00:00:00

James Redenbaugh: The start of the month is always on a different day of the week, and that's just annoying. But for now, months are easiest to think about for people.

00:00:16

Audrianna Jacques: So I propose an idea. So, like I said in our first call in our second call, I really feel like this part is, is really fundamental to the bigger picture. And I think that there's a lot that you and I can do together and that you're going to continue to do independently. That's going to make progress towards the shifts that you want and need for Iris. But I wonder what creating like, almost like agreements between you and I or you and someone else internally, we can include someone else if there's someone else in the team. That really feels like more in a peer position to you is in regards, like to how the business is. Maybe your partner or someone you're working with on all.

00:01:17

Audrianna Jacques: On a lot of the projects to set, like for the county accountability of saying that, you know, within the next month. Right. We're at the beginning of the month now, so maybe by the end of this month you have clarity on the different roles and you want to start having conversations with people that could potentially be good fits for these roles. How does that feel for you?

00:01:53

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, feels great. I think, you know, we could go a step further and say tangibly like completed or chart and role descriptions, related roles, and then also even agreement docs or for each of those. What am I tangibly asking people to agree to?

00:03:06

Audrianna Jacques: Yeah. And then we can kind of work, like you said, with the way that you work with projects in general. Having that. Having the next 25 or how many days may have 31. So next 26 days that you can break up and focus on these things or allocate some level of time to work on it. And then you said. What did you say? There's, there's. There's some things that are happening. You're looking in the cap, the chest cavity of Iris and so is there. Is there some discovery that you want to do in order to bring some of these roles to life? What is that discovery?

00:04:06

James Redenbaugh: I think it's stuff like this. Like, I love. I love making charts and diagrams and finding patterns. I'm going to open this up. There's a lot in here I could revisit as well. But so we have like this. Have I showed you this action process?

00:05:15

Audrianna Jacques: Yeah, yeah, briefly. Yeah.

00:05:21

James Redenbaugh: We have this action process for how we think about any action, large or small. Moving from idea into integrated reality and turning ideas into. Into reality is a huge part of what we do at Iris. So I feel like this is going to be really important for how we're thinking about things. There's a lot of thinking that's gone into each of these stages that I want to benefit from as well. And it's not only that, you know, IRIS isn't only a simple tube. We also have to think about these different roles and how do we relate to time? How do we relate to clients? How do we relate to the different kinds of work we do? How do we create space for serving clients but also developing resources internally?

00:06:45

James Redenbaugh: And do we hold, like we talked about, monthly clients or ongoing support clients differently from project based clients? How do we think about that? What roles does each client project need? What are we expecting of creatives? What are we expecting of teams that we work with? You know, what needs to happen every month? What does each role have to do every month? What does each role have to do every week? And while we don't have a huge team, what, and even when we do, what do I, who's going to always have multiple roles that I'm playing in the organization?

00:07:48

James Redenbaugh: How do I hold those and what do I need to do every day, every week, every month to be moving the whole system along instead of just responding to what I feel is most urgent and pressing while I neglect the important stuff that needs to keep happening?

00:08:24

Audrianna Jacques: Yeah. I wonder if, you know, as I kind of want to like scale back a little bit to the big picture and as we, as you bring in these different roles, you know, as they're, you develop them and you see their placement and you know, really consider what you're getting them to, you're asking them to agree to. But there's also kind of where my head was going while you're sharing that was. What is the, what is the formation of bringing people in? You know, are you bringing them in all at the same time? Are you bringing them in one by one? Who is, who would be the most vital to bring in first and to really onboard because that's one of the most labor intensive elements of bringing somebody in, you know, is getting them familiar with your systems.

00:09:15

Audrianna Jacques: And so I was thinking it'd be great to have probably somebody more in the operations and management kind of human resources role, to really be that person who's going to understand the business and as well as trained people, you know, to onboard them, show them around, kind of be like the ambassador of the program. That way you can really invest deeply in that person so that they can answer questions about your system. But you're not going, you don't need to be so deeply involved with each person who comes in. Right. So you're not training 12 different people, you're training one person.

