll sign off on it and we're good. And I have my staff creating policy all over the joint. And it comes to me for sign off. And it's like, yeah, great.

I didn't have to write that policy approved. So this is this is the where the responsibility point comes in from the staff member. Right. Or the team member. You can be a team member and be completely irresponsible by going well.

But the policy said.

William Harris 46:53

Yeah.

Mikel Lindsaar 46:54

Right. So you need to build that company culture, which is we're all in this together. We're trying to find a path through an untaped, unmapped Kevin system. We think we're going in a pretty good direction. But by God, if if you stumble across a cliff, make sure you tell us before the entire lemming contingent walks off it.

William Harris 47:18

Sure. Yeah.

Mikel Lindsaar 47:20

Your job is walk forward, but don't kill yourself in the process. It's you got to give that responsibility, and you build up that responsibility in the team, and you build up that responsibility by giving them a job, telling them how to produce, rewarding them for production, getting annoyed if they don't. You know, like all of these things coalesce into a high performing team and that team tends to know what everyone else is doing and what they're thinking, and that's how they grow. So yeah.

William Harris 47:50

So okay, this kind of reminds me of something you told me about before the airport terminal analogy. Walk me through this, this analogy of like a modern e-commerce business as an airport where founders are accidentally creating delays and things like that.

S5: 48:08

Yeah, it's.

Mikel Lindsaar 48:09

If you're if you have a really smoothly running organization, you have things arriving and going really simply. Everything's on time, everything's on schedule. And if you're not in tune with that as a founder, you'll start issuing policies or decisions which are throwing cogs at, you know, gears into the cogs. You're dropping wrenches all over the joint and sending people off track and things like this. It's really important to not Bypass a person.

So if your salesperson is doing a job or or your customer support person is doing something, and you as a founder get frustrated because they're not doing it right, you know, your first inclination is to jump all over it and just handle the hell out of it.

William Harris 49:03

Yeah.

Mikel Lindsaar 49:04

Sometimes you have to. Right? The client's about to quit, leave whatever. You're just going to handle it, or it's an emergency. Fine.

But if you ever do that and you want your business to continue running smoothly, you need to go and speak to the person that you bypassed. Right? The person that you went around to fix the problem and help them get back in control of that thing. Right. So you might want to do a write up to them.

Hey, I know you've been handling Frank. He called me directly, I did ABC. I told him def this is where it currently stands. I'm giving this back to you now. Right.

What you don't want to do is for that support rep to call Frank. And Frank goes, why are you calling me? I already spoke to Mikel Click. Because now he's just been invalidated on his job. So he's he's had the responsibility for his job, yanked away from him without warning, without any handover.

And that now creates a level of upset and hidden upset and hidden emotion that is brewing there. Right. And nothing might have come of that for like six months. But then you add more and more and more and more of those together, and you get a situation where the boss is an asshole and blah, blah, blah, and this company is stupid anyway, because they're just getting wrapped around light poles and they're not getting a chance to succeed, right? So you got to be careful as a founder.

Don't don't go around bypassing people and and doing these sorts of things. Just get in there and produce the produce, the product. If you need to do something, do it. But then make sure you hand it back to the person who's responsible for it with a write up so they understand and they can carry it forward from there. Otherwise, you will just wear every job in your company and that's that.

You're not you're never going to get to a point where someone can be owning a job if you keep bypassing them on it.

William Harris 51:06

I feel like there's a story here. Like, was there a moment when you had this moment where you bypassed somebody and something happened? You go, oh, okay, I get it. Or is this just like you were like, no, this just makes sense.

Mikel Lindsaar 51:18

Yeah. It's something I've learned over the years. And and I mean, you mentioned iOS. It's a, it's a one platform. I've used the Hubbard management system a lot.

And that's where I've learned a lot of that from. And I've just seen it play out again and again and again. I have too many examples of me doing it wrong for me even to think of one.

William Harris 51:39

Sure.

Mikel Lindsaar 51:40

It's it's so easy to do. And I did one with my amazing assistant, Lisa. She's she's incredible. She and one of my team in my establishment division did this whole workout. I didn't even know about it, although they did tell me they were doing it, but I hadn't actually internalized it.

