Ep53: What All Business Owners Should Be Doing 25-33% Of The Time

FinneganFaldi - TruEffectToday I’m talking with TruEffect CEO Finnegan Faldi. With over 20 years of senior management experience in startups and public technology, Finnegan headed up the global broadband division at Yahoo and served as the Chief Operating Officer at Datalogix. He currently works with performance platform TruEffect focusing on first party cookie technology.

Keypoint Takeaways: The scoop on TruEffect

Finnegan took his first foray into working with a public company at NetZero (now called United Online) where he ran sales and business development. He then built an online payments company called SQL Networks before moving to Yahoo in the global broadband division. Later Finnegan tackled search affiliate Partnership Network and the North American Mobile business before landing at Datalogix as Chief Operating Officer.

TruEffect offers a patented technology focusing on first party data and are a tier one certified ad server much like Media Plex, DoubleClick, and Atlas. TruEffect hosts both a self-service platform and a managed service platform for its clients.

To help illustrate the differences, Finnegan describes a self-service platform as something you’d find on Manage.com or Ancestroy.com. Their managed service side of the business helps companies use the platform like Charter Communications, the second largest cable company in the country. To date they have about 70 clients across managed and self-served platforms.

TruEffect’s technology helps marketers activate and control their data. It works as a first party ID, or cookie, and can’t be read or interpreted by third parties. TruEffect essentially fingerprints the traffic and lasts up to 18 months. Every time that customer comes back to your website, it gets re-written and starts the clock again.

First party cookies

Unlike traditional cookies, no devices can actually block these first party cookies because it’s pure data and is coming from the marketer. From there, their clients can look at their CRM file or house file history before making an ad decision call whether it’s re-targeting or serving the ad.

How do first party cookies effect your bottom line? Finnegan sees most of their clients actually spending less money as soon as they start using the TruEffect system. But their KPI’s and attributable conversions go up by 25-35%. Fortune 500 company with around $21 million in sales in 2013 with 40% growth. Finnegan sees TruEffect company growing 60 to 70% in the next year and their products are used in 200 countries across the world.

 What’s behind TruEffect’s growth

Finnegan attributes the main driver to rapidly increasing growth is adding their second sales person just 70 days before this interview was recorded. Meanwhile, TruEffect’s number one sales person for the first six months of this year was client referrals. Finnegan said it’s been hugely helpful when your clients can say, “Hey, I know this person in my similar job at this other company. I’ve been telling he or she that this is a great technology. It’s helping us in a big way.”

90 Day sprints

Finnegan says one of the things he’s learned in senior roles during his time at a public company is that they’re always in 90 day sprints. In a public company, CEOs report numbers every 90 days without much room to take your foot off the accelerator. But you still have to balance that with “What’s my strategic plan out a year or 18 months?”

But TruEffect is a private company with the advantage of being able to invest and reflect. They can take their time, and go through trial and error with certain things, but one of the things that we can really do and learn from these experiences is that you’ve got to keep on pressing.

Finnegan tells us, “We’re in 1 day sprints. We’ve got to keep on pressing the accelerator, but we can be scrappy. I still said, the best public companies are the ones that maintain that scrappiness feel, and there’s some great companies out there, especially—we moved from the Silicon Valley to Colorado and there are some really well run public companies that maintain that scrappiness of when they were private.“

Finnegan has learned to say it’s okay that the company spent six weeks on something and it’s just not working. It’s okay to admit your mistake and making a big shift. With private companies, you have starts and stops that isn’t as much a pivot as it is a zig-zag. Meanwhile, he sees people as more reluctant to raise red flags at public companies and change courses.

Hiring people smarter than you

Hindsight is 20/20, and Finnegan assures us you’re going to make more mistakes than get things right in the early days of running a company. But he also discusses the importance of recognizing your role as decision maker but still listening to others that are smarter than you in certain disciplines. That’s why he only hires people in skilled roles that he could ever compete. In other words, if they were up for the same job, Finnegan wants that other person to be the clear winner.