00:10:07

Audrianna Jacques: And so that itself, like if I were to really think reasonably about that, I mean, I would say you're at least looking at two to three months of an onboarding period and just call it what it is a season, you know, planning and having a season of onboarding with, and probably at least a month, two to four weeks with the first person. And then that person actually should have enough management and like projection skills to be able to identify how ready they are to bring in people and how many they would feel comfortable doing that with. Right.

00:11:02

Audrianna Jacques: So where I'm going with all of this is thinking about your day to day life and where choosing just a couple of days to be really dedicated to this element of the business which is quite forward thinking and just dedicating that just the same way you do with everything else. Because I mean one of the, I would say maybe like more sensitive elements of this, it is having the boundaries with your clients and with the client projects. Right. Because this part is a self, it is self care. You know, you choosing to bring in more people to take on different roles. It benefits the company, but there's also the self care in it because that means that you're going to be able to do more in your business. There's really the things that you're passionate about that bring you joy.

00:12:15

James Redenbaugh: Yeah.

00:12:23

Audrianna Jacques: So the most days you have, do you have, are you doing monthly meetings or weekly meetings with your team for the different clients, is that right? For the monthly clients.

00:12:41

James Redenbaugh: We'Re not doing whole team meetings because everybody's involved in different client projects. I do weekly meetings with everybody who's kind of regularly involved in different things and then as needed meetings to push things forward or meet with the clients. Yeah. And then right now at the moment I'm the only person managing projects. But then also the teams that we work with this, this team in Kosovo and then we're starting to work with a new team at Germany. They manage their own projects and they can manage, you know, more things on their own. They don't need as much checking in as an individual person because they have, you know, at least a project manager on their own team. But they're not autonomous.

00:14:44

James Redenbaugh: I can't give them a bunch of stuff at the beginning of the month and then expect it to be done by the end of the month or fully hand off a client to them and have them work with them. They're going to need touch points and checking in and making sure things are getting done and making sure things are aligned. But I'd love more tools for how to think about those relationships and expectations.

00:15:38

Audrianna Jacques: How to think about the clients, the.

00:15:44

James Redenbaugh: The teams and the creatives.

00:15:47

Audrianna Jacques: Huh.

00:15:48

James Redenbaugh: You know, in a more optimal way to maintain alignment there. I think right now we have different slack channels for different parts of projects, and we have initiative briefs and things like that, but there's not a. There's not a lot of clarity or I, I feel like something's missing around time and timelines. Right. Like last week, I'm working with the team on. In Kosovo on this new offering for a client in Germany. And I told them a bunch of times that we want to get this page launched by the fourth and had them working on different aspects of it. I'm also working on it and Ivana's working on it at the same time. And they took one of the aspects that I had them working on. They didn't do it right the first time. You know, they misunderstood me and did the wrong thing.

00:17:40

James Redenbaugh: I needed them to make a calendar and they made a scheduler. And then I tried to explain it and then they made a different scheduler. I'm like, no, we need a calendar. And then they finally made a calendar. And then I'm like, okay, we need to develop this because we got to launch by the fourth. And I, I thought that they were just going to work all day on this on Friday, but they ended up working on different things, I guess, or I didn't hear from them. So, you know, it's like they're not holding. I don't expect them to hold the deadlines in the same way that I do because I'm making the agreement with the clients. But we need more ways to, I guess, align around. Around time with everybody.

00:18:42

James Redenbaugh: And I don't know if it's a visibility thing, if it's like we need to. I'm very visual. Maybe we need to see time together and see like, oh, the fourth is in four days. It's. It's coming up and have a kind of global view of that or, you know, views for different teams and creatives to see those important deadlines and the things that they should be working on or if it's a, like a people culture thing, you know, if it's about having more conversations with them about how we're. We're holding timelines and communicating around them. I'm not sure.

