Become a Problem Owner

Hi,

This week, I got a crazy piece of mail. I received a notice that I potentially qualify for a class-action against Papa John’s. 

I am going to break the formal writing here, I literally laughed out loud. I might frame it. Or put "defendant in a lawsuit against Papa Js” in my Linkedin description. 

All silliness aside, it actually did get my thinking about my pie making days. 

For reference, I was 19 years old and it was my first “real” job and I was terrified of being fired. I felt constantly like I was doing everything wrong. After about 2 weeks into the job, my 16 year old coworker, who was suspended from school for dealing drugs, gave me a pep talk, “Yeah man, you are just putting food on other food, relax.” 

Weirdly, it helped. 

Then, I thought about whenever we would get an angry customer on the phone or in the store, I wouldn’t even listen to their full complaint before I said, “Let me go grab the manager.” 

Not only did I not want to deal with the problem, I didn’t want to learn how to solve the problem because it was simply not my problem. 

You see, my time at Papa John’s taught me that the most important stance I could take was to distance myself from the outcomes. I owned my station on the line, and that was it. 

Whatever happened after that was someone else’s problem. 

Which brings me to my topic for this week: Ownership of the problem, not a piece of the problem, the whole thing. 

Let’s dive in. 

Today, I had the distinct honor to go on a run with my Cousin Andre. Andre, funnily enough, was the person who helped me get a job at Yelp when I graduated college. 

He has built a very impressive sales career off the back of Yelp, where he has gone on to be an enterprise account executive for a software company. 

Naturally, both of us having experienced working at Yelp got to reminiscing about our experiences. There were two nuggets that he said that really stuck with me. 

First, he rated his experience at Yelp as a 4 out 5 because the organization kept such a focal point on growing as a rep. I would second that review. All of the hijinx aside, there were constant conversations around getting better as a sales person. 

Secondly, as an enterprise AE, he has seen the emergence of reps needing to understand the clients Costs of Goods Sold (COGS) almost as well as the client. As the deals get larger, so does the necessary context. Someone is not going to buy from you because they like the way the button looks in the app or because there is a snazzy feature.

They buy from you because the tool you sell makes business sense. 

We jogged our way into this conversation because I told him I had an aggressive take for my newsletter: anyone who wants to build a career in Ops, Marketing, or Sales should start a side hustle in their 20s. 

I am not walking this take back. I will say it again. 

Anyone who wants to build a career in Operations, Marketing, or Sales, Actually and Product, should start a side hustle business in their 20s. 

Let me explain. 

When you start your career, one of the first pieces of advice you receive is: learn a skill. 

I think the age-old adage sounds more like, “become irreplaceable.” 

What is missing from this otherwise good advice is… understand how a business benefits from your skill. 

For example, if you learn Meta Advertising that is a very valuable skill, but if you don’t learn how to look at a P&L then you will require someone else to tell you if you are doing a good job. 

Real story, at a job I had recently, not my current job, I was in charge of ad buying. At the end of the month, I asked the controller if I could see the P&L, where he replied, “Stay in your lane pal.” He has an awesome Boston accent so it felt like a welcome to the league moment. 

I realized that all of my time running The Hero’s Journal, I not only could see if something was working, but I also had access to the information that would tell me why it was working. 

Therefore, learning a skill in a silo teaches you a lot about the skill and very little about business. 

When Ai becomes your boss, it will be a lot more concerned if you understand business rather than if you can perform a skill it already did. – My opinion on this is a bit softer than this, I just wanted to be dramatic for a moment. 

The second reason why I believe that if you want to work in product, sales, marketing, or ops, that you should start a side hustle business is ownership. 

Per my earlier Papa J’s story, where I skirted all responsibility as quickly as I could, what I didn’t know at the time was learning how to solve customer’s problems was so much more valuable than my pizza toss. 

When you are the owner of the thing, the buck stops with you. You are making great money, great it was probably something you did, if you are losing money hand over fist (this happens more) than it is probably something you did or didn’t do. 

There are no excuses. 

What is born from a circumstance with no excuses? Problem solvers. 

People who see a problem, and don’t wait for it to magically be solved. People who want to go into the burning building. People who other people will pay handsomely to go into burning buildings. 

When I say all of this, I want you to know this final thing: it doesn’t matter if you make money. You are earning so much more than money, you are learning context, you are learning critical thinking, and you are learning resiliency. 

That is what makes you marketable as an employee, business owner, life partner, or anything else you want to do. 

I will end with this last story mostly because it is funny. Towards the end of my tenure at P-John’s, I was given the opportunity to run the shop solo on Sunday afternoons for about 5 hours. It was a slow afternoon, and an old man walked in. He ordered his pizza, and I said it would be about 10-15 minutes. He said, “no it won’t”, then proceeded to stand there and stare at me while I made his pizza. 

The pizza took 7 minutes. 

I guess the customer is always right. 

kyle