Finnegan is a big believer in not just work, but history. He sees how history has a tendency to repeat itself. That lends itself to hiring people who were successful in their position not just by taking over, but by fixing or building something. TruEffect is still a smaller company, and needs a “roll up your sleeves” mentality.

Recruiting 24/7

I asked Finnegan something that always fascinated me—are CEOs really supposed to spend 25-33% of their time recruiting? Finnegan wholeheartedly agreed and says he’s always recruiting. He encourages people to recruit when you don’t actually have anything open to get people excited about your company so you’ve got a bench waiting. He wants prospects fired up and checking in to see what’s open.

Finnegan loves to recruit people he’s worked with before because they have history and he’s been humbled by how good they are. He likes to recruit people from companies that he may have competed against and knew that they were much more talented than himself.

Everyone in your company should be in sales

Everyone in your company should know their product inside and out because you never know when you can help make a sale. Finnegan tells everybody in his company that they’re in sales. “When you’re sitting on a plane, when your sitting on a bus, sitting on a train, at a dinner party, or something, you need to be able to sell your company’s product no matter what your job is with that company.”

Links and companies mentioned in this episode

TruEffect

MediaPlex

DoubleClick

Atlas

United Online

Resources mentioned in this episode

“The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change” 

[spoiler title=’Transcript’ collapse_link=’true’]

Eric: Hi everyone. Welcome to this week’s edition of Growth Everywhere where we interview entrepreneurs and bring you business and personal growth tips. Today we have Finnegan Faldi. Did I pronounce that correctly?

Finnegan: You did.

Eric: All right. Finnegan Faldi from TruEffect. Finnegan actually has over 20 years of senior management experience in both startups and in public technology companies. He was at Yahoo and head of broadband and also served as Chief Operating Officer at Datalogix. Finnegan, how are you doing today?

Finnegan: I’m good. Thank you.

Eric: Thanks for being on the show. Why don’t we start off with your background first and then we’ll go from there.

Finnegan: Like you said, I’ve been in the internet space for probably about 16 years. Had done a couple early startups and then my first jumping into a public company was I ran sales and business development and made the turn around at NetZero which became United Online. [Pause 00:01:23] Sorry. I did that and then I did a payment’s company which—I built an online payments company called SOL [ph 00:01:28] Networks, and then I moved on to Yahoo where I was responsible for the global broadband business. We grew that.

When I left there it was about a $450 million business and then I also there ran, the search affiliate business globally, Partnership Network and the North American Mobile business. After that I went to Datalogix as Chief Operating Officer and stayed for a year when I had the opportunity to jump to TruEffect with great technology and the basis for a great team. I couldn’t resist and we’ve had a great run for the last two years.

Eric: Really impressive background. Why don’t we talk a little bit about TruEffect first? What’s TruEffect all about? Can you tell us a little more about the company?

Finnegan: Sure. TruEffect is a patented technology where we focus on first party data. We are a performance platform. Foundationally we’re a tier one certified ad server, so your other tier one certified ad servers are: Media Plex, DoubleClick, Atlas, and TruEffect. We have two flavors of our technology, one is a self-service platform and one is a managed service platform. The self-service platform, where lots of companies would use that technology and run the system themselves, straight enterprise status software.

Companies like that would be Manage.com or Ancestry.com. And then we have a managed server side of the business where we help the company use the platform. Company clients like that of ours are like a Charter Communications, second largest cable company in the country. And so we have probably 70 clients, both managed and self-served.

Eric: Got it. Okay. Let’s say I’m a Match.com and I’m thinking about switching over to TruEffect, what are the main benefits to someone that doesn’t have a lot of experience in this area?

