Hey, it's Mark. This is a podcast for coaches and I'm doing a thing now where in order to, Make the experience of the podcast a little richer. I'm just gonna have my friends come on occasionally and we just chat. Oh, fun. That's what this is. This is gonna be tough for you and I to chat. Oof. Yeah, we, we, we barely ever do. So everybody, this is Jesse Mecom, my very good friend. Friend since 2008. Eight, yeah. That's getting up there. Yeah. A lot of the audience already knows you, I think.
Oh. Some of them listen to beginning balance. Jesse and I have a podcast together called beginning balance. We started it in 2021 Okay, at which time I just hefted it onto my shoulders and I've been carrying it ever since you're you've carried that podcast Yeah, yeah, I've told this audience that that podcast is the most consistent thing I've ever done That's pretty awesome because I'm not in charge of it. Yeah And acknowledging that is a win. It is such a win.
I'm trying to figure out how to work that into other areas of my life. Jesse is the founder of a company called YNAB, which used to mean you need a budget. Now it means you're not a budget. Don't relegate yourself to such things. You are not a budget. You are so much more spend, save and give joyfully without guilt or second guessing. That's I've been saying that a lot. Oh, that's so good. Yeah. I got oohs and ahs at a thing. It was fun.
Yeah. Oh, you know what I should say on this recording to this audience, if anyone appreciates the work I do today, they need to thank you because in 2013, when I was limping away from my first attempt at self employment. That was, that was pretty good though. Like it wasn't limping. No. I mean, what I can tell you is that I had a lot of personal debt and I owed the IRS a lot of money. I'll, we'll stand by the limb. It at least felt like a twisted ankle. I was like, yeah, okay.
I'll give it to you. I may not be very good at this. After all, you gave me a job as the YNAB staff writer, about a year after starting as the staff writer, I came to you and said, I need to make more money. I want to make more money. Which I only knew because of your software. Yes. You were on a mission during that year. I was on a mission. That was like a Mark 2. 0 to 3. 0 to 4. 0. we made some changes. Kate was very patient in the process.
There were comments on the YNAB blog, which is where I would write every day where people would say, I feel bad for Mark's wife. You were just, you were just in it. I was, it was such good writing, material to have you just like blogging your personal transformation. Yeah. I was basically live blogging my, it was reality TV It's reality tv. So anyway, anybody who appreciates what I'm doing now should thank Jesse because you gave me the softest possible landing from my self-employment.
You'd built, I mean, you had started building a coaching business inside YNAB. You start, you were like, yeah, that's the thing. I said, I want to make some more money. And I said, I think we could do this coaching thing. You were very supportive of it, which is amazing. I think within six months, the coaching practice inside YNAB was paying for itself because it was paying more than I cost. And, but then you realize that you're not a coaching company.
Yeah. It's just, it was a, we were just, you could sniff the, The focus fade. You know, you just, it just wasn't right. Yeah. Wasn't right. You were right. And you were right to say that. But then again, you gave me another very soft landing out of your company back into self employment and anybody who's felt served by me in the last 10 years, 10 years. That's amazing. Yeah. So that's the most consistent thing you've done. I mean, you, yeah.
And it's, well, what's good for you is you get to kind of It's, it feels almost new every day in the sense of like you get to do your favorite thing, which is figuring out why people think the way they do what they're doing. You get to do it in a space that I think you enjoy, which is kind of the money business intersection. It just, I think it checks a lot of boxes and migrating toward now. Oh, let's not forget. You get to set your own schedule and be an entrepreneur.
I forgot those two things that are really important from Tik TOK. Yeah. I hate, I hate, I hate when people talk about entrepreneurs, like it's some romantic thing. Oh, I refuse. When people are, when people tell me, Oh, you're entrepreneurial. I always say, no, I'm not. Don't say that. Yeah. I own a business. Which is funny. A person listening to this would be like, why? What's your beef with that? I don't know. It's, it's, it's yeah. First of me, it's too much of a meme.
Yeah. It's way too much of a meme. And also I actually, for me, the word entrepreneur means something specific. An entrepreneur takes capital and puts it at risk in hope of creating greater value. I don't do that for the most, I don't really do that. What I do is I operate as a self employed person, a technician, and I get paid well for being a technician. I'm in that sense, highly risk averse. I'm not going to borrow a million dollars and go do something or, or that, or am I? I would call that.