I'd seen it, and something came up and I made a snap decision. Right? And I mean, it wasn't a wrong decision, but it wasn't taking any of this work into account. And then suddenly they're like, well, but we just spent two weeks on this, you know, is that worthwhile? And I really had to work with them to figure out, well, okay, how do we actually take this forward now and how do we fix it?

Because I discounted it like I hadn't thought with it. And this is this is a really, you know, if you want to make people feel wanted and and contributing, you got to accept that help and get rolling. Now key thing don't just accept all help. You're going to accept help unconditionally. That people need to prove that they can actually help you before you just hand over everything and say, go for it.

But yeah, you you really want to work with your team and and really help build that out.

William Harris 53:05

You told me, and you've kind of alluded to this before, if a staff member asks you a question, you typically now don't always answer it. Maybe you're going to turn it into a policy if you needed to, but you assign them homework instead. Why? Why does that work?

Mikel Lindsaar 53:21

Never, never, never accept a problem any junior presents to you is like such a foundational datum. Always demand a solution. And this is this seems really brutal, but my team now have just internalized it. They they never come to me with just a how do I solve this? They come to me with a, I think we should focus that we should do this right, or we should do that right.

And. When you violate that principle of solving problems, if you're a junior in a company and you go to your boss and you say, hey, this is happening, what do I do? If the boss gives you an answer and you go and implement it and it goes really badly, who's to blame? It's the boss. It's his fault.

But if it goes really well, who takes the credit? Well, the junior, because he did it right. So as a boss, you're in a lose lose situation no matter what you do. Either way, if it goes well or goes bad, it's not great. You're much better off asking that person, well, what do you think we should do?

And maybe they say, well, I don't know. And you say, well, okay, come back to me when you have some ideas. And they'll come back. They they might give you completely crap ideas and you go, well, don't really like that. Now, this doesn't work.

Obviously, if it's if the building's on fire.

William Harris 54:49

Right, right, right.

Mikel Lindsaar 54:51

And obviously at that point, maybe write a policy or help give them some data. But it's a really powerful, enabling thing for someone in a lower position to go and find the information they need in order to make a decision.

William Harris 55:05

Yeah. Do you have kids?

Mikel Lindsaar 55:07

Yes. One.

William Harris 55:09

Oh, yeah. You said nine year old, right? Eight year old, nine year old.

Mikel Lindsaar 55:12

Eight year old.

William Harris 55:12

Yeah. Eight year old daughter. Do you do this with her?

Mikel Lindsaar 55:17

Yes.

William Harris 55:18

Good.

Mikel Lindsaar 55:18

Constantly. She hates it.

William Harris 55:20

I was gonna say I do this with my daughters as well. And especially my youngest one hates it too. She's doing her homework and she'll ask, you know, how do I spell blah, blah blah? I'm like, how do you think you spell it? And I will always help her, right?

But I will always ask you. She's like, I'm sick of you asking me that question. Why can't you just tell me how to spell it? I was like, because I want you to focus on this. But that said, let's let's remove the nine and ten year olds from this discussion and say how this can feel annoying and frustrating to people.

So how especially sometimes high performers, how do you make sure that this is does it become a point of stress for those people too?

Mikel Lindsaar 56:01

Because I'm not an asshole about it.

William Harris 56:03

Sure.

Mikel Lindsaar 56:04

You know, and and at the end of the day, they're getting paid very well to do that job. Right? So I don't sit there and go, why are you bringing this to me? Come on, dickhead, go and work it out. Like that doesn't happen.

The way this usually pans out is. Hey, Mikel , client A just said B, I don't know what to do. And I'll say, oh, okay, give me some more data about that. What do you think's happening? So I'll get them to start trying to.

So the reason someone can't make a decision is they don't have the data. That's in order to decide, one must understand. There is if you want to decide correctly. And even if you don't understand something at all, you're almost unable to make a decision because the fear of making the wrong decision is too high. Right.

So in order to decide, one has to understand that's a truth out of the the Hubbard management system. So I get them to start eking out more information, and I say, well, what do you think they want that I don't know. It's maybe it's because of their revenue. Okay. Is there any way you could find that out?

So I prompt them into that journey. It's very rare. I just say, just. Can you bring me a solution, please? I might, if they're being a bit irresponsible or I'm wanting to, you know, be a little bit annoyed or a little bit angry, but very rare.