Finnegan We have to answer that on our sales calls. The benefits are pretty much any type of performance marketer has data assets because they’re doing performance marketing. They have to have a house file, a CRM file, or they want to build—legacy wise the WAGs [ph 00:03:55] have been served and retargeted is through third party companies and that’s where it’s coming, not from your domain, but through another company and through their servers.

When companies do that they are [DROPPED 00:04:08] in control of their data. There data is shared and their data is also open on the web. With TruEffect, what we wanted to do is, we said, for performance marketers, and that’s who we work with and then we put our software in their domain. The company then has active data, active first party data. When they’re retargeting their serving from that domain it is seen as first party data out on the web as well, whereas in the data brokerage world or through third parties it is first party data from the marketer side, but when it hits the open web it’s seen as third party data, because it’s going through somebody else. TruEffect, we allow marketers to basically activate and control their data.

The next advantage is; whether they are actually serving or retargeting, or messaging consumers out on the web, or prospects, or whoever it is, that data cannot be read or interpreted by other third parties because it’s a first party idea, first party cookie. Then the next advantage is—many devices and browsers don’t accept third party cookies and third party cookies delete. Our software creates first party IDs and you can call them cookies, ID’s, whatever you want, fingerprint. Our software creates that for the marketer. When that is out on the web that cookie or ID lasts for about 18 months and every time it comes back to the website it gets re-written so it starts the clock again. No devices can block first party cookies because it’s seen as pure data, marketer’s data, it’s coming from the marketer, they know what it is. Those advantages lend to the marketer saying, “Okay, I’ve activated my own data. I’m controlling my data now.”

Now the technology allows things, because we’re in the first party, technology allows a marketer to look at their CRM file or their house file history, prior to making ad decision calls, whether it’s re-targeting or serving ad. In the third party you can’t look at your CRM file prior to making ad decision calls. It comes down to the fact of many people might have a checking account.

I have a checking account at Bank of America. They’re not a client of ours. Every time I go and maybe move money or check my account, when I go to a publisher I get hit with “Open a Bank of America checking account.” because they don’t know that I’m actually Finn Faldi who actually has a checking account. One of the advantages is really to—that we allow marketers do de-doup to the third party cookies and understand that Eric we might do [DROPPED 00:07:10] party cookies, but Eric will only see one individual cookie. It’s basically allowing the marketer to see the trees and not the forest.

Eric: Got it. Okay. I like that. I’m an internet marketer myself. I’m just wondering how come something like this—it seems like it’s higher quality, it seems like it’s more secure. How come there aren’t more people doing this?

Finnegan: Great question. Technology has been around for 10 years. I came here two years ago, excited [DROPPED 00:07:45] understand the third party—I worked as a data broker, I worked at Yahoo, I worked at United Online, I understand the whole value of third party cookies. But what we’ve done is say, third party cookies, they’re my dash [ph 00:07:57] huge value, but for certain types of marketers. Marketers who aren’t worried about house file or CRM file.

Think of a ketchup maker or think of a big [ran ph 00:08:09] where you’re just trying to niche no matter what. You might niche Eric 50 times, but that’s fine, because you’re just trying to cast your net across the web as wide as you can. What we’ve done is said, okay, there’s another type of marketer. That marketer wants to basically make sure that their messaging to just their people within their house file and be able to suppress all those people in their house file against third party cookies when they’re prospecting. So, it becomes much more efficient. We see most of our clients end up spending less money the sooner they start using our system. But their KPI’s and attributable conversions go up by 25-35%.

Eric: Wow. That’s the smoking gun right there. I like that. You said 25-35%?

Finnegan: Yes.

Eric: Cool. Why don’t we talk a little bit about your revenues today and you alluded to your growth rate a little before we started the call.