00:19:34

Audrianna Jacques: You know, what's coming up for me on this is. Where are you guys looking at? Does each project have kind of like a home base somewhere?

00:19:45

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. Right.

00:19:47

Audrianna Jacques: Where's that?

00:19:49

James Redenbaugh: Right now it's in Slack. It's just a Slack channel for each. And then there's like a document in, you know, in the top part of Slack with the important information.

00:20:00

Audrianna Jacques: A document. And is that Doc. What kind of document is it?

00:20:03

James Redenbaugh: It's just a Slack canvas.

00:20:08

Audrianna Jacques: Okay. I have a. I have a proposal for this. What. What was coming to my mind. There's two things came to my mind. One is, so I'm just part of a story. I'm kind of. I think I. My proposals often come with stories. So I have been trying to get better at Du Lingo for the last decade, and recently they really upped their algorithm in the last, like, couple of years. And they have it dialed with multiple different ways to, like, keep me in, you know, and to keep me practicing one lesson a day. And some of the things that they have are one, there's a community, so they. They have. I don't even know who the people are, but I get nudged regularly by other people who follow me. And I have, like, friend challenges with.

00:21:09

Audrianna Jacques: And I think one of them I do know, I don't know the other person, but they're in Europe. And so my morning is their evening. And so they. They ping me at night, their time, which is my morning. And I ping them at night, my time, which is their morning. And so I almost always have like a little ding in the morning that's reminding me to do duolingo. And then it has. It sends me notifications. And it's really quirky. It says things like, oh, I like, I can't believe you're going to let me down, Audrey. You know, I can't believe you let our streak dry. Streak die. Like, are you breaking up with me? It just, it's really. It's really clever.

00:21:51

Audrianna Jacques: And then they also have a widget that goes on the homepage that has the count, has like a countdown for how many hours or how many minutes until midnight, you know, when you lose the day. What else do they have? I think those are probably the main things, the friends, the notifications and the widget. And so that keeps me on track in a way that, like, nothing else in my life has ever kept me on track. And so I wonder if there's a way to incorporate some of that into this team, project management, timescale being all on the same page and I know that work. That's a lot of different systems. We're talking about apps versus a Slack Canvas document, you know.

00:22:38

Audrianna Jacques: But I'm also wondering if there's a way to kind of, to create like a real simple landing page for each project that has like a bright and shiny countdown on it, you know, and has like the things that need to be done. Right. You know, I'm envisioning it with like the scoreboard and it's lit up and then there's the pieces underneath it that have to be done by that midnight. And if there's a way that you can set it up to, I'm assuming this would be a system, but like that until they click that they've submitted their part that they're getting some kind of like email notif an automatic email notification that's saying, by the way, you've got six hours, you've got four hours or two days. You know, something like that.

00:23:33

Audrianna Jacques: Because we all have so much going on and most people don't have virtual assistant and need one, you know.

00:23:41

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, yeah.

00:23:43

Audrianna Jacques: What is, what comes up for you with those ideas?

00:23:47

James Redenbaugh: Well, there's a part of all this that we haven't talked too much about, which is like how to automate what we can with AI. And a colleague has started this AI ecosystem automation offering and he's offered to automate certain parts of our system for free because he's like building this out and wants to prototype it. And so we'll see what comes of that in the next couple weeks. But whether, and I'm not sure how that system will work. He seems to have high hopes for it and claims that it can do all these things, but whether or not it can do that, I know that certain things can be done with airtable. And we have so much data in airtable and stuff and organized in airtable now.

00:25:04

James Redenbaugh: And then we're also creating these interfaces on our website for clients and team members that use that data. And then we can build into, we can build these kind of automations into the system in the way that you're describing, so that we do get automatic notifications of upcoming deadlines or automatic summaries of the work we did this week or summaries of what's on the plate to do next week, things like that. And I think that moving forward that's going to be More and more important and it's also going to get easier and easier to do with AI.