You know, I'm very collaborative on it, and I help them work a path through the problem, and we might spitball it a bit and come back and forth. But at the end I always say, so what do you think about that? Right. So I'm always throwing the responsibility for the decision back to them and they'll go, yeah, I think that might work. Do you think that's all right?

And I'll say, yeah that's good. So at that point I'm agreeing with their solution presented. And that really creates a, a trust level like Toby from Shopify just did a podcast with can't remember who it was anyway. It was just recent. It was quite long.

I listened to it on a on a long walk. But he talks about like having a trust bucket. And as you're doing each of these interactions, you're building trust and you're filling that bucket with more and more trust. And then if they do something wrong, you're taking a little bit out of that trust bucket, right? So you want to help them build that up by walking them through the path on how you make that decision and telling them where they can find the data.

And maybe they don't know, you know, help them.

William Harris 58:42

This reminds me a lot of something that I like to do that I actually borrowed from the hospital field, which I believe was borrowed from the military field. It's called Sbar. Sbar. And it's situation background assessment recommendation. And whenever we do run into these situations that it's like we don't have an idea for, I like to say like, well, what is the situation.

Right. And I'll use the example from the hospital, because I think it's more graphic and illustrative of what you're trying to do. But it's like the patient's bleeding out of their chest tubes. Okay. Got it.

That's the situation, right? Like, well, what's the background? The background is they had open heart surgery 24 hours ago. Okay, good. Now I understand why they're bleeding out of their chest tubes.

This might actually be okay for a little bit. This isn't that alarming yet, right? Or at least if this is ten days out, we've got a problem. What's your assessment? What else is going on?

What's their blood pressure? What's their heart rate? What's their, you know, heart rhythm. Give me. Yes.

Some of this information. And then you get down to recommendation. What's your recommendation. Right. So it's like I need to know what you think we should do.

And then I can say yes, I agree. No, I disagree and here's why. But going through that process, the reason why I like doing that with my team is exactly like what you just said. I want them to think in that way. So that way it's like almost as if like Will was over here on their shoulder just saying, like, hey, what's the situation?

What's the background, what's your assessment? What's your recommendation on this?

Mikel Lindsaar 59:59

Yeah, totally. And that's you know, this comes out of I mean, you mentioned that book of mine True Team right, with Tony Melvin that I wrote that is actually an acronym. Right. So, you know, I.

William Harris 1:00:11

Didn't I didn't realize that I should have read the book. I did not I apologize.

S5: 1:00:15

Truly.

Mikel Lindsaar 1:00:15

Radical, unrelenting enterprise of totally enabled and aligned members. Right. So you've got this whole group of people that are going in the same direction. They're all aligned. They've been enabled.

Policy right there. Unrelenting. They're after their product. They're a bit radical, like they're doing different things. And that's how you create a brand new business.

But this is a whole you get those individuals on the job who want to do the job, take responsibility for the job, follow the policy that exists, propose missing policy that doesn't that will build up the company. And you can think of policy as like little foundation blocks in a business. And as they get laid down, embedded in by continual use and proven that they work, that builds a really strong foundation for you to keep building your company up.

William Harris 1:01:04

I love it. I want to shift into some of your scaling, exiting, being acquirer ready stuff because you've had a couple of good exits you've sold companies for, I believe, 50,000 or 50,000 millions. What changed between each exit?

Mikel Lindsaar 1:01:24

Believe it or not, the smaller the deal, I found it harder. Because. Really? I mean, the really, really tiny ones. That was.

That was just easy. That was just decision over the phone. And yeah, we'll do it and let's go. There's a point, though, when you start selling companies where the data collection, you're just not set up to have it because you haven't got your your procedures and policies and things in place. I tell you, one of the things that saved me a lot of time was having a lot of statistics that we were tracking on a weekly basis for the last six years, and someone says, what's your blah?

And I pull up a graph of it being tracked on a weekly basis for blah through the whole history. That builds a lot of confidence. You know, one of the key things in in a sale is that money is an idea backed by confidence. Right? So people are going to give you money if they're confident that they're going to get something in exchange.