Finnegan Inc. 500, which we’ll be in again this year, we’ll have a couple of notches, and Forbes had us in 2013 at $21 million. I can say they never get it exactly right, but that’s right around the pin. That was—we had a slow growth year the year I came on board because we got rid of some wrong revenue and had to build up and we were about 15 the year before that, so still about 40% growth, but it was purposely slow and this year we will grow about 60-70% and I think next year, as we’re putting our strongman together I would be surprised if we’re anything less than 60 or 70% growth next year. Because, as you said our technology is used today in 200 countries across the world now. All of our clients don’t resolve [ph 00:10:17] here in the U.S., but most of them are global clients and there are ads we targeted served or messaged in over 200 countries.

Eric: You know, 60-70% growth is definitely nothing to scoff at. What’s the main driver of that growth?

Finnegan:  The main driver this year, believe it or not, we just added our second sales person 70 days ago.

Eric: Wow.

Finnegan: Yes. Our number one sales person for the first six months of this year was client referrals, which is a great way. When you’re client says, “Hey, I know this person in my similar job at this other company. I’ve been telling he or she that this is a great technology. It’s helping us in a big way.” That’s been great. What I’m seeing now is that the market, because of the issues with third party cookie deletion and the inaccuracies of measurement of third party data is that performance marketers, or anybody that considers themselves a performance marketers, are now saying two things.

One; I want to control all my data. I don’t want to have to give it to a data broker. I don’t want to lose control when I’m messaging in the web. That’s great. We look at those, the early adopters, and the fast follower, sort of complex marketers. Those are the smallest groups. Legacy’s always going to be the biggest, but those two groups are really good for us and we see a lot of companies in the middle part of the market that have sort of in-house agencies or individually they pick different pieces of their stack, are looking at this and saying this is a great alternative, they’re kind of Switzerland, and we can service them in a terrific way. We have 68 really smart people here at the company and its growing pretty quickly.

Eric: Awesome: I’ll have to check out the platform afterwards. Let’s talk about your 20 years of senior management experience. You’ve obviously been through a lot, you’ve seen a lot, so—the first part would be; what are some management lessons you can share from being at a public company that you think startups can learn from?

Finnegan: One of the things I’ve learned at being at a public company in very senior roles is that—they’re 90 day sprints. It just is. You have a public company, your CEO has to report numbers every 90 days. You pretty much can’t take your foot off the accelerator. Maybe the first or second day in the quarter or the last day of the quarter, but other than that you’re sprinting to the next 90 days. You’ve got to balance that with, “What’s my strategic plan out a year or 18 months?”

What I found with companies like ours, we have the advantage of being private. We have the advantage of basically being able to invest. We have the advantage of being able to take our time, trial and error with certain things, but one of the things that we can really do and learn from these experiences is that you’ve got to keep on pressing. You’ve got to still balance that—it’s were not in 90 day sprints, we’re in 1 day sprints. We’ve got to keep on pressing the accelerator, but we can be scrappy. I still said, the best public companies are the ones that maintain that scrappiness feel, and there’s some great companies out there, especially—we moved from the Silicon Valley to Colorado and there are some really well run public companies that maintain that scrappiness of when they were private.

Eric: Got it. Okay. Reversing that question a little bit, what are some management lessons you learned from being at a startup that you think public companies can learn from?

Finnegan: I think one of the things at public companies that I learn is that it’s okay to say, even we spent six weeks on something, it’s not working we’ve got to stop. It’s okay to say, look we made a mistake, and we’ve got to shift. Because I think, my experience at times is, you put a plan, you put a budget in place probably in October for the following year, you get somewhere in May and you’ve had a lot of investment, a lot of resource going to something and sometimes you’re like, “You know what? We’re going to push through this anyways.” rather than just rolling back.

Because you’re private, you have starts and stops. Every private company does. It’s not so much a pivot. It’s sort of a zig and a zag. I think sometimes in public companies you get sort of—no one wants to raise the flag and say, “Look we made a mistake. Before we go any deeper let’s stop, pivot, and go a little bit the other way.”

