#98: Kris Snyder (Ninety.io, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile)

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:00:00]:

If people are in the pursuit of being the best version of self, we think we can help them do that at work and actually enjoy and hopefully love what they do and they feel safe and they feel those things and we can't do that for them. But we think we can help that aid that whole process by giving software that allows people, those entrepreneurial leaders, to go out and do the things they want to do. Look, if you ask me what's my mandate? How will I know I did it well and did it right at the end? I want to really believe that I helped leaders build great organizations, right? And you can build one great organization by yourself or you can figure out how to help. Right now, 6300 organizations be better versions. And that's what we're trying to do.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:41]:

Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are telling the stories of its entrepreneurs and those supporting them. Welcome to the Allay of the Land podcast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland. I am your host Jeffrey Stern and today I had the real pleasure of speaking with Chris Snyder. Chris has an extensive entrepreneurial past over the last 25 years, building and leading five companies, including founding Vox Mobile, an enterprise mobility management service here in Cleveland. Back in 2006, where Chris served as CEO, growing the organization to over 200 people, over 20 million in capital raised and tens of millions in recurring revenue. He is an active member in Entrepreneurs organization Cleveland chapter as a member of the board, chairs the board of the Northeast Ohio Arthritis Foundation, and was recognized as an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year for his work there. In 2018, Chris founded a growth advisory firm called Impact Architects, where he serves as the managing partner. And in 2019 he began working with 90, a company focused on supporting that same market as Impact Architects by providing company operating system software. A broader topic which we will explore in detail in our conversation today, where he serves as the head of finance and partnerships, sits on 90s board and helped them recently close on a $20 million investment round led by Insight Partners. This really was one of my favorite discussions so far. As Chris, who is one of the most clear thinkers that I know, has this powerful ability to distill his extensive learnings into very concise, meaningful takeaways as well as speak to his underlying motivations of working with entrepreneurial leaders to create impact another the which will come through in spades throughout our discussion today. So please enjoy my conversation with Chris Snyder. So I was thinking about where the best place to start this conversation might be land. I actually want to go somewhere a little bit different than where I normally do, because one of the ideas that I've been particularly fascinated by and have explored through this whole podcast over the last two years now is the whole concept of a startup flywheel. And this idea that to achieve sufficient startup momentum such that the broader ecosystem can sustain itself, you need to have entrepreneurs and early stage employees who have been through the trials and tribulations of company building and emerged successfully from that. On the other side, in a position where lovers of the game of startups, they are reinvesting in other startups and founding new companies. And I think like the parentally cited example are these like mafias, which I say in air quotes, but these alumni networks of those companies that have broken through. Land you have classically the PayPal mafia with a legacy of, I don't know, Tesla, LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir, so many companies. And my observation is that the most analogous situation we have here, if you take stock of Cleveland entrepreneurs and their experiences, is your own company, Vox Mobile, actually. And so I wanted to start there and actually ask about what you did with the culture at Vox that cultivated entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship and startups in its wake and how can you intentionally foster more of that?

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:04:12]:

That's a great question. First off, I don't know if what you said is true, but I like it, so I'm going to Google it. I think it goes back to leadership styles, right? So depending upon what you Google, who you listen to, for me it breaks down to the following. So you can be autocratic, bureaucratic, democratic, you can be Lazi fair leader, you can be a transactional leader, you can be a transformational leader and you could be a coach. Land along your journey, you're going to figure out which one you're going to be given the situation now when most businesses start and just think about a founder and a few friends getting together and you've been there. Jeffrey it starts off as we all have to do everything because there's just not enough time for specialization and then somebody along the way becomes more transactional in their leadership. Land they're going to tell people what to do from the efficiency of time span, capacity to get things to done right. But at some point, if we stay transactional in that command and control kind of leadership, there is no next layer, right? So the natural move as a company goes from survival in the early stages to sustainable is for the coaching leader to stern to start to merge. And that's an investment because now I can't just tell you what to do. I have to give you the context and the reasons and the why about why I need you to do what these things are due. And quite honestly, this is also when we start to talk about operating systems because I need to give you a framework to coach to in order for you to invest in the company and the people so they can start to scale. And then if I do that and I want to move to scale right now we're starting to talk about your flywheel moment. I have to start to think about transformational because I need you to be able to transcend from that stage of now knowing being coached to being able to coach others. So if I look back and the things that I've invested in, mostly because people invested in me, so hopefully we reciprocate. The things and kindness that have been done for us along the way is to go to that transformational and put a lot of time into the development of other leaders so that the organization can scale and quite honestly, so they can scale and so they can do it for others. And there's a ripple effect of impact that can happen. And it takes time. Land it takes intent, right, and discipline to go invest in people along the way. Land so often in the work that I do today when I meet leaders that have hit a ceiling and they're like, Chris, we can't get from this kind of sustainable to scale, what's our number one issue? You ask them the leadership question, tell me about your leadership style, what are you doing today? And they often can't give you a title to it like I just ripped through, right? But they actually start to tell you what they do and how they do what they do. And then you can start to discern what type of leader are they being, even if they have an intention of being something different. So if I go back to your question, I think doing that and understanding the leadership and the progression and the investment land pulling people in and really helping them be a better version of self so that they can also do that for others, I think is what's required to have that ripple effect, what's required to have that alumni that are hopefully out there going, hey, we're doing the right things because someone did them for us. So I'll invest in you, I'll take the time in you because it was done for me.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:08]:

So I think we'll get to talk more about operating systems and the work you're doing. But before we do, where does your own interest in entrepreneurship and company building stem from.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:07:24]:

Survival? Look, I like to say my family history is that you go back to farming, right? And if there's ever a sense of entrepreneurship, it's farmers, right? Like you have to figure out how you're going to make this stuff work. There's so much that's against you that you don't control. So I grew up in that kind of environment, quite honestly. My dad was a teacher, vocational education teacher. There was four kids. There was never enough. We weren't poor poor, but you had to figure out if you were going to have something more to go do that yourself. So it was all those initiatives, everything from selling the crops that we had to raising animals and selling those, to starting a long care Landscape Company. Land that was all really need based. It wasn't vision based. My vision was going back to that Maslow's Hierarchy of need is if you have food and shelter, then you're going to think about I'm going to start to think about the other things that get me to hopefully a sense of belonging. Right. But I can't think about belonging until I actually have enough of the things that I need. Land so really, entrepreneurship has so much similar analogous to that Maslow's Hierarchy of need. So the first part of entrepreneurship for me was just having enough. Right. Land figuring that out and going, okay, well, if someone's going to pay for college, it's going to be me. So now what am I going to do to make that happen? Because it's not going to happen for me.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:42]:

And what were those things that you started to explore from there?