Entrepreneurship. Yeah. I'm a self employed technician. Even as a coach. I'm a self employed technician. Yeah. Cause it's just another kind of technical work. So anyway, you've been very supportive and it's, yeah, it's been, it's been fantastic, but I brought you on the show today because, You run a company with how many employees were one, one 70, maybe one 70. I want you to free associate about the idea of coaching and how you, you would or wouldn't use it in your company.
I'm not saying about coaching, like, Oh, a manager coaches, a team member. Right. Right. That's great. Okay. We could talk about that. I'm actually curious to get your perspective because so many people in my audience, I think would love, for example, to say, why NAB hired me to coach? Oh, I got you a team member or to coach a division, a team or something.
And I just want you to kind of free associate about why, why not, in what circumstances, how you think about it as as the owner of the company, if at all higher level coaching. The higher the level, the more the coaching is just like, yeah, it's irresponsible for you not to be coached by someone external to the organization. Really? Okay. Say more about this. Todd, has a coach Todd is the CEO of YNM. Yep. Todd has a coach now. He has a coach meets with her.
I don't know how often, but, she's external. I've never spoken with her. She has Todd's back. She couldn't give a rip about me. I don't think, and that's, I'm saying that in a very positive way. Yeah. She has Todd's back like that. Her job is to make Todd the best he can be, how did Todd End up in a coaching relationship with his coach. He was referred by, I think the then CEO of help scout, service we use similar software company size, that kind of thing.
They had a relationship just like, Hey, we're both, you know, leaders in similar size oriented software companies. And I think it was when I was pitching him the idea of being CEO he might've gone to Nick and who was a CEO. And I've been like, so I'm, I want to get some. Instruction. I want to get some coaching. And then Nick said, Oh, I recommend these guys. And I honestly couldn't tell you the name. It's just, I think like kind of a small little coaching operation.
Oh, it's like it's a firm, a firm, a few people. I don't know. I really don't know the size. It doesn't matter. Cause he just works with one woman there. So, okay. A referral from a friend. Do you have any sense of the structure? Some regular phone call Okay, yeah But you don't know whether it's weekly monthly. I don't yeah, that's okay It doesn't that doesn't really matter so much But you from what you know of it todd that's the setting in which todd can say anything.
Yeah get support around Do you think do you do you know whether it's ceo I think it is. Yeah. Yeah Ynab pays the bill. Yeah How do you feel about that? Great. Did you ever feel any resistance to it? No. He said if you weren't willing to pay for coaching for the CEO, I wouldn't take the job. So this was in the transition to CEO. Yeah. I was like, well, if I do this, I want coaching. It's like, absolutely. Oh, good.
And he's just like, if you don't do this, like Tim, Tim, that was a signal of I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he said something to that effect. And it was just like, that would be a signal to that. You don't think this is that valuable position, you know? And I was just like, no, yeah, do it. We, you know, YNAB has a training and development budget for every team member for Todd. It's obviously larger than it is for someone that just started, cause we're trying to develop people.
What are some ways that people use the training and development budget conferences? A lot of the time, especially if they can all go to the same conference or a lot of them go, and then you kind of have a little bit of a twofer. It's like we get to have a team meetup. We're all remote, right? So team meetup bonding. And you get to go, you know, learn up your game. Some of them have ended up speaking at those conferences. Like that's, that's a sign of development, right?
Yep. Yeah, our support team, they've gone to a conference, I think pretty regularly where they've, that's kind of leveled them up. Some lots of books and things like that. I don't think there are formal coaching relationships except at the exec team level. If there are I'm unaware of them. How long ago did you establish a training and development budget? I don't I don't know that we've ever talked about it. Gosh, maybe 2015 It's eight years ago nine years ago. Do you have any memory of what?
Was the catalyst? Yeah, probably someone being like hey if I buy a book for My job like does wine i'm cover it and we would just be like, oh that seems reasonable But then it's obviously like well we can't Just, you know, cover everything. So yeah, I think that's where we carved it out. Chance would be able to give you all the details on that because that's an ops thing. So he, he's over that. Does chance, do you and chance is the, what is chances title?