Eric: Got it. Okay. I think that’s a very valid lesson. What stands out for me also is that you’ve had all these different roles. You’ve been head of sales, head of broadband, and now you’ve been placed into this CEO role. What’s some advice you have for people that are placed into a CEO role where—I guess, what are some of the mistakes you made during your transition?

Finnegan: The first thing you have to realize is; hindsight’s always 20/20, is that you’re going to make more mistakes to get things right early on. The second thing, I would say is that, you’ve got to listen because even though, at the end of the day, you’re the final decision maker on any jump ball [ph 00:15:19] or anything, make sure that you’re listening to people that are actually smarter than you in certain disciplines. The definite thing I’ve always followed and I try to get my team to follow here is when we hire, the last question should be; if you’re hiring somebody to be on your team, if it were you and he or she, if you would get that role over them, they’re probably not the right person. Meaning, that you need to hire people who are above you.

Eric: I’ve forgotten who said that, I think it was Jeff Bezos that said you’ve always got to set the bar higher. You always have to hire someone smarter than you. Go ahead.

Finnegan: I was saying I don’t—I would say that out of all the people that I’ve hired in really skilled roles, there’s no way I would ever, if me and them for that job, there’s no way I would ever get the job.

Eric: Got it. Okay. Do you have any specific hiring tactics that can help you pretty much know that they’re more qualified than you are? Any practical advice that you can share with the audience?

Finnegan: People’s history, I’m a big believer in history, not just in work, but in lots of things. History has a tendency to repeat itself. Finding people that are successful, who have been successful, they’ve been successful because they’ve been in positions where the role was; they weren’t just taking over—keeping the car going straight. They actually fixed something, or they created something, or they built something.

For smaller companies like us we need people like that because there’s a level of ‘roll your sleeves up’ and everything. And that’s not to say that hiring somebody to keep a car going straight is a bad thing for certain types of jobs, but we like people that are hungry and that they know what they’re getting themselves into. Going from a public company, even though it’d be a huge stress, a huge demands, it’s a change from ‘roll up your sleeves’.

Eric: Continue on the CEO talk, can you tell us about one big struggle that you faced after taking over as CEO and what you learned from it?

Finnegan: I think that you can’t take your foot off—there’s a lot of different pieces of the business that you have to maintain, and even if you’re at GM or running a big part of an organization, I don’t think you appreciate all the other pieces that go into an organization. Everything from keeping your ear to the ground on the culture, keeping your ear to the ground on communicating to employees what’s going on.

One of the pieces I got feedback was, and it was really good, was; look it’s great to cheer, you know, and be chief cheerleader, getting people excited and all that, but also be honest with your team, “Hey, we had a bad week” where something bad happened and “Look, we’re all in this together. We’re going to get through it.” rather than not ever bringing that up. I think that I have learned that even though you want to hide or protect your employees from things they shouldn’t have to get stressed out about, there is something about the trust and bringing them closer when you kind of open up to them. I learned that because I didn’t’ do that, and I got feedback in 360’s that would be something I should work on, and it’s something that I’ve tried to focus on.

Eric: When you talk about transparency do you ever see that possibly back-firing? Let’s say if you have one negative month and you have another even worse month where you’re in the red even more where it’s like you have to lay some people off; that’s a total morale killer. What do you do in that- are you still 100% transparent?

Finnegan: Fortunately we haven’t been in that position. I don’t plan on being there. But you’re question’s a good one. There is a soft-line sort of level of transparency in that one of the things you want to make sure is that even when—you might be going to a fund raise, or you might have had a bad month, or one of your clients is saying, “Well, we may not renew.” and they’re one of the big clients, or something like that; is you want to balance the fact that you don’t want to worry people, but you also want to let them know, “Hey, we’ve got hit a little hard right now.” or, “We’ve got to focus on this client.” or “We’ve got to focus on getting this product release done because it’s really critical to a number of sales we have.”