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:08:48]:

Well, a variety of businesses. Man, I had to stay close to home because the long Care Landscape Service was how I was paying for college, and I still needed to be within an hour and a half radius to do it. So I went to hire Wesleyan because my family I grew up in Marion, Ohio, so it was close enough from a school perspective to get there. But even when I was at school, I needed more. Right. So everything from internships to I started a business called Campus Lofts, and we built wooden lofts and so sold them to this campus. And eventually I had distribution to five campuses, and it was literally me and my roommates going home over the weekends and building wooden beds to ship them out along the way. There is always that sense. One of the interesting things is I went to graduate, and people saw my resume and all these different things that I was doing. They're like, well, why aren't you just going to be an entrepreneur at this point? It's like, well, because all the things I don't know, I'm smart enough to know. There's so much I don't know, and there's people that have learned it before me that I need to learn from. And I found that even beyond working for somebody else, but all the peer groups that I participate in, like EO, the SaaS Academy, there's so much knowledge out there that can be shared that I've been in hopefully, a lifelong learner. Land continuous pursuit of other people's wisdom, so I can figure that out with and for myself along the way.

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:07]:

So I think we mentioned Vox at the onset of the conversation here, and we can work our way towards the present with impact architects. Land 90 that you're doing now, but, you know, what was Vox? Tell us a little bit about that story and working in, I think, to the kind of culture that cultivated entrepreneurs to, I don't know, graduated, if that's the right word from Vox, ultimately, yeah.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:10:32]:

And I think it's worth giving MCPc some props here too.

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:36]:

Absolutely.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:10:37]:

I came to Cleveland in 2002 as part of the team that helped with the divestiture from MCSI to MCPc, mike Troublecock and a lot of other leaders that have gone in to do a lot of other really good things around the area. So while I was at MCPc, I was the CTO and COO. And had a lot of opportunity to think about building more recurring service based businesses other than a traditional technology bar. And one of those businesses that we were believing in was this concept of work from anywhere. Like, at some point the Endpoint will travel land. We had done so much historical PC distribution and one of our clients that was really kind of into that kind of field service but wanted to be able to work from anywhere was Dbold. And we had a project with them to take and help develop an application to a BlackBerry. This is dating myself a bit here, Jeffrey, but we were going to write a Java app on a BlackBerry, right, and allow thousands of these workers to work and behave differently. So that kind of set me upon this whole concept of where's the world going and the power of mobility again, because it's 2003, four maybe time frame was like, wow, there's something here. We won't just be sitting in our cubicles doing work. And clearly I think this is proven out, but it was the belief that we would be a mobile workforce. And I don't just mean the people who are in the field, I mean all of us, which we kind of aren't. Like, we've hit that point today. So that kind of inspiration and what we figured out pretty quickly is if it was to stay inside that business, it wouldn't be the same business as it needed to be. And one of my favorite plays is to talk to entrepreneurs all the time and go, you probably have a software or tech enabled business inside your business and we haven't realized it yet, and making that move, that carve out, that spin off, or whatever we're going to call that. But breaking that out and letting it be something different, because if it stays underneath the weight of the umbrella of all the other constraints that the traditional business has, it can't really go see it. So Mike and I agreed that it was better served to take that kind of that mobile division out after we were building it. So in 2006, July, we spun out 15 employees and myself, and we began the process of creating box mobile with this mandate that we were going to go figure out how mobile workers were going to behave. And we had a big vision, but we also had just a pending sense of reality. On the technology side, we all get five G and all these types of things we talk about today, if you go back to that time frame, it was text based transmission, really. We're just barely a step above a pager. And so we had lots of transportation, lots of battery issues and all that to try to get from here to there. But that was the vision. We really wanted to go help those folks work from anywhere.

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:17]:

And what was the trajectory from there of Vox? How did the company grow? Where did you get to lead it?

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:13:25]:

Yeah, so we'll talk a little bit of funding, then give some employee size and those types of fund milestones and landmarks. So we did an angel round. So we spun it off, and then it was gospel. Do an angel round here in Cleveland. And I think it's gotten better. I mean, I shared with you before we started, been actively helping some companies raise money, participating as an investor at that stage, going to people and saying we were going to help people to work from anywhere. And the company's Box Mobile doing these things. There was blank stairs coming back, man, everywhere. It was like, I don't understand. Tell me again how this works. Right. The cloud was not well understood. People hadn't been using it themselves. Land so it was a bit of a lift to get people to buy in, right. That there was there there. Now we were we were plenty fortunate for having advocates. Doug Weintrab as an example, I think he was chairman of Jumpstart at the time. Doug was an early fan. The had a network of folks. So the angel piece at that point was probably still some today. It's like, who do you know, right, who can extend trust? Trust in the entrepreneur, trust in the idea, trust in the market. And so we kind of did that first angel round. Land then that went well up until 2008. So 2008 was a tough time, I think, for most people. But for us it was really difficult because August of 2008, we'd worked on an acquisition. We had a VC out of New York that was funding it. We were acquiring a company that was complimentary to us. And then the markets just all crashed, right? And so after six months of working on an acquisition that fell apart, our bank swept our line. We'd never done anything wrong, but they swept all the cash because they were on businesses. At that point in time, we lost our second largest customer. So all those things just kind of collided. And from that point, though, really, looking back, it was great that the angels still believed in us because we had to get some more funding from in order to get the company back because of all those events that happened. And we got back to the growth cycle, really by kind of mid 2009 again, and we had a good run. And then we did our first round of an Air Series C. It was led by Edison Partners. We were probably, at that point, 50 ish people, something in that neighborhood. I have to go back and look. But we were catching some momentum. We raised seven and a half million dollars, and then we kept building the business from there. At the peak when I was there, I think we were about 250 people. We had one point, probably 50, 60 people outside the United States, mostly in Canada, and we ended up, before I left in 2018, we had done three rounds of venture based funding up through our Series C. Land it was the premise didn't change a lot. It had to change off of the BlackBerry only type of model. Right. So the invention of really, the iPhone coming into the business and Android and most of the applications where it wasn't just more about assets and applications than it was end users, that was the chase. It was for us to get into those organizations like Caesars Entertainment. And it wasn't just supporting somebody's phone. It was supporting all the endpoints. Right. With the application layers that run across.

Jeffrey Stern [00:16:24]:

As you scaled Vox from where it was to ultimately hundreds of people, did your your interest in operating systems, you know, converge at that point? Or, you know, how are you thinking about scale and the actual company building process outside of the nature of the problem you were solving at Fox?