So any sale really is a confidence game. It's how do I get the buyer to understand the inherent value of this business and be confident enough that they can achieve that value out of the outcomes, right. And as soon as you understand that that's really all a sale is, it makes things a lot more simple in terms of, well, what would I want to know? You know, in order to buy this and going down that path is is can be annoying sometimes, like you're gonna pull all this data together and you might not have it. And all I can say is what I've found most successful is start tracking those metrics early when you have a small subset, and start betting that into the company, so that by the time you get to the point where you want to exit, all that information is just on tap, you know, and this is where it's important to have a CRM that actually works and that you record your contracts and you know that you're you've got a graph that shows your annual recurring revenue, and you've got another one that's showing the year on year growth rate, and that's just automatically calculated like there's no you don't want human judgment in these statistics as much as possible, right?

You want it to just be the raw data because that will build confidence. You know, if they come to you and look at the graph and go, well, how do you work this out? You say, well, me, Frank and Joe get together and we decide which accounts are actually IRR and which one. That's not going to cut it in any business case, right? Sure.

But if you say, well, that's actually just calculated directly out of a Salesforce report that gets exported via API on a Monday. Oh, okay. Now they might want to look at that. How that's calculated. Maybe they find an error in it.

Fine. But if they do find an error you'd be able to replay that on the whole graph. And it just works right because it's now all being calculated. So that's been something that we've found is is really interesting. I think the other thing about selling a business is it doesn't matter what you think it's worth.

The exact price of a company is what someone will pay for it.

William Harris 1:04:23

For sure. And that's based on confidence.

Mikel Lindsaar 1:04:28

And yeah.

William Harris 1:04:29

You I think you mentioned to me about this Twitter pitch deck that you had a look at or whatever. Like, why do some companies feel obviously valuable while others feel forced?

Mikel Lindsaar 1:04:41

Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I think it might be primarily around what the founder believes. If you're going right back to the start of our conversation about the type of person that just believes it's going to go right and makes it go right, they're the sort of founders that can just drum up another million dollars worth of investment because they call a few people and and figure it out, right. We've done that in my company many times. You know, I've managed to pull in funding at the 11th hour and sometimes not the 11th hour.

And, you know, I've still connect. I think we've raised. I mean, it's in USD and AUD, so it's roughly around 15 million USD all up, maybe 14. And that's been an incredible journey. And and it's taken you know, that self-belief.

But all of my investors know that I thoroughly believe that StoreConnect is obviously a good investment. You know, there's no ounce of self doubt on this line. It's just obvious going to make like it's just obvious. All of our stuff is just obvious. It just works.

The ones that aren't like that, maybe the founders don't quite believe yet that this could actually make money, and they're hedging their bets or they're not willing to commit. You know, when you're taking money from other people to invest or to sell, you're taking their money. You know, that might be the retirement fund or it might be their kids college education. Like it could be anything. You don't know, right?

I mean, unless you're going with a VC firm or something. But even then someone has put that money into that. You you are being the custodian of their belief, and their belief in you is directly measured by the number of zeros on that, on that safe note or that investment deck. So you have to have an unwavering belief that you can pull it off because you have to pull it off. You know, not only is your investor's stuff at risk, I've got ten staff that have got house mortgages backed on the back of my company working, you know, because they've got a job.

So it's a huge amount of pressure on that. And the idea that you're just obviously investable or obviously successful really just animates from that founder, I think. And I think that's the difference. You can see it in founders. They will not good founders will always talk up how good their team is and how good the product is.

And and because it's true, but it's true because they're doing it as well. Right. It's this self-fulfilling prophecy.

William Harris 1:07:39

I think I love that you are looking at even just the amount of people in your company that have a mortgage based on here. It's something that we haven't officially tracked. But if I was going to guess the percentage of people at our company that have bought their first house after starting here with Elumynt, it's like 50%, right? It's like the number of people that have had their first kid, the number of people that have gotten married, the number, like all of these incredible, huge life milestones that they are accomplishing like I do. Sit up and think about that and stress out over that.

And like making sure that to your point that it's like I have to make sure that I'm continually staying, you know, years in advance of anything that's coming down, knowing that I actually can't know the future, but that I've got to be the best that I can possibly be to make sure that whatever happens, because things will happen, I'm ready to pivot where I need to, etc. like you said, it's like this unwavering. It's like we will get there. It might not look like how I'm painting the picture today, but we will get there.