00:26:06

Audrianna Jacques: Right.

00:26:08

James Redenbaugh: And the. Anybody who's coming in to help on operations management level all want to have them helping to create and maintain those systems, not just you know, doing things manually themselves.

00:26:44

Audrianna Jacques: Right. Like you don't want the project manager to be coming in and needing to email every person or Slack message every person to say have you gotten this thing in? You've got three more hours. Like yeah, project manager, not a task manager.

00:27:04

James Redenbaugh: Exactly, exactly. And we should be using the tools at our disposal and I think something like Duolingo is a great way to think about it and it should be multimodal. Like we should make it visible and visual and have time based reminders automations. We have some things in Slack right now like remember to check in about this client, you know, at the beginning of the week or things like that. But we're not really using them. I know a lot more is possible there.

00:27:58

Audrianna Jacques: Yeah, it makes me think of, you know, I know some people are still doing this but kind of the pre pandemic way of selling things online which had the big time table, you know, like you've got four hours and you know, 35 seconds and this many milliseconds and it's like counting down. It's like if you don't do it you're going to lose the deal. Right. Some of my clients still like to do that. I think it's a little old school but you know, to have some. I think that we are, that's how there's a reason why that was included in the psychology of landing pages pre pandemic. You know, like people were respond, people still respond to it.

00:28:42

Audrianna Jacques: I have, I have friends that buy things and they're like Audrey was half off for 30 more minutes and I'm like, you know what I like have you heard nothing I've ever said? But I'm happy for you that you got this amazing one time deal and how many upsells do they get you on? You know, but there's a reason it works for people, you know when it clicks something in their mind and it's. And you know, I think that Slack is a great place to be to like have everything in one place because you can have documents and message all the people on the teams, organize the teams. But I think that maybe like a.

00:29:21

Audrianna Jacques: What do you think about having a short term solution of using a different resource where you can do timetables and you can have progress Bars, you know, with you know, it gets shorter and shorter. Like the little inchworm, you know, it's green when you've got a week left, and it's pretty orange when you only have a couple days left.

00:29:43

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, the radial interface I'm designing for different groups to keep groups connected. Here's a, A little preview of it. Now. This is for a group that's gonna convene in Vancouver at the end of the month. And there's like a webflow form. People have filled it out and answered these different questions. These guys are kind of are AI generated placeholders just so I could see more people in here, but they fill out the form, they automatically end up on here. And then we can kind of see everybody together. But the next part of it that I'm going to build out this week is the timeline. So it'll be like a big clock in the background, basically, and we'll. Oh, this is so slow. Wow.

00:31:05

James Redenbaugh: But like that, basically we'll see time moving and we'll see the event coming closer and then it'll pass and we'll see it going into the past. And I think that we could think about projects in the same way. And as it gets closer to the center, it can change colors and get bigger. And we can have that for any one particular project. So we can zoom into that project and see important deadlines on the horizon for that. Or I can generate a team member view where they can see all the projects and not only deadlines, but also like periods in which we should be working on something. And then we can also generate a high, the high level, all teams view where we see all the projects and all the deadlines, all these lines in time coming at us.

00:32:18

James Redenbaugh: And I feel like that could help us keep those things in our awareness a lot more.

00:32:34

Audrianna Jacques: Yeah. Yeah. What I just thought of when you were sharing that is, you know, personally, I have what, about 30, 40, between 10 and 15 active clients a month? Just me that I'm managing and, you know, every. I keep. It's a mirror, it's on. I don't really have a specific system for staying on top of things except for the notebook that sits right next to my desk, you know, and I glance that and I go, oh, right, right. That like, absolutely has to be done, but I do. I, you know, just like you. And I'm sure most of the people that you have in your creative, in the creative team, it's like, what's on Fire right now that needs my attention tends to be where my attention goes.