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:16:43]:

Great question. So, you know, my entrepreneurial journey, which I think I've seen a lot in other folks land you got to keep figuring out the next thing. It's like, how do I get from here to there? And then if you're in that peer community, you're asking people, your peers again, who've done it before you, how did they do it? And so being in that moment, I started asking people, and you started finding all these operating systems. You started finding Verne harness and scaling up Gazelles, right. You started finding, well, Michael Gerber in the emyth scenario, patrick Lynchioni land an advantage, and then obviously there's EOS and Gina Wickman. So we chose the advantage. So we really kind of pulled from Patrick Lynchioni systems, and we loved his five Dysfunctions of Team book and his Death by meetings, right. And so we were cobbling together kind of all those thoughts at Vox and picking and choosing bits and parts of which ones that served us best. We were also Jim Collins fan out of the gates with Good to Great. So we started on using some of those tools. Land we're an amalgamation of operating kind of bits and parts of operating systems. But that was our path, was to go then at that leadership level again, use those tools, use those books as reference points, and kind of start to bring together this thought of these things are really mostly concepts, tools. And I don't mean tool like a wrench, obviously. I mean like, you take something, you go, it's repeatable to its outcome like flywheel. You mentioned to us the hedgehog concept the flywheel is the tool, and it's the discipline that gets you that ten x momentum acceleration. Right. So we think about things that way. That's where we started doing at Vox. We were experimenting like crazy. We had lots of good folks that were at times probably frustrated with us because it felt like book of the month and shiny objects because we were trying to figure it out. Right. Versus just going to one system.

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:24]:

I guess it might be worth a quick detour into just at a high level what an operating system is and how you think about those.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:18:33]:

Yeah, let's do that. Every organization has an operating system. You either have an accidental operating system or an intentional operating system. Right. The operating system is somewhere between four to who knows, ten different components to how you think about your business. You have a vision aspect of it. Right. You have to know where you're going. Like, when we think about everything that's directional in its nature, that could be your core values and Simon Sinek speak, it could be your just cause. Right? It's Jim Collins. It's your bhag. Right. But that's the big picture stuff. That's the infinite sea, it's the infinite game kind of model you're playing. That's your vision. Well, then have to get to the execution. Like, how are we going to know we're winning? We have to start keeping score, because if we don't keep score, we're just practicing, right? So then we go, okay, can I see out three years? Can I do a three year outlook? Can I do a one year plan? Can I do a quarter that I'm in? Right. And that starts to get to the execution side of the model itself. Land we go. If we're going to do that kind of in those time frames, well, then I have to really start running meetings. Most of us don't like meetings. We don't like meetings because they weren't run effectively. They were wasting our time. So we don't want more meetings, we want less. So the operating system brings in a cadence of meetings. Land more the Lynchione approach to meetings. We think there's five kinds of meetings. Each meeting type has a purpose, right. And so it's agreeing to those. We're going to have weekly meetings, we're going to have same page meetings, we have strategic meetings, we have client meetings. Right, but you agree to a structure of that inside the operating system. Land that gives you kind of reference points and commonality of language, especially as you start to go from that, hey, I went from sustainable to scale. I got to have more of that because I can't just be in the command and control and tell everyone to do today. I need people to have a system to be accountable to because Jeffrey, people don't want to be held accountable. I always find this interesting because people.

Jeffrey Stern [00:20:14]:

Be like, we just need that is interesting.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:20:19]:

I want to be accountable to the situation, to the structure. Land I want to have agreement based leadership. I want you to set the expectations. I want to agree to them. I want to own the now if I can't behave inside that structure of that system that you're setting up, well, then sure, you got to hold me accountable. But the right structure, which is another part of the system, right, is US speak is accountability chart. Some people call it responsibility chart. It's more than an.org chart because it brings in the details of what your agreements are. Land then those sides of the agreements are also going to be things like one to three metrics for every one seat that you've agreed to. So quality metric or quantity metric, some combination therein. So that's also another part of the operating system. Another part is how you think about data, like database decisions for operations at scale. It's just required. I don't care if you call it OKRs KPIs metrics, they're all about the same. It's about having leading visibility into where you're going to go and how do you instrument the business along the way. And so we'll compartmentalize that. Then we start to set those pieces up, too, so people can understand, are we winning, are we learning? And that's all going to come from the data side itself. One of the most fascinating things that we didn't do at Vox Well land this was an EOS thing that I learned, was really how to solve issues. Like we would have the moment where you'd give me the issue and we'd sit around land we would discuss. Land we would discuss and somebody would politic and tell us all their passionate moments, right? And then you'd sit there and you spend 60 minutes and you might get something progressed to maybe a solve. And it's two items and it's just not enough, right? There's not enough time in the day as you're trying to do this. So this approach to actually being able to say, I can clarify, identify the issue itself, I can spend time on discuss, that's really about giving your facts, give me your experience, don't conjecture, don't politic along the way, right? And then let's understand how do we get to solve. And solve has a destination. It's got to be an endpoint, right? So we like to say things like, jeffrey, if that's to be true, what's required? And then get the person to really articulate because sometimes we can't. So issue solving is one of the components in operating system as well. There's a couple of different approaches, but quite honestly, I think EOS does a really good job at that piece as well. And then at the end of all this, you're going to get into the human side, the people side, which is more than just structure. It's how do we actually not only lead folks, how do we get them to understand what our core values are? How do we get them to really participate at the level that's important to them in the business and align to the direction that you're going. People call it HR, that's fine, but HR is often misunderstood as just compliance. And it's not the investment side of the human, which is really where the operating systems can help when you're trying to chase scale is know you're getting the right people in the right seats, but you're investing in them too, and they have some kind of programmatic approach to that investment.

Jeffrey Stern [00:22:56]:

So at Vox, you're playing around, experimenting with a few of these different systems and trying to figure it out as you go. I'll ask you the question you're asking maybe yourself at that point. How did you keep score? What did success look like? Where were you trying to go ultimately with Fox?

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:23:17]:

So I think it's got probably a few parts to it. Right? So I'll personalize the first part and then I will probably go to some other places, including the investor side. So the personalization in that moment, as an entrepreneur, I was just chasing impact. I wasn't chasing an outcome. I was trying to figure out how do we have the greatest impact into all aspects that we're participating in. Our local community, like the jobs that we're building, the customers that we're serving, those were things that were really important to me. But it wasn't like I had a number like, hey, if we get to this, I can have a billion dollars. That was not it. Right. It was like there has to still be this feeling and this knowing that we're making a difference along the way. As long as we're doing that for ourselves, our customers, and then obviously our shareholders, the that feels good and that feels right. I've got plenty of folks that I've talked to who they're different. They have a number. They're chasing a billion dollars. They're chasing whatever they're chasing. Right. And it's a different set of outcomes. So that wasn't my personal aim or game in that scenario. It was also to see and be aware that how far can I take the business and I want it to be sustainable without me. You see this often when the entrepreneur, the founder, exits, the business itself just collapses. It doesn't have the ability because we didn't get it to a place where there's enough people inside that business that really understood it that they could continue the mission without someone. I do believe entrepreneurs have capacities, but they also have interest. At one point in my career, I thought, well, wouldn't it be cool if you realized that you could take a business from zero to a billion and then you start to understand the difference required along the way? Right. And as an entrepreneur, I don't really love operating the business. I just don't. That's not where I get I think other people do that really well and they should do that. But if. There's something that's around the growth and the gain side of it and figuring out the right changes in the model. That's where I'm energized. That's where I feel like I'm being the best version of self. So it's also getting that awareness of where are you going to be best suited to take the business? And at some point in time be prepared that maybe you're not right for the business anymore, and that's okay. Right. The business, hopefully, if you did it well and did it right, it's sustainable without you, and you can step away and go do the next thing that you need to do that continues to make the impact that you're looking to make. So that was my selfish version of what we were trying to achieve and where I was trying to go with it. I think you can then start to go to lots of other places. I listened to your podcast with Ray and Hardick from Jumpstart Ventures this morning. You brought up the Drive capital. They keep track of how many millionaires they've made. My moment in time, listening to Jeffrey was, what about the leaders we created? Can we put because that to me, is more important than the millionaires that we did? Because those folks lay not be millionaires, but they have the skill set and the ability to go make an impact in our community. And they can help build and be operators of other businesses, too. Land I think that to me, is, again, personal a better level of scale and impact than, hey, we created some millionaires. Because we did. But at the same time, I don't know that that's how I would personally measure it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:26:19]:

Yeah, that resonates with me. There are a lot of more ecosystem challenges to surmount with just access to capital and things generally. But I know that resonates very much.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:26:30]:

Yeah, well, we could spend some time on this, right. Because I don't think capital is our limiter. It's a limiter. I don't think that's the limiter. I think it's actually the awareness to the entrepreneur community here in Northeast Ohio that inside these businesses are so many other great businesses that can be emerged and pulled out. If you think about the sheer volume of what's required. We did this with Aaron Grossman's business, right when we spun off an employee stream. And Aaron's been really kind to me publicly. He's made statements around, he would have never done that without Chris Snyder because he and I have been long term friends. And we were talking one day land he's like, hey, I've got this thing. I want to do this thing. But I don't think we can do it. We couldn't do it this way. I was like, Well, Aaron, you can we did it a Vox. You can pull it out. You can set it up. It's already got customers. It's already got some employees. You could go find some good operators, leaders here. We'll find the capital. But those are like the whole if you think about how many people can start something in a garage without customers, without an understanding, without market fit versus all those businesses that sit inside companies around Northeast Ohio, I think. We have an opportunity. I'm working on two or three of them right now to help entrepreneurs do that because I think it's so much I don't know, more foundational path. And then the capital shows up confidently. Right, because you got somebody that's already got ten customers and some success. Land an entrepreneur that guides it, like Aaron Grossman on top of it. So anyways, I think that's what we lack. I think we lack the understanding that you could do that. Land there's a structure and a process to do that with great confidence.

Jeffrey Stern [00:28:02]:

And what does that process look like? How do you do that in a repeatable, reliable way? And maybe that's a good segue to speak to some of the work that you're doing more recently with Impact Architects and kind of the productization of these operating systems.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:28:19]:

Yeah, it's a concept. It's not been proven yet. Right.

Jeffrey Stern [00:28:25]:

I like it, though.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:28:26]:

I live in a world of testable theories until I know more. Right. That's the way I approach it. So my concept with this is we start workshops. Like, we go to the entrepreneur communities, the EOS, the YPOs, because even some of these are not just EO sized businesses, they're YPO sized businesses. But we show them through a workshop, kind of a framework to start to think about and know that there is a community out there of capital. Because what happens with these businesses is they're making good EBITDA, they're funding it, but they don't want to put all of that at risk. Right. So it's slowly growing. But if they had another $2 million right, and they already have customers and the concepts beyond just a whiteboard, right. Then if they knew how to do that, but otherwise the list seems like distraction, it seems heavy. It's all those things that they don't have someone who's done it before tell them how to do it. But I think there's a method to that and we could teach it and coach it in a workshop and the you get people to raise their hands and say, jeffrey, I'd love to do that. I've got one I'm trying to work on. I told you about the other day where it's a really good company who wants to get a SaaS product to do a very specific thing. And in session they basically say, hey, that sounds great. Why don't you help us do that? Because we have the funding, we have the customers. We don't really want to run and figure out all the software. Right. And those are moments in our opportunity to say, what could be better? You've got the clients, you've got the infrastructure, you've got capital. You don't have all the capital because they don't want to put all their capital at risk in that moment, right. But they can be an awesome place to jump off from. So I think we do this, some of that in introductions at scale through workshops, and we start to come out with kind of this is the three to ten steps. You have to think about gate yourself along the way. And there has to be people like you, I others that have been in those places before that can then say we'll raise our hand to help either operate, coach, advise right. To make sure the entrepreneurs come through that process at the right place and approach.

Jeffrey Stern [00:30:18]:

So working our way towards the present here. How does the Vox story end? And you mentioned trying to constantly figure out what comes next. How are you thinking about that at the time and what ultimately transpired?

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:30:33]:

Yeah. So I think the Vox story ends with, I think, frustration on my side, on the investor side, because I spent a lot of time talking to a lot of customers at the end of 17 and the market didn't show up. The mobile device management market, never the software side showed up, but the actual mobile management market never came. The gardener stuff, I mean, we built a global joint venture. I was in like five different continents. I just came back from Vietnam. I went and spent time in the market. And it was never going to be what gardener said it was going to be, never was going to be what we thought it was going to be. But the thing that I did believe was it was going to be around this work from anywhere, coupled with security, which is a different change from what we were doing at the time. Right. We had to think differently about it. And I think that going back to the board at the end of 17 and pitching, hey, I think we need to think about this differently and let's talk about what that does for us. I think we need to be more software than service. We have to press on this. And I think that that point they didn't agree, which is okay. That happens so often with entrepreneurs and investors. And you bought into a thesis, a thesis, is this, right? And then if you're looking at the market, I think you said something on the podcast this morning with Hardix, like, the business we start is often the business that's not at the end. Something like that. I'm paraphrasing Jeffrey. Right. And I believe that to be true. Land that was my moment of going. This is not going where we thought it was going to go, but it can still use all the assets to become something that's more truly around the work from anywhere than we were at on the mobile side. And we need a bend of security that we didn't have. And if you think about what's happened in the MSP managed security market. Oh my God, that has been such a good market from end of 17 to now. It's with its own challenges. Right. But I think it's been different anyway. But in that scenario, it's like, okay, so then if that's true and that's where our shareholders, our business partners, want to continue to take the business, I'm not the right person for it. Like, somebody else needs to do this because this business needs to be operated differently because I want to still go build and do something. This isn't the thing that I want to continue to go do. It's a very hard, emotional moment for a founder to walk away from a business. But also you have to sometimes, again, recognize that has seasons and the season that it's in is different than the season that I want to be in. So now it's time to figure out that transition. And I've coached so many entrepreneurs since the with all kinds of empathy through this process, even when you sell the business. Land I was fortunate enough along the way to got coached early on that you have the opportunity to do secondary and take some capital out along the way. You should do that. And I've shared that story with lots of entrepreneurs because your exit might not be clean from the standpoint of there's cash on the other side of it, but if you've actually done well to position yourself in secondary along the way, then it's less of that initial financial impact, because it still may be another five years before that business ever has a financial exit. And I still have capital tied up and everything else. Right. But that's okay because again, I think about that as a longer term piece of the portfolio.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:28]:

So as you kind of navigate that transition and turn your lens towards your own future, how do you approach it? What are the ideas you're exploring? What are the things that are exciting you at that point?