Mikel Lindsaar 1:08:40

Yeah that's right. I love one of the things you know, one of my pet hates actually, is I remember when I was trying to get a house loan. Oh my God. You know, I was literally through my companies paying. I think at the time we had 15 staff with mortgages.

Right. So my company was generating enough revenue to look after 15 staff houses. And I went for a mortgage and the bank's like, no, it's too risky to lend you money. And I'm like, what are you talking about? So we had to do like, you know, 25% deposit and all this sort of stuff to qualify to get a loan because I was self-employed, you know, and yet all of these staff are getting mortgages underneath me just straight off, like the bank would contact me and ask me to sign a letter to say that the staff member was reliable.

William Harris 1:09:32

Yeah, right.

Mikel Lindsaar 1:09:33

And then say that I'm too risky. Like, it's just ridiculous. It's so funny how the money market works, but, you know. There you go.

William Harris 1:09:40

First of all, did you call that pet hates? Is that what you called it?

Mikel Lindsaar 1:09:44

That was a pet hate. Yeah.

William Harris 1:09:45

So we call it a pet peeve. I did not know that there was a difference in what we call pet peeves. Pet hates. That was interesting, I appreciate that. On the AI front, there was something I wanted to ask you about too because you said that everyone says AI will fix everything, but you're saying most most companies aren't even ready for AI.

Why are they not ready for AI?

Mikel Lindsaar 1:10:04

Because their data is shit, You know, there's there's a couple of things with AI that I think I have some I don't know if they're different or unique outlooks, but there's a couple of things. People say that AI is going to replace every business or something. Right. The thing about AI is it's really good at doing. It's not very good at creating.

And I mean this in the truest sense of the word. You'll get people say, oh yeah, it is. I mean, look, I can tell AI to create a scene of a woman in a red dress walking down an alleyway in France, and it's created this wonderful thing, or know what it's done is it's interpreted your creation into another format.

William Harris 1:10:56

Exactly.

Mikel Lindsaar 1:10:57

And this is something to really understand about AI as it stands right now. This may change. I don't see it changing very soon, but it's very, very good at converting one set of inputs into another format. And it's also very, very good at reviewing a large volume of data and extracting the pertinent pieces out of it, fundamentally at a base level. They're the two things that AI is good at.

Everything else is just an extrapolation of that. I do a lot of coding. I use AI tools for coding a lot. And what AI tools for coding have allowed me to do as an executive? Because I run a lot of companies, I don't have many four hour blocks where I can just focus on a coding problem.

So what I do is I have Claude running. It's actually running right next to me in a couple of times in this podcast. I've been telling it to go forward. I have that running as a side agent, building something for me, and I'm evaluating its responses and regarding it and putting it in the right direction and doing all these sorts of things. So I'm putting my create into it to get it down the path.

So that's one thing about AI. The second one is that that the client's data is just out to lunch. So they don't have a single source of truth. This is one of the things we are actually fixing and helping companies fix with StoreConnect. Because if all of your data is in Salesforce, that's one repository to do things like product recommendations and next best purchase and all this sort of stuff that can come out of that.

If your data is in five different systems, that's a lot harder because now, well, where's the source of truth? One of the questions I asked my clients a lot is how many single sources of truth do you have? And it's a very enlightening question for them, because they realize that they don't have a single source of truth, and they thought they did. So, you know, I don't think a lot of companies are ready for AI. They need to be.

And the easiest way to start with it is not trying to boil the ocean. Just find something that you do all the time that I might be able to help you with, you know, summarizing documents. Even someone sends you a big legal contract, whack it in one time and see what it comes out of. Still, read it for yourself because the AI read it is not a legal defense, so still read it yourself. But the AI might be able to point out some things that you might miss otherwise.

But yeah, that's that's one of the things I also think about, you know, people going, oh, well, now that AI is here, all these companies are going to go out of business. Some will. Absolutely. But the other thing to bear in mind is that everyone's got the AI right. So the level of productivity that's expected across the whole is everyone's going to rise together, right?

So I see people say, oh, well, you know, in two years some kid with AI is going to build, store, connect. And I go, well Maybe, but all of my 20 plus developers are using AI, so we're going to be doing 20 times the volume output that that one person's doing right.

