Chasing Balance

It's a raw , honest exploration of the entrepreneurial journey , packed with candid stories and hard-earned lessons from KP's own career . From scaling your business to navigating tough decisions , this guide offers relatable , actionable insights to keep you inspired and focused .

Whether you're looking to lead with purpose or tackle challenges head-on , sunday Scaries is your roadmap to resilience . Grab your free copy now and kickstart your week with the advice you need to thrive . Visit kpreadyco slash books and scroll down to Sunday Scaries to get your free ebook . Today .

You are listening to KP Unpacked with KP Ready a weekly dose of insights for innovators and startups from the built environment and beyond . Want more discussions like this ? Join KP's exclusive online community , the Catalyst Network . To learn more , visit kpreadyco slash Catalyst Network .

My name is Jeff Eccles , I'm a senior advisor and the head of our mastermind and incubator programs at KP Ready Company and , as always , I am joined by KP Reddy himself . Kp welcome .

Follow him on LinkedIn and find his posts about his travels , about his conversation with startup founders , with investors , with the leaders of ENR top 100 architecture engineering firms , et cetera . And these are his reflections , these are his thoughts , these are his vision of what the AEC industry is and where it's going .

And once a week we come here and we unpack one of those posts . And today , kp , I was reading your Sunday Scaries . So every Sunday , as you can imagine , kp posts a .

I guess it's a series right called sunday scaries and in this particular one , which was last sunday's sunday scary , you titled it chasing balance , time to restack the pancakes , and it's got a , a photograph . I'll let you describe it a little bit more , but it's got a photograph of a little boy and a really big stack of pancakes .

Uh , sunday scurries is a weekly Doing speaking gigs , advising corporates , investing in startups and , of course , more broadly supporting a thriving ecosystem that encompasses all of the above , and then you throw in all the usual family and friend obligations in there . It's a mad chaos .

You talk about the last several months , et cetera , and you and I were talking offline about optimizing time . In fact , our last episode we really sort of touched on optimizing time a little bit , but I think this , the um , the image of the stacking the pancakes fits , fits really well here . So how , how do you expand on on that image and that thought ?

What's important to you here ?

Asheville has its own set of problems , so now we're moving from , I guess , theoretically Asheville to Silicon Valley , right . So that's kind of what's happening . And that workload was an unplanned workload that has thrown you know X number of hours of work from closing on the old , you know , selling the house and all the .

I mean just , you know , when you stay somewhere for 13 years , I have two storage facilities and changing the addresses on all my credit card statement , like all the stuff . Right , it's just like it's this added workload that was unplanned , so to speak , because we already did it when we moved to Asheville , quote unquote . So so it was interesting .

So I've been super , just like tired , like just exhausted and my 24 year old son kind of how 24 year olds behave he's like dad , it seems like you should take some advice from your own book , and he's referring to what you know about startups is wrong , which is my entire founder journey , including almost dying and all that good stuff , right , it's quite the

epic tale , something like Homer . I've always seen you as homer simpson , not the odyssey I think that makes your 24 year old , bart yeah , exactly , or lisa , uh , but so , so he's not wrong , right ? So the the dumb thing about kids is that they're it's not that they're wrong .

They're wrong a good amount of time , but when they're right , you just need to admit it . So , anyway , so he's not wrong , right ? So I was like , okay , how did I end up here ? I am like seven days a week , 20 hours a day .

I'm just constantly , constantly working , and it's this external force of this big move , added with travel , added with some new projects , all the above , and so you know , I was sitting there making pancakes for my two and a half year old .

I'm like , okay , like time to time to restack how I'm thinking about things , and so I'm a huge fan of time , time blocks , right , using time blocks to manage time , um , whether it's availability for internal teams , for external teams , like fridays , a lot of time my , my time is blocked out .

I have no external meetings is usually my friday , so I have a system . The problem is , when you have a system and you start adding new things to it , you never . You have to reassess the system , and so in the post , what I talk about is like rethinking your time blocks , trying to find ways to stack . Much like pancakes .

Get you know , take them all down to stack . Much like pancakes . Get you know , take them all down , put them all on the table , start sizing them up . The ones that are irregular shaped , you know you take away . So when I say take away , maybe you know in my case you probably ate them , but in in a time block perspective , just don't do it anymore .

