Key Takeaways
- →Three weeks without rain is a drought. Three years is a new climate. Plan for the climate you're in.
- →When the owner shares an idea, the team hears an order unless the owner says otherwise.
- →Before an idea leaves your head, decide if it's an idea or an assignment. Ideas go to the filter. Assignments get an owner and a date.
Nick Friedman's leadership team had a plan for the housing slowdown: wait. "When the mortgage rates come back down, we'll get the tailwinds again."
Nick, founder and president of College HUNKS Hauling Junk & Moving, gave them a different forecast. Three weeks with no rain is a drought.
But if it's like three months or three years, that's a desert now. It's a different climate. That doesn't mean we're going to wait for it to rain. That means we're going to figure out how to thrive in this climate.
Nick Friedman
That's what a sense of urgency sounds like from the top.
The harder half of the job, in Nick's telling, is keeping urgency from turning into panic. The one who flips it is the founder.
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The trigger you keep waiting for
Not long before Nick and I sat down, I watched an owner wait on the weather in real time.
I was facilitating a group of business owners. One of them, an insurance agency owner, kept circling the same plan.
When this situation or this market or this trigger happened, then he was going to put the pedal down and move forward.
A few people in the room clearly had something on their mind, so I asked the group how they felt about it.
A fairly blunt guy leaned forward in his chair and said, "there's never gonna be, you know, scenario that's perfect, dude, like, just get after it."
It hit the agency owner square in the face. Exactly what he needed to hear and didn't want to hear. You could watch the excuse melt off him.
Waiting feels like discipline. It looks like patience and risk management, the adult in the room keeping his powder dry.
In the rooms I sit in, it's usually a bet that conditions will do the job the owner is paid to do.
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Nick knows there's "a fine line between bold and reckless when it comes to entrepreneurship," and he isn't arguing for reckless.
His argument is that a slump that lasts three years is the season you're playing in. He put it in football terms. Both teams play in the snow.
When leads slow down for everybody, the team that adapts takes the market share.
Then he went after the vocabulary. Nick "tried to ban the word limitations and constraints" from his team's vocabulary.
Nothing felt more like nails on a chalkboard, he said, than getting on a Zoom call for an update and hearing the constraints.
He knows there will always be limitations and obstacles. He wanted the update to start with how the thing gets done.
A sense of urgency, minus the frenzy
Nick describes the founder's role as creating "a sense of urgency without creating like a sense of frenzy or panic." He reached for John Wooden to say it a second way: be quick, but don't hurry.
Then he told on himself.
Early on, Nick would come back from a conference loaded with ideas and start texting the team. His word for how that landed was "disorienting, to say the least."
His people were left guessing.
Does Nick want me to drop everything I'm doing and go do this right now? Is this just for my information?
Nick Friedman, on how his team heard his ideas
His next line was the honest one: "And I'm still guilty of it today."
An idea from the person who signs the checks doesn't arrive at idea volume. It arrives as an order, because the team can't afford to guess wrong.
The founder thinks he's sharing. The team hears an assignment with no deadline, no owner, and no permission to say no.
Stack a conference weekend of those and the founder has built the frenzy himself, one helpful text at a time.
I know the pattern from the inside, which is why I ended up building a bot to argue with me. First, the version that works inside a franchise company.
A person, a meeting, and a spreadsheet
Nick's fix was structure. A few years ago, College HUNKS promoted a brand president into the integrator seat Gino Wickman describes in Rocket Fuel.
Now Nick's ideas go to a weekly same page meeting and into a spreadsheet. The integrator can look at him and say, "we're not going to be doing this right now."
Nick doesn't treat that as a loss.
Some of them are literally just like therapy, me getting them out of my head and seeing them on the spreadsheet.
Nick Friedman, on his weekly idea spreadsheet
The idea is out of "the storage closet of your head," parked where it can be revisited.
The job left for Nick is to "pick the most impactful few and trust that the team is going to execute on them."
The same filter runs at company scale. Nick borrows Jim Collins: "shooting bullets before cannons."
College HUNKS has eight corporate locations where an idea can be tested before it goes out to the franchise system. They're also rolling out a tech and AI subcommittee of franchise owners and team members.
His line on the alternative: "it can't be a thousand things in a thousand different directions."
The filter's job is to change who carries the idea.
Without one, every idea lands on whoever reads the text first. With one, it lands on a list, a meeting, and a person whose job is to say not now.
If you can't hire the president, build the skeptic
Nick said it plainly: "not everybody can hire a president to be that filter, that integrator."
That's where my bot comes in. I've run EOS for about a decade, and I still had a head full of pebbles, rocks, and boulders with nowhere to put them.
So I built an ideas bot. I barf every idea into it. It doesn't act on anything. It captures the idea, researches it, and pushes back.
I set it up to be a skeptic on purpose, so I have to explain why before anything reaches a human.
Nick called it "almost like an AI integrator" and said it was an action item he was going to implement himself.
Then he added the warning I'd hand anybody building one: "you don't just take it at its word or follow exactly what it's saying."
You keep your own agency of mind. The bot's job is to slow the idea down long enough for your judgment to catch up.
Idea or assignment?
The filter I took from this conversation fits in one question, and you ask it before you hit send: is this an idea or an assignment?
An assignment has an owner, a date, and a reason it beats what that person is already doing. If you can't name all three, it's an idea.
Ideas go to the filter: the integrator, the weekly meeting, the spreadsheet, or a bot built to argue with you. They stay off the team's phones.
That one question answers what Nick's team was guessing at. Drop everything, or for your information? You told them before they had to ask.
The calls AI can't make for you
We spent the back half of the conversation on AI, and Nick drew the line where I'd draw it.
His list of what we can't lose: "creative thought, critical thinking, resourcefulness, and kind of discernment, decision making, being able to like identify what's quality versus kind of slop."
I boil it down to judgment, taste, and discernment, and I've been tested on it.
Somebody called me out on LinkedIn, privately, and asked if AI wrote my post. I said, "Well, define write." Did AI create it for me? Yes. Then it's slop, they said.
Was the content valuable? That's the question I care about. You still have to hit publish. If it's on your LinkedIn, you believe it.
As I told Nick, "the skill is getting better at judgment, taste, and discernment. How you get to those things is far less important today."
His company name proves the point. If Nick had asked a machine to optimize the brand, it might have told him to call it something like Triple A Best Junk Removal and climb the search results.
Some people find College HUNKS "too gimmicky or too corny," Nick admits, and he's fine with that: "not all things are for all people."
That's a judgment call with a personality in it, and it's the kind of call I'd never hand to a model.
It's the argument I make in Easy Mode: put AI on everything that isn't your edge, and guard the calls only you can make.
The mover in the elevator
Nick closed with the story behind his description of College HUNKS as "somewhat of a resourcefulness factory."
A College HUNKS mover got stuck in an elevator at an assisted living facility with an elderly woman who couldn't stand for long. She "was having a bit of a panic attack."
He got on his hands and knees and let her sit on his back while the elevator was being worked on, "almost like a human bench."
Somebody took a picture, and Nick told HuffPost in 2014 that thousands of people were sharing it. HuffPost named the mover: Cesar Larios.
There's nothing we could have put in our operating manual. What do you do if you're stuck in an elevator with an elderly woman?
Nick Friedman, on the mover in the elevator
You can't write the elevator into the manual. You can hire people who will get down on the floor, and you can keep their heads clear enough to think when it happens.
Bring the urgency. Keep the frenzy in the spreadsheet.
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This is the way.
Hanley.
Disclosure: I currently work for PFS Global, the company behind this episode's sponsor read.