William Harris 1:14:14

So it's a force multiplier. I completely agree. I see it as a force multiplier. It increases productivity and it increases the output quality, potentially because you can now do several things to get it to do a little bit.

Mikel Lindsaar 1:14:27

Better and things like that.

William Harris 1:14:29

Yep. But yeah, not a replacement in most situations.

Mikel Lindsaar 1:14:33

Yeah, exactly. And this is you know, it's it's exciting. You know I can I can build things really quickly. I know exactly what I want to build and I can just nudge the AI in the right direction. One of the things I found with with things like Claude and Cursor and stuff is the AI goes insane sometimes because.

And what I found is quite often the best thing to do is tell the current. Like sometimes you'll see an AI get into a loop like they fix it, then they unfix it and then they fix it. Then they unfix it and it's the same loop. Whenever I get an AI into that situation, I actually tell it. Write up a summary document of what we're trying to achieve here and summarize it.

And I copy that, and I quit the AI and I start a new session, and I feed it that document. And that quite often just solves the problem, because the reason it's in a loop is it's trying to include all this prior context, and the context keeps sort of overriding itself with the next best thing. I'm not quite sure why it happens that way, but yeah, if an AI starts going insane, shut it down, boot it up with a fresh set of hypotheses. This is what we've done. This is where we're at.

This is the problem we're having. Help me fix it. And quite often it will just fit.

William Harris 1:15:50

Very smart. I do want to spend a little bit of time getting to know who Mike Lanzer is, because I think it's fun to get into the human being.

Mikel Lindsaar 1:15:59

Careful.

William Harris 1:16:02

That's fair. You give a lot to charity. You volunteer. You walk five kilometres every day. Watch formula one religiously.

Why does rhythm matter so much in your life?

Mikel Lindsaar 1:16:15

That you know. Tune in November 12th, 2024. I'd already been on a bit of a health kick to lose a lot of weight. I'd lost 30 kilos by that point, which is quite significant, and I was doing a couch to Five-k programme during 2024, just trying to get to a point where I could run five kilometres. And when I started that couch to five K programme, you know, I was 30 kilos overweight.

For one thing, I couldn't run 30s, I just couldn't. I'd get to the end of 30s and I would be doubled over in pain. So getting to that point of being able to do a full five kilometer run. It's painful. I remember reading this thing from a blog post somewhere that when you're running, it never gets easier.

You just get faster. And that's really true. You know it's not quite true. I can run a kilometer quite easily now. It doesn't even bother me.

But it's true. When you're pushing yourself, it doesn't really get easier. You still have that pain, but you get faster and you get better. And in 2024, I was at a ballet dance thing for my daughter, and I'd had several really bad things happened that day and I was just not a happy camper. I went to the concert.

I was really there for my daughter. I made sure that that went really well and that she was really appreciative and all that sort of thing. And I was there with my wife and I said, you know what? I'm just going to walk home and my wife's like, what? Because we were, I think, 12km away from home by walking, which is what, nine miles?

Eight miles, nine miles. And I went, yeah, I'm just I'm just going to walk home. I'll see you soon. So I start walking. It took a couple of good hours to do that walk.

And I got home and I went, you know what? That wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I think I'm just going to walk five kilometres every day. And that was just a decision. And I've done that every day since.

So it's now over a year. What is it, 14 months? Something like that. And every single day in that 14 months I have purposefully walked five k. Now, I'm not talking about looking at a step counter at the end of the day on your watch and seeing a total of six and going, yeah, I'm done.

That's not the point. It's going out and doing that five k walk as a specific activity for that entire day. And that's what I ended up doing. So yeah, for the last year and a half, I've been doing that or year and a bit and it's either A5K walk or A5K run. And yeah, having that rhythm and that requirement to do the job and having it as a non-optional thing really grounds you in life.

You know, I've done five KS inside of Dallas Airport because I was there for a layover and I couldn't get out of the airport. So I just did my five K walk around the terminal. I started getting really strange looks from security guards, you know, wondering if I'm casing the joint. But yeah, that's that's a really important aspect of my life is that whole five K activity. And you get to when you when you have a rhythm like that, like a foundation, you get to build other things around it.