00:33:25

Audrianna Jacques: And so I imagine what would be really cool for the creatives in the team is to be able to like you said to have. So they have all these different pages that they're going to for the different teams that they're on and the different projects that they're working on and they can see those timetables there. But for them to be able to have like a take home, like a personal page that has all those different projects and it's showing all of those timescales, you know, so that they can evaluate like how much time one is going to take and be able to manage themselves a little bit better, you know, so they're not working on something that's green, that is not super challenging and they are addressing the things that are like 91 1. This was due yesterday.

00:34:12

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, exactly.

00:34:14

Audrianna Jacques: Yeah.

00:34:18

James Redenbaugh: That'S what I'm saying. It would. The all teams view would be the most complicated where or I can see everything but then it can get filtered down by either project or by team member.

00:34:37

Audrianna Jacques: Right, right. And then you also, you and the project manager can look at those things and use that timetable to be able to make better proposals that you can follow through on, you know, and know what needs. Like if you need to actually let a client know it's not going to happen, you know, because you can see that one person on the team has like five things in the red, right?

00:35:10

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, exactly. We can forecast availability and workload and things like that. And we've had stuff like this in the project management systems that we've used in the past. Use ClickUp especially, which can be great because it's built for things like this. But it would tend to be so complicated and have so many features that people wouldn't really use it. And it was pretty much unusable for clients. Really hard to onboard clients into that system. And so that kind of was the impetus for creating a more custom thing on our own website that worked for clients. And then building the, since we're building the client views there, it's just as easy to create the team level views. It's just, it's going to take a lot more work to get it all to get that really working properly.

00:36:53

James Redenbaugh: And I don't know when I'm going to be able to prioritize that this month because I've tried delegating that out and getting people to build that and I keep finding that the system is so clear in my mind because I'M most familiar with the business and also the technologies that are enabling it to work. The, the creatives that I've put on it just kind of go in circles and move really slowly.

00:37:41

Audrianna Jacques: So speaking of that and speaking of you and what's on your plate, my, the question that I want to ask that I, I, I won't right now because I think there's a better way to probably approach this. But how are you managing your own time day to day?

00:38:03

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, a lot of things are around, are just around deadlines and meetings. You know, if I know I have a deadline tomorrow on something, I'm gonna have to make time for it or a meeting with a client, then I'm gonna, It's like impetus to make things happen before the call. And then I tend to, we're delegating so much to the team at Kosovo these days, so I tend to, at the end of each day, organize things for them to do, send it to them, you know, make sure I reviewed the stuff that they did yesterday so that they have that feedback. And it's like, it's definitely chaotic right now where it's responding to the most urgent stuff.

00:39:12

Audrianna Jacques: Yeah.

00:39:13

James Redenbaugh: And there's not a high level plan. There's not like a time in my week that I set aside to do invoices or things like that. There should be. Yeah.

00:39:46

Audrianna Jacques: How many hours are you working each day?

00:39:55

James Redenbaugh: Let's see. Usually at least 13.

00:40:18

Audrianna Jacques: How does that, how is that for.

00:40:20

James Redenbaugh: You on weekdays these days? I know I'm very busy and also I generally, I love work, so I love the work that I get to do and a lot of it is really fun. Days that end up being like 18 hours suck. And I've been a lot better about not working on weekends, which has been good for me. And if I really want to take half a day off during the week, you know, I always can because, yeah, I set my own schedule and I do that pretty often. And, but you know, honestly, I'd be stoked if I never worked more than 12 hours in a day, you know, if like 12 hours would be my heaviest day.

00:41:28

James Redenbaugh: And, you know, I know that there's a world where my work day is like six hours long and I'm just focused and I'm doing the most high value stuff possible and I'm delegating a whole lot more and getting more done and making more money. I know that world is out there and that's why I'm working really hard now to figure it out, but also, you know, taking on lots of client work so that I have money to invest in those kind of things and learning new tools and stuff like that. Yeah.