Head of operations, head of operations, which is essentially people. Do you and chance have conversations about The size or an intended use of the training and development budget. Todd and Chance do. Todd, of course, Todd's CEO. And do you, as the person who ultimately is signing checks, well, first of all, do you think of it that way? No. Todd thinks, you think of Todd doing that? Yeah, he signs the checks. Good job. Good job being a leader.
Yeah. Because I still totally think of it being like, well, Jesse's, it's Jesse's money. I, it is my money. I and Taylor's. I've on my Colby index, I found out that I am very happy to have other people do things for me. Yeah, I can attest to that. So Todd and Chance talk about how big the training development budget is and should be and what it should do. Yeah. Yeah. You have some guidelines. Hey, we, we mean it for it to be used for things like this.
Someone wants to like, I don't know, some QA specialists is like, I want to up my game on writing this kind of code or this, this, you know, whatever. And it's just like, Oh yeah, go take that course, do that thing. So you, you have to let them decide. I always like to push decisions down as local as you can get them, you know?
So, but then there have been times where we've decreed things like in 2013 or 14, we decreed that we would use Gino Wickman's traction, which is in effect coaching via a book, right? And We just decreed it. But you never worked with a traction implementer, for example. I tried once. He gave me his pitch and I was like, that is not a cultural fit. Like this would not fly. Oh, I think I was in the room. Yeah. Yeah. He just, the vibe wasn't right. It wasn't.
Yeah. Like obviously your coach has to, you got to have a vibe. It's like a therapist. Just as important. You got to find the right one. Yep. So we, we rolled it and I do think if I would have found the right person, it would have been so much better to have an external implementer. So it's not Jesse with some new harebrained idea because he happened to read a book, you know Which is a thing that happens.
Yeah, it's I I didn't read a read books for a year just to prove a point to the execs And I stuck to it to be clear because the exact execs kept coming to you and saying oh great Just chill out with the books You guys got to hear this this is so amazing okay, so You're happy to see this money being spent on training and development. Yeah. Do you have any feedback from Todd about how it's helped? I actually don't. I guess I could, I could ask Todd. I have access to Todd. Yeah, I should ask him.
Just be like, so how's, how's the, like, what have you gotten from it? I mean, Todd is a Zen teacher. literally, he is a Zen teacher. So he's very used to having someone, guide him. We'll say that.
And I think he sees it as valuable when he was a principal of a school, when he was assistant superintendent,, he regularly talks about this mentor of his and I cannot remember his name, but he quotes him at least once in every quarterly meeting we have where he's just like, you know, so and so said, and it's this, it's this mentor of his very meaningful. Now that wasn't a formal coaching relationship, but you can see that Todd really appreciates guidance from a mentor.
from a wise person that has his back. So maybe he's just wired to kind of, kind of want it. I've, I tried harder with our head of marketing to have her get some coaching and it took a couple of years. For it to finally, finally find someone where she's like, Oh yeah, this is clicking. I like this. Was she quote unquote dating in the meantime? Yeah, in a sense, but off and on. Cause it's like, Hey, are you going to do this? Oh yeah, I need to.
So what I'm asking is, did she meet with coaches and then be like, ah, that's not a fit. That's not, yeah, I think she tried a Vistage meeting once, which is peer coaching. Oh, that's hilarious. I, I would not imagine Lindsay liking it. Yeah, it didn't go well, you know, Fresno of all places, her energy. She's probably laughing all the time. She's like, that was not funny. I love that. She's a great time. So she, yeah.
So I think she finally found someone that just, I think it's an informal and they've just, they agreed like, yeah, I'll help you out and we'll, we'll do this regularly. And she's liking it. Taylor joined a Vistage for a while and got some mileage out of that. Taylor's part owner in YNAB and our tech, technical fellow. Now he used to be head of technology. He's a technical fellow. And that is his real title.
Yeah. He gets to dig deep on things that are kind of cutting edge and figure out how YNAB will be affected slash. So he was in Vistage. He was in Vistage for a few years and then bowed out just what didn't feel like he was getting value out of it. And now he has joined an EO group. And he's really liking that it's pure, it's small. It's very strict. Like if you're late, you owe the money. Like there's, there's some things just like, you need to respect our time.