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:33:43]:

Well, best advice I got, there's lots of transition coaches out there, executive coaches, but I got a great one. His name is John Dreary. Land so I called John, said, here's where I'm at, I'm transitioning. John's done a lot of work with EO YPO type of founders and transition because if people sell their businesses and I had a conversation, I was coaching one of my clients, and he's got an opportunity to sell his business. And I'm like, what are you going to do after you sell it? Like, you're 40 years old, you're going to sell it. You're going to have enough money to be comfortable. But now what do you do? Land so there's really a moment because we always think about the build, the scale, the exit, and then what, right? And the it is really kind of a redefinition. Land when you've had so much of your life kind of poured into something that you're no longer a part of. So john was great for me because we went through this whole set of exercises, but at the end of the exercise was really a decision filter. You'll appreciate this. We called Mine because you have to name it because all important things have names. Mine was called an impact filter because part of my longevity play was I just wanted to continue to figure out how to create impact. And so you come up with your non negotiables, the things that you're not going to do anymore. One of mine was I had traveled so much for Vox, I didn't want to travel, like very limited travel. So I had to think about that as I went to build something and then really get down to what drives your passion, right? And so for me, it is the growth side of things. I love working with growth entrepreneurs, but there are plenty of good businesses that want to grow 2% a year, and they should. But that's not for me. That's not what gets me excited, gets me passionate and drives me so we came up with these non negotiables. We came up with these kind of things that I wanted to see myself talked about. Kind of like, what stage and age would you actually retire? This was the first time I actually understood this because for so long, jeffrey I would sit down with our financial planner, Land, my wife, and he'd go, okay, so what age you're going to retire? Land I literally become full of anxiety because I was like, oh my God, what am I going I'm going to sit on a beach and medicaid? Am I going to play golf? What am I going to do, right? And so at some point, working with John, he's like, well, what if you didn't retire? You just did things differently. And I was like, is that an option? He's like, yeah. I said, Chris, plenty of people still coach advise. Like they just choose differently what level they're going to do and who they do it for. And it was that actual understanding of what do most people want? And there's experiences the freedom of choice, right? So we then set upon to design it such that I could understand my freedom of choice. What age and stage would I be in as those choices became more opportunities for me to think about making those decisions. So that became this thesis that we created, that it was like, look, I think I want to advise Land coach Land. I want to actually find some companies to invest in and feel like not only the capital is at lay land working hard, but that I can help them make a difference in their journey. So that was the initial thesis of it. I didn't know what the advisement meant, jeffrey because I was like, people call you all the time so we could be on board of advisors, and sure you can, but most of the time there's really no little to no income that's generated from it. Right. And so still raising a family, I'm not in a position where I'm not going to have income. So you have to figure out like, well, what does that mean? And through folks like Aaron Grossman and others that have done the EOS thing, they're like, well, there's a whole community out there of these US implementers that if they come in, they help companies obviously get compensated for it and you can go about it. So I said about I think I talked to 30 US implementers in a very short period of time. I talked to 50 executives because I love data and started to catalog, like, what's this whole thing look like? Could it be for me as part of that advising role that I wanted to have for companies, which that set me upon joining the EOS implementer community in the end of 2018.

Jeffrey Stern [00:37:31]:

And EOS is the entrepreneurial operating system.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:37:36]:

Yeah, again, we were talking about business operating systems earlier, right. And they're so similar in their nature. Most of these folks that wrote something, Gino Wickman, I think he studied under Vern Harness for a while. Verne studied under somebody else, and they always have a take at a very specific place that they put it. And the EOS operating system has kind of got its sweet spot, in my opinion, from like ten employees, really about the 250, some people might say 500, but I've seen it really be effective up to about 250 people. But again, there's all these different pieces of parts, like I mentioned Lynchiones a little bit earlier.

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:11]:

So pursuing the EOS consulting kind of approach, I'm really curious how kind of following your own model of where you can extract things under the umbrella and free them to be something larger, more impactful, where where the path with 90 kind of converges and how those two things come to mesh. And what 90 is.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:38:40]:

I also want to say because you could say, well, Chris, if you did something like Advantage Lencioni and all the stuff you did box, why didn't you just go back to do that again? And the reason is because you need a product. What EOS has done well is they productized it, right? And they created a community of people out there helping implement and do those types of things. So it was like, gosh, you can have some definition and some credibility when you start to have the conversation. Otherwise, it's just kind of Chris's approach to operating systems and how's that going to land, it's a little harder, right. But to say, hey, this is a system that's been implemented 10,000 times by all these people, you probably read the books, whatever the case is, right? So there's credibility. Credibility is required to get to trust. Trust is required to get to the agreement to let me actually help you in this situation itself. So that's why I didn't try to invent the own operating system. It's like, hey, look, someone's already done this before. They've done it well, let's just go down that path and use it. But getting back to my original thesis of advising and investing in some other companies was, if I'm going to do this, there's got to be a tool set, right? This whole coaching thing is interesting, but there has to be software that allows it to happen. So that set me upon my journey to go find software that was related to the operating system. And hence at that time, 90 was called Traction with an X kind of a play on, obviously the Traction, the book from the US side, and the there was another company called Traction Tools, but both of those organizations eventually Traction became 90 after it got a license to use the trademark terms from US worldwide. So I was to spend time with both companies, ended up spending more time with 90. Mark Abbott, who's the founder of that organization, he's a product led person. And for me, if you focus on product first versus sales, then you can actually figure out sales. But if you focus on sales first and then product, it's typically a mess. That's been my experience. Right. So love founders that actually they're obsessing just about their product continually, and not just giving the users what they asked for, but understanding what they need and then understanding how to scale that software. And Mark is one of those founders. So I think when I met him, they were probably like 30 or 40,000 MRR. It's going back ways. This is 2019. So I first became an advisor to that business and then an investor. And then in 2020, beginning of it, it was really kind of those moments where the company needed more support. Land one of the things that I've been post, Fox especially, and talking to people is this whole opportunity for capital efficient builds. Like, how do you build these companies differently? One of the things I disagree with lots of VCs is like, you take money and then out of the gates they press upon you, how fast can you spend it? Right? And it's like, I don't think that's the I understand the leverage that you're trying to create, but if you don't need a full time CFO, don't take a full time CFO. If you can't really afford to have a person this full time position, figure it out. Fractionally. And so Mark and I were really aligned around that approach, especially as the early stages of 90 we were building. And so that really I took on the fractional CFO role and eventually took on fractional channel sales role. Right. And helping build those things out. And I could do those things in kind of real time because I was using the software in my coaching practice. Right. It was a natural kind of layover to the things I wanted to do. And things I wanted to be involved in.