If it doesn't fit into what your objectives and mission are , just get rid of it . And then also make sure you have space for other things , and so , whether it's family time , workout time , quiet time , it's kind of funny .

My father-in-law , who I'm currently living with , asked to have access to my calendar so he has a better idea of my travel schedule , and of course , he opens up my calendar . He's like oh my god , like I've never seen so many colors and things and like I've never seen a calendar like this . Um , he's like , no , no , no wonder you're tired all the time .

But he also started to notice things like you know blocking out lunch , blocking out time with my two and a half year old , like . So there is a method to say let me block out my time and also insert time for rest and all those things .

So I think my point in my post was whatever your 2024 objective and I'd like to think I should probably be more fluid I shouldn't have to wait a year for things to go off the rails . But I think that's just how sometimes it works out .

So my suggestion to founders especially is whatever your objectives were this time last year , my guess is that they're not the same .

You've either added employees , you've added new products , you've taken some things away , employees , you've added new products , you've taken some things away and really it's a good time to reformat your time blocks and how you spend your time . The one thing I love about time blocks is you get to predefined how you're spending your time .

So , if you're a consulting person , here's how I'm going to spend time on business development . Here's how I'm going to spend my time working with customers , like whatever it is right in your world . Jeff , it's hey , you know how do I ?

What time do I spend booking podcast guests and working with posts or whatever it is right , and so I'm a big fan of time blocks and the point is assess what you've been doing and see if you need to make some changes to it . I'm also not a fan of multitasking , but I am a fan of dual tasking .

I will take my son on a walk quote unquote spending time with him in a stroller and I will listen to my necessary podcast . Most of the podcasts I listen to are necessary through economic stuff , whatever .

So I'm listening to a podcast quote unquote spending time with my son , which kind of doesn't count , and I'm also getting about 30 minutes of walking in and I'm drinking my athletic greens , so like I'm getting a lot of things done right , but it's very deliberate .

But you're , you know , in this world where we are now , and I was having a conversation with somebody , uh , at the end of the day yesterday um , we're talking about business models for engineering firms and and you know , this is this is someone that is a real leads are small and relatively new firm and they're saying you know , I hear KP talking about this and

I'm reading KP's posts about about this , that and the other on LinkedIn and listening to KP Impact and , and I'm wondering , right , you know he says all these things , how does you know ? How does that apply to me ?

Because you know we say this all the time , right , the , the , the firms that we reference , and the , the people that are in our mastermind groups . You know our innovation leaders , our construction technology mastermind groups , et groups , etc . They're from larger firms . We talk about enr , enr lists and things like that .

So you've got this person that's basically a sole proprietor and they've got a little bit of a partnership going on with somebody else . But , um , they're

going . Okay , how does how does all that you know technology and , uh , ai and innovation ? How's that ? You know all that technology and AI and innovation ? How does all that stuff that's happening at the big firm level , how does that apply to the small firms ?

And I think what's really interesting is that , for everything we talk about in terms of innovation , everything that we talk about in terms of technology , really the game-changing piece of it that we talk about is how to the human , the human factor of it ? Right , and call map insight , timer , time blocking . You know all all these different things .

You know , our grandparents might've called them all these newfangled things . Right , we're talking about how all of this could be high tech , or it could simply be a paper calendar .

It's a little hard to share , maybe , your paper calendar with your father-in-law , but we're talking about how these things impact human beings , which I think also ties back to the photograph of your your youngest son and a giant stack of pancakes . Right , very , very human ?

Right , we can get caught up in this all the technology things , but we're talking about human beings and how human beings can live and and and work maybe more artfully and intentionally is one way to to say it .

On any other day Sometimes they don't get like , what are you doing , but that's like my family . And they start stacking them up , right . You start stacking the biggest pancakes first , all up , all the way up to the tiny pancakes Right , pancakes , right . And the tiny pancakes at the top tend to be funny enough .

Your most important ones right , it's the ones at the bottom are ones that have kind of been solved for . And then when I say it's like , once you have it all stacked up and it's ready to go , then you got to pour syrup over the entire thing .

And my reference to the syrup is fun , like , if you're going to do all this stuff , my wife does this thing to me used to drive me absolutely insane . Now I get it .

