Doug DavidoffLet's get something straight - we are NOT almost out of another decade. The end of 2020 will be the end of the decade. Anyway, so the good news is this is a year in review! In this episode, Mike and Doug go back through the year and discuss some of their failures, what they learned from those failures, and what they predict 2020 will consist of.
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Show Notes
You learn more from doing something wrong than when you do something right, and people are more honest when they explain mistakes rater than their successes. For Mike, his first failure was that he jumped on the bandwagon (a tad) for chat bots. There was discussion around it fundamentally changing marketing, and there was a lot of FOMO around it, too. He soon realized that it wasn't doing him wonders and decided to turn his efforts elsewhere. Mike's second failure what that he had higher expectations for growth and felt disappointed that they never accomplished their overarching goals. His learning was that he needs to hold himself more accountable and ask what the process for achieving those kinds of goals will look like moving forward.
Switching over, Doug's first failure was based around becoming better with alignment. This sounds nice, but he soon found out that alignment is a bitch! He learned why bigger companies seem to move slower and that it's okay to move slower as a smaller company because sometimes when you slow the process down, you'll end up moving faster. His second failure was that he had put together a 90 day plan that ended up taking about 180 days to complete. His lesson there was that we live in a "performance is culture" world and that no matter what you plan, you'll end up not being realistic with what you can truly complete. Moving forward, he's going to shift his mindset and focus on putting together plans that are more realistic for the company.
Going into predictions for 2020, Mike thinks there's a 20-25% chance of a recession while Doug thinks it's a 40-50% chance (although he believes it'll feel like a recession even if there isn't actually one). Next year they speculate Facebook will explode as more people start to wake up to what the company has been doing. And to top it off, in 2020 both think there's going to be more reality in the market where companies start to move back to looking at value over growth. Doug's big advice for the next year is to focus on a couple of important things and make them happen, and don't worry about what you aren't working on.