Jeffrey Stern [00:41:56]:

Yeah, I love that. It's an entrepreneurial endeavor that really is in service of other entrepreneurs. What does the product look like and feel like? What is the actual solution?

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:42:07]:

So let's go back to Concepts, tools and disciplines. Concepts are the books that you're reading. The tools, they will typically put out there in a PDF. Right. It's going to be a four quadrant mental model. And they'll be like, hey Jeffrey, you write some things in this box. In that box, right. And you're going to be, that was really cool land then. Okay, now what do you do with it? Where's the discipline come out, the action to take? Well, that's where the software comes in. Right. It's like both the visibility layer, the transparency, the KPIs we talked about earlier, even the vision side. Where are your core values? People ask about culture and it's like, well, culture has got really two main drivers. It's got the rituals, the things that you do, and really the frequency you do them. And then it's the artifacts, the things that you create that remind us of the culture that we desire. Right. And so the software is an enabler of those things, both the rituals, the meetings that we have, and then obviously the artifacts because it takes a digital flavor of those things that you're going to put in front of everybody in the company. So we make sure that we can drive the culture at scale. So it's really the enabler of it 90s. It's a configurable operating system software. We obviously have a license with us, but we still have people in there who are running Scaling Up, they're running Pinnacle, they're running all these and sometimes they're running back to my box days amalgamation of this stuff, where they love what EOS does in this area, but they also love the flywheel land hedgehog. Right. And the EOS approach. And most of these things you'll hear people use terms like EOS Pure, which is great if that's what you want, but there's plenty of people who then extend beyond EOS and they're looking for other tools or maybe just a totally different tool set. So the software itself is an enabler of those business operating systems, depending upon which flavor that you're actually trying to put inside your organization.

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:43]:

And in this context, I'll ask the question again, your own question. What does success look like here? How do you know that you've achieved the impact that you're trying to with this organization?

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:43:57]:

Yeah, so this is one of the things that Mark and I have aligned around. Right. So if you ask him that question, he's not saying a billion dollars. He is truly. And we're lined here. We're chasing as much impact as possible. We share our data pretty openly. So today we're almost 100 team members. We've got 6000, the hundred companies in the system, 93,000 paying users, 160,000 users overall in 28 countries. And we are looking to continue to grow and build this business for the kind of the impact of the entrepreneur community, but in general, to help. We believe that work is something that you should love to do. And I know we've have this debate with lots of people when we say that because they don't believe it. But if people are in the pursuit of being the best version of self, we think we can help them do that at work and actually enjoy and hopefully love what they do. And they feel safe land, they feel those things, and we can't do that for them. But we think we can help that whole process by giving software that allows people, those entrepreneurial leaders to go out and do the things they want to do. If you ask me, what's my mandate? How will I know I did it well and did it right at the end? I want to really believe that I helped leaders build great organizations. Right? And you can build one great organization by yourself, or you can figure out how to help. Right now, 6300 organizations be better versions. And that's what we're trying to do. We brought on Insight Partners in August of 2021 as our series ABC. So they invested $20 million in the organization in August of 21. That capital efficient is still really important to us, Jeffrey. I mean, we've grown to the place where we're just a little over 1.1 million in MRR, and we still have 16 million plus on the balance sheet. So we think if you look at that capital efficiency the dollar invested in, the dollar created, we're still kind of doing really well. Our net revenue retention rate is 135%, our Churn 7% annually. So I think that we're still instrumenting this business quite well along the way. But we're chasing what we take as humbly public. Most likely, that's what Insight would like us to do at some point in time. We don't have a time frame to it. I'd like to comment. I think I agree with I think it was hardick, or maybe it was Ray or even you. It was like you think about building the business from one round to the next. And for us, we plan that accordingly. We like to have two years of cash on the books, operating cash on the books. When we go out to raise. We've done some things interesting. We're having conversations. Obviously, Insights will lead our next round. But lots of other kind of the larger the Tiger globals, the K ones right. Of the world to continue to help us grow the organization.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:32]:

Wow. That's incredibly exciting. I feel like, I don't know, 90 is a little under the radar. How do you think about the land and, like, talent and recruitment land, you know, the the kind of I don't know, the the Cleveland, the proximity component to the to the whole equation.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:46:51]:

So we we have we have probably six employees in Cleveland, but we don't have more probably in any of the markets. Like, Mark has a house in Atlanta, so I think he's got probably six employees there. He also has a house in Salt Lake because he goes back and forth. Probably six employees there. Right. But otherwise 100 are distributed all over the place. And that's the way we think about we're a work from anywhere organization. We're not looking to build offices. We're looking to kind of build hubs of people interacting together. We're trying to find all the talent in the right place. We're about to release kind of a whole new brand strategy in January, so you'll see kind of that. But we're also back when I first worked at McMaster Car Supply Company out of college, they're a multibillion dollar family owned organization that most people don't know about, and we want people to know about 90, but we're also not going to go. Maybe one time to me was if the will doesn't surface, it doesn't get harpooned. So it's not for us about just putting billboards around airports. It's really just putting the marketing and the effort in the right place to have the right impact that we want. So you'll see plenty on the LinkedIn side for us from hiring because we've been doing a lot of it, but we put ourselves into the communities where if you ask EO people about 90, they'll know. If you ask Vistage about 90, they'll know. So we go and put ourselves in the communities that we want to be part of, that we both have our clients in. But it's also on a recruitment side, we put ourselves into those communities as well. So it's very hopefully intentional in what we do and how we put our brand in the market. I won't say you'll never see airport billboards for us because it could happen at some point, but it's just not what we're doing. That's not who we are.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:25]:

Yeah. So how now, having gone through this exercise, thinking about your own future, do you think about choice and allocation of your time amongst different projects at this point?