If your phone goes off, like mine did when we were recording, that's a problem. If you miss a meeting, one meeting next one, you're out and that kind of thing. Like it's serious, but they're serious because they're, They want the investment to pay. So he's been using EO for members of the audience who don't know what EO or EO are pretty similar organizations or similar intent. Yeah. I call them CEO clubs. Yeah. Yeah. Taylor's not a CEO, but it's, it's a place where.
Key, key people in organizations can go. And in our world, we would call it masterminding. Yeah. Collaborating. Yeah. It's probably more formal than what people call masterminds or how I've heard them because people are like, Oh, I'm in a couple of masterminds. And I'd be like,, how can you have the time to do that? You know? Yeah. But it's cause it might mean like a once a month call or something. What does Vistage cost? A couple thousand a month? Yeah, it kept going up.
It might be 2, 500 a month or something. Is EO comparable? I don't know on EO. Yeah. Vistage also gives you, you're the chair of the Vistage group in your area also meets with you for a couple hours once a month. So you do get coaching from the chair. You still do that? No, I don't anymore. I I think I was done with Vistage a year and a half ago. Oh, you don't do Vistage? I don't. I didn't know you stopped. Yeah. I, so this, the Vistage format is you meet all day, once a month.
First half of the day is a speaker. And then the second half of the day you're at processing issues, talking through things always depends on your group, you know, why did you, you were in that for years? Yes. And I think I was in that for nine, nine years. Why did you stop? I felt like I had gotten what I needed out of it. And it really. change when I was no longer CEO.
Cause then I just was like a lot of that, that you're learning from the speakers or whatever is like how to do this, how to do that. And it's just like, I'm not, I'm not boots on the ground anymore doing that. You know? My chair, Dwayne, he still invites me to stuff. I, Hey, maybe you'd like the speaker, you know, maybe just pop in, listen to the speaker. And it does give you a little bit of whipsaw sometimes, sometimes.
This speaker says you should, you know, do this, this speaker says you should do this and all of them are great, super polished presentations and you're like, Oh my gosh, content overload. Yeah, it is a little bit of content overload in companies that do Vistage the staff on that in those companies regularly caught day after Vistage, meaning like what's, what's coming down a little bit like day after Jesse finished a book. Yeah. So you got to be careful with that.
You know man, a great speaker that spoke that I remembered was his name's Cujo. That's his call sign, not his name. He was a fighter pilot,, high functioning fighter pilot. And he spoke for three hours about the power of briefing and debriefing. It was so good. It was so good. So you'll get these, I mean, some of those speaking engagements that I went to Edgar Parker spoke about true alignment. His book is not good to read.
It's so dry, but his speaking, how, your core values express your brand and that expresses to your customers, that changed YNAB trajectory. Like that helped us, helped us realize we were much more like an Oprah Winfrey vibe than we were a personal finance management. You know, like we started learning, Oh, we're, we're helping people self actualize. We aren't helping them manage money. It was a breakthrough for us. So I'm very grateful.
I did all those a lot of people in my audience would want to be those vista speakers. Yes. Yes. What's that like? You need to get endorsed. You need to get approved. You need to buy Vistage the company. Yeah. But do you go through Vistage the company? Yeah. You would need to contact chairs. And I think chairs actually. They protect chairs quite a bit from solicitation. Yeah. Essentially.
I remember, Oh, I don't know how many years, five, six, seven years ago, Dwayne reached out to me, the chair of your Vistage Group, fantastic guy. And he said,, let's work together. I'll help you prepare your presentation. I want you to be on the circuit. I think you have a lot of value to add. It wasn't a fit for my business model. Yeah. That kind of marketing wasn't really going to serve me now.
Interestingly, as I'm moving more and more into coaching, I'm starting to As it's become a bigger part of my life It would probably make more sense for me to look back at the potential there but People didn't solicit in their presentations. No, you are not. You're not allowed to. Yeah. You need to add value from your presentation requiring no sale, you know, but there are a lot of speakers that were, that is their, their sole lead gen. I would have to be.
Yeah. And they've done a thousand of them, you know, it takes a special kind of person that enjoys the road warrior thing. So these chairs will come together and be like, Hey, listen, I've got six vista groups in salt Lake city. And we can do it. Boom, boom, boom. And then the speaker's like, okay, you have my attention. Cause they don't have to do the back and forth as much. So there's this interesting little economy market forms.