00:42:25

Audrianna Jacques: How much longer do you feel like at the pace you're going, you can keep going at the pace that you're going?

00:42:35

James Redenbaugh: Well, I'm getting married in September, and we want to start having kids shortly thereafter. And when I'm a dad, I know it's going to be very different.

00:42:50

Audrianna Jacques: Right.

00:42:53

James Redenbaugh: So there's that. And I don't want to be surprised at that point. You know, I'm working hard now so that I can be ready for that. And. And that doesn't mean just like, working as hard as I can until kids are here and then, like, falling off a cliff.

00:43:13

Audrianna Jacques: Yeah.

00:43:15

James Redenbaugh: I'm going to need to better at designing my time, having clear systems and IRIS and things like that so that they. The work I do in IRIS can be in a much smaller contained space because we also want to buy a house in the next couple years. And I know I'm going to be building a lot more stuff and working on the house and working in the yard and doing things with my hands. And I know that there's. There's going to be a way to do that's congruent with what's happening in. In IR and in times when I am making a lot of stuff with my hands and I get to, like, move my body, I'm actually, I'm more creative and more focused when I'm with clients and.

00:44:40

James Redenbaugh: But I need to figure out the delegation stuff now so that, I mean, for so many reasons, but I just know there's so much more value I can bring to client projects and to my consulting and to IRIS when. When there is that balance and there is that awareness. You know, if all invoices were going out on time and. And all proposals were going out on time and kind of everything was clear with clients and clear with team members, I feel like I'd be so much more productive and inspired, and I feel like clients and team members would be, you know, more focused and energized and we'd be getting. We'd all be getting more done.

00:45:56

Audrianna Jacques: Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I agree. There's a way. There's definitely a way to. To get to that place. And I think that kids are. And. And everything that comes around the kids, you know, wanting to have a house for them. And, you know, when you work on the house, that means you're around, you know, and they. And you're having the relationship with them and spending quality time with them and obviously in the first. What is in the fourth trimester, you know, really wanting to be there for your partner also. So, you know, let's say you guys get married in September. I'd say like in. Within a year, you would want to have at least have. If we're shooting for a six hours. Right. Maybe you don't get down to six hours in the next year. Maybe you're getting down to more.

00:47:00

Audrianna Jacques: Something a little bit more reasonable, like nine hours a day and weekends off. Does that feel like a stepping stone in between where you're at now and the ideal world that you're moving into?

00:47:16

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. And I think your Virgo brand's helping me remember the importance of setting these goals and timelines. And I want to use that year interface as a tool for myself to see, okay, six months from now, I have this goal of, you know, of working this much and implementing these processes and having this much throughput in Iris as well. You know, I think it's important that we scale our capacity while I limit my capacity.

00:48:12

Audrianna Jacques: Right. Yeah. I have a couple, I have a couple more things I'd love to explore. I know that we're. So how are you feeling?

00:48:28

James Redenbaugh: I feel okay. I'm happy to be talking about these things. I feel a little, I think you can tell I'm just like a little foggy today.

00:48:35

Audrianna Jacques: Sure, sure. Yeah. No, I'm, I, I'm a little foggy as well. So you're not alone in that, where. I think we're getting into some good stuff, both of our states. So if were to like. I, I like to go into the sauce and then come out, you know, and so I feel like getting into, like, these, massaging into these nuances and details that are in the future, but suggest a lot of small things that it would be coming together to get to that place, give. Coming back to now in the present. Have you, have you looked at the budget? Have you. Do you have plans. Look at the budget to start to conceptualize where the money is right now and how. And where that's going to go for these new roles, or at least one new role.