Eric: Okay. Fair enough. I think that’s completely right. There has to be some kind of soft line, as you said. You talked a little bit about 360. That’s something I’ve heard a lot, but I’ve never seen too much literature on a 360. How do those work and if someone in the audience wants to get that started in their business how do they go about doing it?

Finnegan: You can pretty much set up a 360 as you want. The way we do them here is that once a year you have your direct reports, give a write up on you, and you give a write up on your direct reports. And we do. We follow five or six questions about [INAUDIBLE 00:21:39]. Then you pick a couple people, not in your organization, but from around the company, two or three to give you a review as well. You keep everything anonymous. You can pretty much start to see, you’ll know whose writing what, and some companies choose to have anonymous, some companies don’t. We tried it anonymous, but we’ve actually gotten feedback that people were like, you kind of knew what they were writing anyways. I would just say what it does is it kind of brings things out in the open that you might not thought of thought was a big deal, or it kind of put’s some light on one of the shadows you haven’t been paying attention to.

Eric: Fair enough. Would you guys run these 360’s, come up with a list of questions and send them out like a Google survey or something very simple like that?

Finnegan: No, we created the questions and they were based on our core values.

Eric: Got it. Okay. One think I always hear from CEO’s and this is one thing that kind of fascinates me, true or false, would you agree or disagree with this; CEO’s are supposed to spend 25-33% of their time recruiting?

Finnegan: I agree 100%. My team will tell you that every place I’ve always been is that anybody that’s a manager better be spending at least 10% of their time during the week recruiting, or 5%. But I would say that I’m always recruiting and one of the things that drives me crazy is when I’ll ask somebody, I’ll say, “Have you talked to so and so? I made an introduction, did you talk to them?” “Well, I don’t have any roles open.” That’s when you want to recruit. You want to recruit people when you actually don’t have anything to give them because the fact is you want to get them excited about your company, so you’ve got a bench there.

You’ve got them excited to the point where it flips, where they’re checking in and saying, “Hey, I’m fired up about your company. Let me know if there’s anything that’s open.” Because people’s lives change. Someone’s spouse or partner, or significant other may say, “I’m moving.” and they’re going to move with them, or someone may say, “You know what, we’re going to have—one of the two of us, we’re going to go to a single income family.” or, “I’m going back to school.” or, “You know what, I need to take time off.” And we’ve had all of it. But the fact is, when I got here, we never, we didn’t have any bench strength in terms of recruiting.

Now I basically—I would say I know a number of people that could fill in for the people here because you never know when that person who you really liked says, “I’m really excited at my job, but heck.” Something may change over there and all of a sudden there’s a superstar available. You don’t want to have to start to collect. You want, “Hey, let me tell you everything that’s been going on.” I’m convinced you can always find somebody that makes your company better. You can always find a place in your organization if they make your company better.

Eric: I agree. In terms of recruiting what’s working for you. Are you going to events? Are you speaking—what’s working for you nowadays?

Finnegan: It’s your network. I love to recruit people that I’ve worked with over time because they have history and I’ve seen them and I’ve usually been humbled by how good they are. I like to recruit people from companies that I may have competed against and I knew that they were much more talented than me, or—I’ve heard from clients saying this person’s a really good marketer or this person’s a really great product person, or this person’s a great sales person. One of the best ways to get sales people is ask the people that aren’t becoming clients of yours. Who’s selling you, who’s closing, go get them.

Eric: Love it. Cool. That’ super helpful. Maybe we need to do another talk sometime on just straight up recruiting. I’d love to hear a little more. It sounds like you have it down. Anyway, continuing on here. Final few questions from my side. What’s one piece of advice you’d give to your 25 year old self?

Finnegan: Be patient. Because at 25 I remember I was all worried about what the next role was. If I could go back I would probably would have taken some more of our siloed roles just to hone certain skill sets. I’ve never had a product management role. I think that would have been really helpful for me. Had a straight marketing role. All I did was marketing. I think that would have been really helpful for me. I think that one of those things that I tell people is; rotate yourself through different disciplines because the thing you always want to be able to do is that, if you’re in sales and you’re going to sit with a marketer someday, it really helps you to say, “I was there at one point. I’ve been in marketing.”