Right. So now that I walk five K every day, that's an hour a day where I get to think through or percolate on ideas or even just experience nature and not do anything. You know, that's actually a really valuable thing. Going and looking at things. You know, when you're sitting at your desk and your attention is like point eight of a meter in front of you for the entire day?

It's incredibly therapeutic to go outside and look at things at different distances. You know, not even listening to anything. Just go and look at different things. It will bring your happiness level in your tone way up. But, you know, I get to listen to podcasts now, all sorts of things.

So very, very powerful to have that sort of rhythm and activity in life. It's not structured like I don't do it always at 11 a.m. I, I just make it fit.

William Harris 1:20:28

You're in good company. I've heard a lot of people greats throughout the years in history who basically swear by this idea of like an afternoon walk, right? This something for clearing your mind. Being able to think through things allows your brain to just reorganize something. And I forget who said it, but it's like it's almost as if your brain was designed to think best at, like three miles an hour like that is optimal thinking.

Mikel Lindsaar 1:20:53

Yeah. And, you know, it's sort of it's sort of also makes sense when you look at where we come from as a species. Right? We were nomads and walking around and following the game and all that sort of stuff. So it's a really interesting life hack.

And man, does it help your health markers. Yeah, fantastic for that.

William Harris 1:21:14

Do you track the like, you know, beyond just like the physical things but like all the different blood work, stuff like that as well. Cholesterol levels. Yeah. You're doing stuff like that too then.

Mikel Lindsaar 1:21:25

Not, not too heavily I, I have a I mean obviously having lost 30 kilos of weight, I had diabetes, type two diabetes issues and all sorts of stuff. So that's all improving. And I track glucose and a1-c and, and the really critical aspects. I'm not too much of a health nut on that, but the watch and a a wearable glucose monitor have been like absolute life changes for me, and being able to control that and get that all under control. And, you know, all of those markers for me are now much more in range.

They're not quite at the levels where I want them, but they're all going in the right direction. And I'm doing that all without medication. Right. So I'm getting these massive health improvements just by doing a simple walk. You know, it's not always a walk.

You know, on Saturday I decided to do my first six k run and wow. Oh, my God, it killed me. It absolutely. I really did not think like I got to the end of the run and like almost throwing up and like it was like wildly hard. And I did not expect it to be that much harder than A5K, right?

William Harris 1:22:36

Sure.

Mikel Lindsaar 1:22:36

But then I looked at it and went, actually, it's a 20% jump. You know, you don't. It's just 5 to 6. That's not a big difference. Yeah it is.

William Harris 1:22:44

Yeah. Well I think the thing that I like about this is like, you're even talking about making sure that you have those statistics, as you call them, the KPIs, automated and tracked. That way you can see them as a CEO, but it's like we need to do that as human beings, too. And it's like you're the CEO of your life, of your body. Like you need to have that data at the ready.

Otherwise, how are you going to affect change?

Mikel Lindsaar 1:23:07

How do you make a decision if you can't, you know, and this plays out, you know, I, I, I track my glucose. And I was at the shop yesterday and that candy bar was screaming my name from the shelf. And I'm like, no, I want my my sugars to be good tonight. And so it gives you a, it empowers you to make those decisions that are going to help you and help expand. And you've got to take the time out of the decisions, like there's no point only getting a glucose check once every four months if you're trying to actively make a change.

So spend the money, get that glucose monitor, take take the data and look at it and go, oh look, that's actually situation here.

William Harris 1:23:45

That's brilliant advice.

Mikel Lindsaar 1:23:46

Take the time out of your decisions.

William Harris 1:23:48

Mikel , it has been really good talking to you and learning from you here today. If people want to work with you or follow you, what is the best way for them to do that?

Mikel Lindsaar 1:23:58

I'm on X and LinkedIn. So X it's just @lindsaar. LinkedIn. It's Mikel Lindsaar in the in the thingy you'll find me. The companies storeconnect.com and metapulse.com are the two key companies there.

Reach out my websites at lindsaar.net. Yeah. I'm available. Find me.

William Harris 1:24:20

I love it. Well, again, I appreciate you sharing your your wisdom with us and sharing your time with us today.

Mikel Lindsaar 1:24:25

Awesome. Thank you very much.

William Harris 1:24:26

And thank you everyone for listening. Hope you enjoy the rest of your day.

S1: 1:24:31

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.

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