00:49:36

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. I've asked the creatives that I worked with last month to give me a breakdown of where their effort went over, which projects, so that I can generate a clear accounting of how efficient were, how profitable. I, I should try to do that myself, too, to see, like, which projects took up how much of my effort. And are we. Is the model working? Is it. Is it really profitable at. At this early stage, or is it, like, barely profitable? I feel like I can't answer that question right now, annoyingly.

00:50:54

Audrianna Jacques: Yeah. Yeah.

00:50:56

James Redenbaugh: And if I could, then. Then I could give a clear answer for, like, how much of that profit can we. Can we put into this role right now? So I feel like I need to answer that question first.

00:51:28

Audrianna Jacques: So this is great. This is great. I feel like that. That point of you reaching out to the creatives and starting to, like, gather and mine that information from them, that's a huge step. You starting to work in the archetypes and us talking about, like, the. The next 12 months, you know, and where you'd like to be, the changes you'd like to see and con, and reaching out to the creatives to start to get a pulse on these types of things, I think are all really great steps. And I wonder if. Have you had an accountant before on your team for Iris? Okay, just looking at some stats. Do you have any colleagues who have businesses of similar size and breadth that you can.

00:52:49

Audrianna Jacques: You could get a, like, a feeling for what you'd be looking at monthly just to start to conceptualize what you would want to be budgeting for?

00:53:03

James Redenbaugh: Mm, yeah, that's a good place to start. I could talk to my colleagues.

00:53:14

Audrianna Jacques: Yeah, I'm think. Because I'm thinking, you know, in our conversations, it's like the project manager is the clearest beacon in the night of, like, needing attention and needing someone in that role. But there's something about that also feels like in some ways like it. It's inaccessible. Like, there's so much that goes into the project manager's role. Their personality, their consistency, their experience, their ability to, like, navigate your systems and. And establish the relationships, and then the big one, which is the budget to afford, you know, that creatrix role. And so I. It almost feels like too obvious to say the project manager is the first one to come in. And so I almost. And thinking about the money, it almost makes a little bit more sense to say, though the accountant might be the one that we want to bring in first. They do.

00:54:14

Audrianna Jacques: I know that accountants, without knowing what you would pay the project manager, just knowledge of the fields. Accountants tend to be more. More affordable than a project manager. Easier to find too, because they. They're doing the same thing for different companies, you know, and then that may help you to, like, get some of that internalized financial structure to start to make better decisions for yourself for the projects that you're working on and then be able to have more reliable funds that you can start to allocate for that role.

00:54:54

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, yeah, I think that's a fine point. I haven't even thought about that, hiring an accountant. But yeah, I think you're right.

00:55:15

Audrianna Jacques: Yeah. And it'll take off that piece. I mean, I hear you with the invoices, I can only imagine with the number of moving pieces that you have for each invoice, you know. Yeah. I think that just from what you've said, it sounds like that would take a, a decent amount off your plate. And, and then it's like, you know, when you've got someone else making sure you get paid, that's not just a task, that's a whole energy that you can move out of your field, you know?

00:55:47

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, definitely. Good idea.

00:55:54

Audrianna Jacques: Cool. Awesome. Well, I took some great notes. I have, I also have some notes from our last meeting that I went organized and I haven't sent them over to you yet, but I can send them over to you today and then I'll go through these as well. But I really think that like I said, some of the takeaways that I think from today and accumulative of the last few meetings have been let's get some of the finances in order so that you can make better decisions and be able to track with your team better. And then for like the creative parts of this, it's continuing to build out the roles and everything that were talking about. There's another creative thing. Oh yeah.

00:56:53

Audrianna Jacques: So the, the conceptualizations around this notifications and the landing page of scoreboards and you know, the, this, the clock that, those two things I think creatively for yourself to be able to. An hour to you know, every other day or something as like almost like it's a creative exercise or like a warm up, you know, before you start diving into other things. I think would be really good. And then one last question for you. Are you, do you track your hours? Do you track your time? Yeah, that. Be. What do you think about tracking your time?

00:57:40

James Redenbaugh: That'd be good. Be good. Yeah. Yeah.