If you’re going to sit with a great product person, if you’ve never done any product work, or product management, or product marketing, it’s really hard to put to gain the trust of someone who’s doing that day in and day out. I would say my advice to me is to be patient, round your skill set with some different roles, just so that you know what’s it’s like to walk a day in someone else’s shoes.

Eric: Got it. It still seems like it’s worked out pretty well for you. You talk about being patient, but you’ve done sales, you’ve become head of broadband. It seems like you’ve jumped around these other roles and you’re still saying, at this point you would have slowed down a little bit more.

Finnegan: Here’s the thing. I tell everybody in our company; everybody’s in sales. You have anybody in your company that says they’re not in sales, they don’t know your product because you never know, when you’re sitting on a plane, when your sitting on a bus, sitting on a train, at a dinner party, or something, you need to be able to sell your company’s product no matter what your job is with that company.

The global broadband business for Yahoo was a great business that had some struggles and we came in and we doubled the business in four years and grew the margins. It wasn’t because of just me by any chance. It was because we had a great team all around the world and we put the right people in the right roles to be successful. But everybody on the team, whether they were in engineering, my head of engineering, my head of product, or anything they were all sales people at the same time and they were marketing people too. You’re always a salesman, always a marketer.

Eric: Totally agree. Moving on to the next question, what’s one productivity hack you can share with the audience?

Finnegan: Productivity Hack.

Eric: Yes.

Finnegan: Give me an example.

Eric: I’ll give you an example. When I wake up in the morning I keep my phone really far away so when the alarm goes off I have to get up and switch the lights on. That way I’m up for sure. That’s an example.

Finnegan: Okay. That is a good one. Productivity hack for me is that I need to get up in the morning because if there’s any news or any communication, I don’t want my client’s prospects or partners ever sending me one earlier in the morning than I’m going to send them one, because I want them to know that I’m always thinking of them. I tell my team; over communicate. When you’re not in communications some people people say, “That’s just a happy client.” Out of sight, out of mind.

When you have five minutes, and everybody does, whether they’re waiting for an airplane, waiting for a train, sitting on a bus. Use that time to reach out to somebody. Understand, like something their excited—something you’ve had small talk with them at a table with them on: Where do they go to college? What sport do they like? “Hey, I just saw the score. Congratulations on your team.” Those are the little thing that makes them know that you’ve listened to them. Use all those extra minutes to make sure that people know that you’ve listened to them when you’ve had a chance to get to know them.

Eric: I like it. I think you alluded to it earlier. It’s all about listening to people and I like that. Take the extra five minutes, I think that’s a perfect hack and I think I’m going to steal it. Thank you. Final question form my side. What’s one must read book that you would recommend to the audience?

Finnegan: The Covey book on “Habits of Highly Successful People”. The “Seven Habits of Highly Successful People” I don’t have it in front of me, but I’m sorry. It’s on the tip of my tongue, but it’s Steven Covey’s book.

Eric: Got it. Is it highly successful people or highly effective? I forget now.

Finnegan: It’s success or effective, but anyhow, you know the book I’m talking about. It’s sort of a must read because, to me, it runs a self-awareness test on you. It doesn’t mean those seven habits or any five habits, or three habits are going to make anybody here, he or she, successful. If you think about what habits you are doing a good job at and what habits you need to improve upon. I’d always say to anybody is that; as soon as you think you’ve mastered something, move the goal post.

Eric: Got it. I’ll make sure to put the book in the notes for everyone, but that is definitely a great book. But everyone, this is Finnegan Faldi from TruEffect. Thanks so much for taking the time out of your busy day to join us.

Finnegan: Thank you.

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