Vistage pays you, I mean, a pittance for the speaking, I think maybe 500 bucks. So it probably doesn't even cover your travel. Well, they'll cover your travel. Oh, they will. Yeah. But it is not, it is not a moneymaker. No, you know so Vistage knows that it's lead gen. Yes. They just don't want you pitching in your presentation. They would, they want to protect the integrity of the experience.
Yeah. It's interesting for me to make that clear to my audience, because I think my audience is often under the impression that they have to have a directly transactional intent with almost anything that they do, but in Vistage and in many other scenarios, you actually don't have to go in. With a very transactional intent, you can just trust the whole thing to produce transactions naturally.
A lot of the speakers will obviously have some kind of a lead gen Follow up thing so they'll say hey I can send you x Just you know, so they're allowed to do that. Absolutely. Give me your email address. I'll follow up with this and this. I didn't experience one even medium pressure kind of a sales. Well, it doesn't have to, because if you think about the environment that creates that. In this, in our community, we talk about high trust.
That's an extremely high trust environment where the speaker is vetted. The speaker has skin in the game because if they don't do a good job there, they get rated. They're going to get rated. They potentially lose the lead stream, the lead flow from Vistage. You have, High value targets sitting in that room I mean 14 CEOs sitting there for three hours and you can't be in Vistage unless your top line revenue is above a certain point Yeah, pretty pretty good size.
So you've got a three hour opportunity to build trust with people who can absolutely pay your fee Yeah, so the incentives are all set up to make those pretty great. that's a good example of the kind of marketing that I would encourage a coach to think about where I would say You You could wisely spend two years preparing yourself to be a Vistage speaker and have nothing happen in those two years, but that's worth it. Yeah, I don't think it'd take two years.
Yeah. But yeah, you need to become, somehow become friends with a Vistage speaker. And you're going to do it pro bono three or four times. You're going to get rated and then you can be approved. And then you need to actually be selected by the chairs. They have to reach out to you and say, Hey, are you available these dates? You can't go to chairs and say, Hey, I'm available. Oh, you can't. No. So it's truly wait to be reached out to. It's just wait to be reached out. Oh, that's interesting.
And so when I would get them, I mean, I just didn't, for me, I was talking to him about remote work and why that would be, a good thing. And I was talking to a lot of pretty old school CEOs and it was, it was a fun presentation because I got to make them very uncomfortable, but it didn't directly translate into Hey, YNAB offers financial wellness. You know, I would have to give a presentation to CEOs that's about how their kids could do better with money. That maybe would start to do it.
But to go there and give a presentation about how financial wellness affects the bottom line of their company, it just, It just wasn't, yeah, it certainly wasn't worth your time. No. And if I could give that presentation, I would, but I don't think it's attractive to the chairs. It's too narrow, you know? There's a lot on sales, how to sell. There's a lot on legacy planning. I think you can go in and kind of see what the, what the topics are in, in vestige maybe, but it would be worth.
Taking a vicious chair out to lunch and asking them. Does EO do anything similar? Do they do guest speakers? I don't think so. I went and spoke at an EO group once, but it was like friend of a friend. He's just like, Hey, you should come talk to us. And I did for an hour. It was totally informal. I think EO does more like you have those, those meetings and then they do trips. I think they're more like travel oriented. Interesting. Yeah. Where you'll go on these big trips.
So you said at the highest level, so maybe the executive team, but would there be any other scenario in which someone I don't know what the best way to, you know, rank and file another YNAB team member would come and say, I'd like to get some coaching around X, Y, or Z. What do you think YNAB would say about that? I think it's been the T and D budget and it makes, it kind of, you know, passes the sniff test. I think a manager. Probably be okay with it.
Yeah. I'm not sure what individual T and D budgets are, you know it would, yeah, we've, I don't know if we've ever been approached like that. I've wondered about a company like YNAB having. A staff, it's essentially a staff therapist, just sort of like, Oh yeah, I'm going to go meet with, I'm going to go meet with Mark, right? What do you, what comes to your mind when I say that? If it was the same therapist that to me would start to be kind of problematic. Oh yeah. Okay, good. Why?