I'd be going into an important meeting , like literally like meeting with sovereign wealth , funds , whatever , and I'll just like call her , hey , I'm getting ready to go into this thing , and you know what she tells me . She's like don't forget to have fun .

It's really hard to to fake having fun , and it reminds me that I was having a conversation with my therapist once and she said that the human laugh is a very revealing , it's the most true human expression . That's .

That's really fascinating , so that that advice from your wife , I think , is it's it's really good advice , it's it's if you don't forget to have fun .

That means , I think that means you're showing up as you , as your authentic self , and you're , you're present in that moment and you're , um , yeah , you , you have the enjoyability of , of what you're doing , but , um , there's some truth in that somewhere a hundred percent , a hundred percent .

But when you're , her reminder to me is like you could be doing anything you want , like you're very fortunate , you get to literally create the career You've created , the career you've always wanted , and like , just remember that , like you're doing it because this is what you want to do , this is what you enjoy , and so I think we all need that friendly reminder ,

right , like this is what you enjoy , and if not , you should be doing something different , quite honestly .

But , um , but I do think for founders especially right for family , I think this applies to everyone , but for founders you've taken a big risk , a big leap , because this is what you wanted and I don't think you wanted something that creates pain and misery .

I mean , it might create some pain and misery , but that's not why you chose it yeah , yeah , I mean , there was .

But he was a guest lecturer at Ball State years ago after I graduated , but before I went back there and started teaching .

But before I went back there and started teaching and it was one of the few guest lectures that I actually drove from Indianapolis to Muncie it was a little over an hour drive to go listen to him and one of the things he said is a very simple thing , absolutely true , but a very simple thing .

He said nothing worth doing is ever easy and I think that is a truth and I think if we embrace that and understood that , we chose this thing , whatever this thing is . We chose it for a reason and to enjoy the pursuit of that . I think that's really important as well .

So , if you're listening to this and maybe you jumped in at the middle , I'm not sure exactly how that happens , but what we've been talking about is KP's post , his Sunday Scaries post , from November 24th 2024 . Just in case it's 2028 when you're listening to this , but the title of the post is Chasing Balance Time to Restack the Pancakes .

And if you missed this at the very beginning , there's a photograph there of his youngest son with an impressively tall I mean I think it's really impressive impressively tall stack of pancakes .

And you know , great , great , little bit of little bit of levity there , a little bit of tongue in cheek there , a little bit of fun there , but a really good lesson about the need to occasionally and the reason for restacking those pancakes . So , kp , thanks for showing up today and unpacking this LinkedIn post for us today .

I think Amazon requires you charge 99 cents or something , but for a lot of people that want the physical , I don't think we're going to sit here and print out physical copies and mail them to people . so we'll we'll let amazon's uh third-party logistics handle that for us .

But I'm pretty excited about it because , uh , I will tell you , I do write that on sundays , every sunday . It's been almost a year since I've been doing it and if you you know it's not trivial to consistently do something , and I think one is .

It's been consistent because I get so much fuel both in doing it like the feedback I get from people is fantastic but because I'm out and about and just I try to be very observational that there's always like a lot of good content to write about . At least I think it's good . You may think it's sad , but but definitely keep an eye out for that .

Uh , that'll come out by year end , I believe yeah , yeah .

We we generally have openings for startups that want to participate there . We always have openings for more mentors and advisors , et cetera . If you want to get involved in a different sort of way and I think we also touched on mastermind groups a little bit so go to our website and look under programs for mastermind groups .

Of course , you can reach out to KP , reach out to me . There may be a more direct line to me than to KP , especially on Incubator and Mastermind , because those are my areas here at KP Ready Co . So happy to share more information , help you get involved in those . And we've been unpacking a post by Reddy on LinkedIn .

If you aren't following KP , look him up KP R-E-D-D-Y on LinkedIn . As he said , many of his posts come from observations that he's made as he travels , as he talks to startups , as he talks to investors , as he talks to leaders in the AEC world and those turn into posts .

And then that turns into my opportunity to ask KP hey , what were you thinking when you posted that on LinkedIn ? What was the impetus for that ? What's behind that particular post ? We'll be back again next week with another KP Unpacked . Thanks for joining us today and we look forward to having you back here next week .

Thanks , kp , thanks everybody , thanks Jeff , yep . See you next week .