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:48:38]:

It's a constant battle. It really is, right? I mean, it's a battle. Land my wife is really good about reminding me of the commitment side of things, meaning that it's easy to commit. Like, I get inspired. I'll meet an entrepreneur, and they'll ask me for help, and I'll be like, oh, my God, that'd be awesome. I love what you're doing. I want to support you. Yes. I'll be on your board. And then you sit back and you're like, oh, my God, that's another how many hours that you have to go figure out, right. To honor the request and to do it well, it's a constant battle. I struggle at times with, should I be putting more time into 90 right. Versus the work that we do at Impact Architects? And part of the. Challenge there is. I still love what we do in a session room. The entrepreneurial energy that gets created when we're coaching clients in these full day sessions and annuals right now right now we're doing two day annuals is incredible. It's the amount of change and impact that you feel, not that you did it. Like you help people find their way to it and that's the appreciation to be in the room when it happens versus kind of like building great software. Yes, want to do that too, but I don't want to lose the opportunity to be in the room when it happens and feel like we're making a difference at that level, but also the level of the software. So I'm still kind of riding that way. I split probably three quarters or three fifths of my time is at 90. Then other two is typically in a session room coaching clients and Impact Architects. Now we've got five coaches, so you recognize some of the names. So Jim Havlin joined me probably 19. Meg Mayhew joined in 2020. She also leads our People architects business. John Carpenter from the Able side and Box mobile side joined in April. And then recently, Gerald Hetrick came on to manage our SaaS practice at Impact Architects. So the good news is I think we're building kind of a really good firm that can go we like to refer to as a growth advisory firm. It's not just, yes, we do operating system work like us, but we're also making sure that we're helping organizations do more at all different levels, like the people side of the equation, the growth side of the equation, operating those types of things.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:38]:

I want to ask and see if there are any others because you mentioned one where you maybe disagree with the conventional company building wisdom that maybe is prescribed from VCs. But are there other areas where you've, through your own experience, come to an intuition that maybe goes against what is kind of pushed as best practice?

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:51:02]:

Well, here's one of my favorites, and I've had this argument, especially in enterprise sales, more than anything else, is we're going to go find a person and we're going to hire that person in the market with a book of business, put that in air quotes, and they're going to come on. And that's how we're going to hit this hockey stick growth. We're going to drop them in all the NFL cities around the country and that's going to work. And I've never seen it work. Not one time has it worked. Now, it could work to a varying degree because you get lucky, the person doesn't have a non compete and they steal business from their prior place of service, which seems like a really taking kind of thing to do, right? But I just haven't seen it work. And it's an impatient move. Land often comes with someone taking capital because they're trying to figure out how to really accelerate the system versus leaning into the building in those markets. Right. Leaning into the harder work of, like, we have to seed the market. We have to know, we have to do all the top of the funnel, work the right way to pull it through, and we have to be realistic about the acceleration of how that comes out. So that like, hey, we're just going to go hire a bunch of salespeople with books of business, and they're going to borrow them from the previous place they worked and pull them over to us. I don't know. It just never sits well. All right with me. And I haven't seen it work, but it gets played a lot. I mean, it's been in those rooms when it happened.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:10]:

I've definitely heard that one.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:52:13]:

I just think what they're solving for because it's a lot of work to see to market remotely we did this a lot of box. We'd see markets remotely means you had to fly into them, get them to a customer base, and then hire the local salesperson to actually start to really run that. That's a different approach, and it's challenging versus just, we're going to go hire a bunch of expensive account executives who, unfortunately, most of those folks have made a living at changing companies. They're good at it, which is unfortunate to the business because I haven't seen it yielded results.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:43]:

Well, I really appreciate your whole perspective on leadership and culture, and I kind of wanted to just leave a little space to are there things that you think we should talk about here that we haven't touched on yet that you find very important in reflecting on the work that you've done?

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:53:02]:

Yeah. Let's talk about Team Health for a minute. I love in the annuals, we spend at least half a day on Team Health. Right. And we talk about the hard work of team building is around people being vulnerable enough. You can go to, like, Renee Brown's work. Right. And the vulnerability, if you give ourselves the space to it, often what people will do is they'll call that the softer side of it, and they'll blow by those moments. Right. They won't let people unpack their humanity in front of the others because it's hard work to do. It's emotional work to do. But if you do that work, then the rest of the work becomes clear because you and I now have a bridge to the conversation, because you have empathy, because you understand me better and I understand you. And I can have a more direct, civil conversation because we like healthy conflict. Every business growing needs healthy conflict. But so often this has been put to the wayside, and I think we were seeing some more movement by the generation that's coming in. Like a lot of family businesses, I've come into, Jeffrey, the preceding parents of those businesses do not have a lot of empathy. They have built those businesses, and they've been more transactional in their nature. Land Command. Land control. Not saying all, but a lot of them. And then you've got this next generation of leader that are coming through the family business who have experienced that. Land they've seen the people not really feel like it's worth fighting for, the people that are taking those paychecks and they're trying to make a difference. And that really begins at the leadership team and being vulnerable with each other and coming through these team health exercises and kind of open each other up a bit, right, to go into it. Land I don't think it's practiced better by some than others, but there's got to be space land time for it. And once someone's experienced that being done, that's not just Kumbaya holding hands. That's not what we're talking about. It's not trust falls off the back of or whatever. Right. This is real work, right. With kind of real instructional discipline to do it and make sure you bring the human in the room every time so we can have as productive interactions as possible.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:56]:

Right. On the flip side of it, the consequences, the implications of not doing it are disengagement from your team, I think.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:55:06]:

Yeah. One of the things I've been doing in workshop fashion that I am passionate about. So at 91 of our BHAGs is we want to be one of the most trusted organizations in the world. That's a Bhag, right? And so everything we do is designed around trust. We have lots of data from lots of people, but we have to make sure that they trust us. And so we started asking our questions about how do you measure trust. This is mark abbott, the founder. Actually went and spent a lot of time on this and started kind of blogging on it a while back. This is kind of proceeding into pandemic. And so there's lots of ways to think about trust. Even Brene Brown has a whole framework for it as well. But we tried to keep it simple because our customers like simplicity. And so we came up with a trust score. Like, literally, we can score trust. And so the way we do it is even like the two of us could score each other on trust. Right now, we think it has three components. The first is character. So either you trust my character or not. Now, sometimes it's just you introduced by somebody else, and I extend you trust of character based upon that introduction I have that actually happen on a call today, somebody introduced me to somebody else, and immediately you could tell I was being trusted because of that interaction of the person's character of beyond. Now they have to start to assess my character as well. We're going to have that exchange. And if you don't have character, trust, it's binary. It's either one or zero, right. Land we know zero times anything is zero. So it doesn't matter. This game is over. The trust score is zero, right? If it can't get beyond giving a one to that. So that's my character side. And then I got to go into competency land. Competency is in our relationship, whether it's personal, professional, we have some expectations of that relationship. And you're going to try to judge me on how competent am I on delivering those expectations back. That's why we clarity in relationships. Like, if it's casual, that's great, but in a personal side, it's like you've got those folks that are right or die in your relationship. And if you wake up one day, you need somebody to pick up and get there to you, you know that they're going to do that for you, right? But you've set that degree of relationship in place and you have 100% competency belief, and they're doing those things for you, right? And work is the same way. That's why we love accountability, responsibility type charts, because we can set those relationships. Understand your five to seven roles and responsibilities and the metrics, and we go, okay, so now I'm going to score you from zero to 100 on how do we think how competent you are. If you have no competency in my life, you're back to zero, zero times. Again, we're there, right? But otherwise we're going to go ahead and we're going to put a number on that. Let's call it 90 for argument's sake, right? And so we give ourselves a 90 on the competency side and then finally we move to connection. And connection is my favorite. And this is where the pandemic started to fall apart for us because it has three aspects of three components to it. The first one is how frequent do you and I connect. So if we don't see each other for six months, we don't feel very connected, and we probably don't feel as trusting because I don't really know where you're at right now. Right? So the first one is frequency. The next one's duration. If every time we see each other, we see each other frequently, but it's five minutes and it's sports, news and weather, that's not going to be very good, right? We don't feel very connected. Like, I see you, but I don't see you very long. Then the third part is depth, right? So I've got frequency, duration and then depth. And depth is beyond sports, land, news and weather. Like, how open will I be with you? This goes back to those team health exercises. Will I be vulnerable with you? Will I say the honest truth to you? Will I do that? Put myself out there, right? To be questioned, to be challenged. And if I do that, then I can actually get the depth side of that. And so frequency, duration, land, depth got really challenged in the pandemic because one of the things we were told about this along the way is this two dimensional scenario that you and I are having right now because we're not in a room together hurts the depth. People still want to feel that. So the scoring at times, because we would go back and try to understand how they got to the score, they got to we were really finding that connection piece with frequency, duration and depth starting to fail. So we use this tool of trust scoring. So especially as organizations have gone like ours at 90, as we start to go work from anywhere, you can be 100 people and all over the place. How do we think about trust? How do we score it? And this is hard work, by the way. This is when there's team health. We don't do right away, but eventually we do because I have to put a number in front of you. Then we're going to talk about it. And it's not about the number being right or 100. It's about us having the dialogue, about why we feel it is where it's at. And it could be. We're both comfortable. It's an 85 overall. You and I can say, hey, that's just pretty good for what we expect of our relationship. Or you put it as an 85, I put it as a 60. Clearly something in this this trust side of our relationship is not working right. We got to figure out if we want to, how do we make that better? So the trust workshops have been a ton of fun and we'll have some software that's going to help on this soon. I think it's coming. Hopefully the assessment side hopefully will be next year, maybe Q Two. So we can start letting organizations inside start to measure trust across the organization.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:47]:

That's awesome. I love that.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:59:49]:

Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:49]:

Because it's hard to quantify trust.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [00:59:52]:

It's so hard, right? And I've got people go, how do you know those three things are right? I'm like, we don't know that it's right, but it's good enough to make progress and to have the dialogue land. That's really what we want. I don't want to use that measure to win the game, but I do want to use that measure to win and proceed into the progression of our relationship.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:10]:

Right. And it captures kind of a static moment in time. I'm curious if there is a way that the kind of nature of trust being built in drops and lost in buckets, as Kevin Planck says, kind of like I don't know how to frame that picture, but I think that's probably one of the best analogies. How does the dynamic nature of trust, how do you think about that?

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [01:00:33]:

Yeah. Well, because it's a forever work. It's not like just because you were in 85, we were in 85 tomorrow, but something happens tomorrow. Like I don't live up to my agreement with you to do something that's going to affect your level because it's going back to competency. I didn't do what I said I was going to do, right? So this is not a static thing. It isn't moment in time. And so I think it's okay to start to think about capturing some of that. But now you have a language and a framework to come back to me. When I didn't do that. You're like, hey, man, I know we said 85 last time, but here's what's happened. And the competency in our relationship is affecting trust. I need to give you some feedback. It's like, all right, I can take that, right? Like, it's data driven. We like to lay that you could do. If what you're about to tell me is three things, it's truthful, it's specific, and it's positive, then I can receive it. Truth will mean it is true. You have data. It happened. Right? Specific is you're not using generalities. You're not saying always, forever, never. Those are trigger words for people because they're not true. It's not always. It's not never, it's not forever. Right? But you can be specific with me. And then when you're positive, I can hear it. If you're negative, I'm going to shut down on it. So you kind of coach in those moments, they think about TSD, and then I think we have an opportunity to have that trust conversation or whatever conversation we're going to need to have that's giving each other feedback from it. So it is dynamic. It's a forever work, and let's figure out how to use software to communicate it. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:53]:

So I will ask you the closing question, which is pretty unrelated to everything we've talked about, but it's for your favorite hidden gem in Cleveland. So not necessarily your favorite thing, but for something that other folks may not know about, that you love.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [01:02:07]:

Well, so we love this so much before the Pandemic. So it might not be as hidden anymore because the park system here, I think hopefully most people understand how amazing it is, but it's amazing. It is just amazing. And we were fans long before we've got a pretty active family. We like to do triathlons land run and bike and all that kind of fun stuff. And the park system just is so wonderful to support that. And then obviously with the Pandemic, it became our outlet. Like, we don't sit at home very well, but we could go be in the park system. We discovered as many as possible. I know probably some other people did that, too. But it's like, for us, we kind of knew our circle of the park system, and then we went and expanded it out, especially during the Pandemic with our kids and our dog, just to go hike, right? And just go be outside and just take it all in. I don't know if it's hidden, but to me, you still go out. We see less land, less people now because the Pandemic is over, but it's still amazing. They've done such a great job on it.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:06]:

It is my own as well. Well, Chris, this was incredible. I learned so much. Thank you for coming on and sharing your story.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [01:03:15]:

Yeah, no, I appreciate the time. Thank you and love the work that you're doing. I think if I got to choose a title given to me at some point in time, if someone said, hey, describe Chris, I would be really outside of the Impact things we talked about. I would like to be considered a good storyteller and not a story as in look at the size of the fish or whatever, but as a story is that somebody could actually take, spend time with others, break concepts and experiences down and share. And even when they're not your stories, the value of that is to be able to replicate and share other people's stories along the way too. So I think you're doing a great job of helping tell the stories for us here in the region, especially on the entrepreneurial side. So thank you for that.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:55]:

Yeah, well, thank you for telling good stories. If folks had anything they wanted to follow up with you about or get in touch, what would be the best way for them to do so?

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [01:04:07]:

Well, LinkedIn is always probably an easy one, right? It's just Chris with a K. Snyder. S-N-Y-D-E-R. So that's probably easy. Also, my emails are easy, so it's Chris at 90 IO and then Chris at Impactarchitects IO. Those are two places to find me on email.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:24]:

Awesome. Well, thank you again, Chris.

Kris Snyder (Ninety, Impact Architects, & Vox Mobile) [01:04:26]:

Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:29]:

That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show, so if you have any feedback, please send over an email to Jeffrey at layoftheland FM or find us on Twitter at podlayoftheland or @sterjefe J-E-F-E. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on itunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word. Land continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land.