Yeah. I think they would start to kind of cross pollinate a little bit. Like, if you're talking about family stuff,, Maybe it's okay, but if you're, you're like, Hey, I'm coming to this therapist for work things or we should say coach, by the way. I mean, yes, coach. Then the coach, it's like, I'm having a problem with my manager and then that manager is saying, I'm having a problem with this team member and, and the, the coach kind of knows both.
And so I think it would be hard to be above the fray. Yeah, you're totally right. No, I can tell you this. No therapist would ever do it. Yeah. Well, yeah, they would probably, 'cause they'd be like, I can't, ethically they can't do that. Like, I can't give, I, yeah, I, I think ethically, I, I remember, I, I have a great therapist and I was like, oh, you need to see so-and-So, and it was all about like, well, what kind of a relationship do you have with so-and-So like, what?
Because they just don't want it close. Like they don't want any, where like they know something about you that you didn't tell them. I have not had that insight They don't want to know something about you that you didn't tell them. That's so good I don't know how that's never that's never occurred to me. I don't know It was I was surprised how many walls Flory my therapist was throwing up. I was like, what is the deal? I'm trying to refer somebody.
Yeah It's like she was playing hard to get in a big way. I said to Ann once, and my therapist that I've worked with, I said, I would love it if you'd meet with Kate. She just shook her head. Yeah. She didn't even, she just, she's like, cause she knew that I knew. Yeah. She said, she's got to go find her own therapist. Yeah. Interesting. So my my thesis for this, by the way, folks, is that sometimes coaches fall into the trap of believing that there isn't a market for coaching.
Oh, no. And I just wanted to bring in a civilian here and be like, no, there's money being spent. Absolutely. I would guess that for example, Todd's coach is not an expensive, not cheap. Oh, not at all. Yeah. I couldn't tell you exactly, but not cheap. Yeah. If she has 10 Todd's, she's doing great. Yeah. I love that you said that because I often tell this audience, it doesn't take a lot of relationships.
It doesn't take a, in this particular business model, I may never have more than a hundred clients total. Yeah, absolutely. In my career. Yeah. Because that's the nature of the model. There's, there's an interesting thing about the person that wants coaching and can't afford it. I get that. But when you're dealing with someone that has the means they do start to kind of look everywhere.
For that up level they look for the therapist, they look for the tutor for their kid, they look for, I mean, if I wanted to get into long rifle shooting where you want to hit something a mile away, which is absolutely worthwhile, I would find, I would find someone that's like, just teach me how much, like when I wanted to learn how to butcher a chicken. I just found the guy, the chicken coach, if you will. But you, you're like, I'm not going to mess around with YouTube. That, that's the thing.
It's like, I'm not going to mess around with YouTube. Let's cut to the chase. There are a lot of people like me that maybe aren't quite as neurotic, but a lot of people like me, they're like, I want to get the best I can get. I don't want to waste my time. I don't want to spend my wheels. I mean, I'm really good at lifting weights. I know all the movements. I totally have a coach and will never not. It's just outsourcing. That is.
Is fantastic, you know, and like again and again and again, you get those kinds of people that just, yeah, like let's cut to the chase and find someone great and get there. Well, it's another thing I've said on this podcast and I will say it a million more times. The people who buy coaching are the people who are already converted to coaching. Yes. Your job is not to convert someone to coaching. Yeah, you don't want to coach that person. I caught a clip of Noah Kagan.
You know who Noah Kagan is He was, he's early at mint. com and early at Facebook. And now he has, he owns app sumo. He's hard to track. Cause he just kind of keeps, he just does a lot of stuff. I think he decided he wanted to be a YouTube creator. A little while ago. That's how I, I, I funny guy.
I caught him on Tim Ferriss's podcast, a YouTube clip of him on Tim Ferriss's podcast, and they were talking about coaching and Noah Kagan was like, yeah, I just have a bunch of people that I can pay a thousand dollars an hour for, Whatever it is I need. Yeah. So if it's a people issue, I go to this person and pay him a thousand bucks an hour I want my audience to know that that is the real world. Yeah. That's out there. I'm not saying it's easy to become that person but it exists.
The market is there. We're not trying to make a market that isn't there. It's there. No, yeah, absolutely. Folks, that's Jesse Mecham from YNAB. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. Everyone should use YNAB. Absolutely. You got to love how you spend your money. Spend all this time earning it. Let's also love it when we spend it. Awesome. That's a podcast for coaches and we'll talk to you next time.