00:57:51

Audrianna Jacques: Do you have a system that you have that the creatives are using to track their time to get to you?

00:57:59

James Redenbaugh: I let them use whatever they want to use and but I, when I do track my time, I use ClickUp and maybe I should just start like even though we're not really using ClickUp right now to manage projects, I can just start a project for tracking My own time and put tasks in there and use the time tracker on that.

00:58:34

Audrianna Jacques: Yeah, yeah. I think that, I think that's a great idea. And not just like, you know, the stuff that you're doing for clients, which as far as our dopamine systems go, having a way to track what we've done and be able to see it does wonders. Just instant dopamine, you know, like, wow, like, look at all the time I invested in that. Right. And when, you know, when you know in certain cases that it's turning into revenue, then that's like a supercharge as far as like keeping the ball rolling, you know.

00:59:16

Audrianna Jacques: It's also amazing to see like how much time you, we, I say this for myself too, spend on things that we don't notice, like we get hyper fixated on and we go start spending like hours and hours on it and then the things that we aren't spending as much time on that actually could use a little bit more time, you know, it's a great way to bring like the archetype of the timekeeper into our own life is just a good old fashioned Excel sheet with some formulas on it, you know?

00:59:52

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, I, you know, I avoid tracking my time sometimes because I don't want to look at how little I make, you know, I end up making per hour. But it's not an, it's not about that. You know, my time is an investment and I should be tracking that investment well and seeing where it's going so I could manage it better and feeling good about the time I spend on all of this.

01:00:39

Audrianna Jacques: Right, right. Especially when, you know, when you're having children come into the world, that your time becomes pure gold, you know, and you're going to want to know where that time is going when it's not with your kids.

01:00:55

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, yeah, definitely.

01:00:59

Audrianna Jacques: Yeah. And I mean, there's, that's what I was saying with, like the motivation, like when you see that you're spending a lot of time and that there's not a lot of return on it makes it like cleaner to cut, to trim the fat and let go of things that you're like, you know, I need to get this done. It's like, no, let somebody else do that, you know, because that's not. The compensation isn't equal to the investment, you know.

01:01:27

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

01:01:34

Audrianna Jacques: Cool. Okay, so do we want to put something else on the schedule this week? Do we have something yet. We have anything yet?

01:01:44

James Redenbaugh: We don't. Yeah, let's do it.

01:01:48

Audrianna Jacques: What's a good day?

01:01:55

James Redenbaugh: Could you do Thursday at 2 my time? It's like half an hour before now.

01:02:01

Audrianna Jacques: Yes to your time is three hours difference. Right. So that's 11 my time. Mm, yes.

01:02:11

James Redenbaugh: Great.

01:02:12

Audrianna Jacques: And we said Thursday.

01:02:14

James Redenbaugh: Yeah.

01:02:18

Audrianna Jacques: Cool. All right. It's on the schedule.

01:02:22

James Redenbaugh: Awesome. And my homework for that can be continuing to evolve this or chart understanding.

01:02:41

Audrianna Jacques: Yeah, continue to evolve this. It's like the. The time sheet. Well, there's two pieces. One, it's the. The time sheet and, like, how to track timelines. And then the. The roles and descriptions and the agreements, and even dream a little bit about, like, budget, like what you would like to be able to allocate for them monthly. And then that would feed into the third one, which is to explore the cost of bringing in an accountant. Maybe reaching out to a couple people with some peers, colleagues that could either give you a quote or even refer you to a good accountant.

01:03:34

James Redenbaugh: Awesome. Great.

01:03:39

Audrianna Jacques: All right, well, thank you, James.

01:03:41

James Redenbaugh: Thank you so much.

01:03:42

Audrianna Jacques: Yeah. Hope you feel better today, and I'll talk to you on Thursday.

01:03:46

James Redenbaugh: Thanks. I appreciate it. Take care.

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