I can still remember Darryl’s conference room. It’s not your typical setup with walls and a desk. Darryl’s conference room was the bar. And when he invited you to a meeting it wasn’t, lets get a drink happy hour. I mean it started that way, but it always had a purpose.

It was a Thursday. I remember because that meant he had something he wanted to say. Friday beers were reserved for bullshitting, but a mid week beer was something different.

I never knew how to act with Darryl. He was more than twice may, been through Vietnam, and part of two mega hit startups in Tonka Toys and Watchguard. This was my first job let alone my first CEO role. But somehow Darryl was a believer in what we were building, despite our crappy office and modest success.

The first beer is the happy one, catching up and pretending that a sixty something year old and a 28 year old have anything in common. But by the second beer he lets you know what he’s thinking. Being a military guy he lives by the chain of command. He respects you but also lets you know when you aren’t cutting it.

At some point he looked at me and said…you need to be more consistent.

I started typing notes into my phone, waiting for him to add more. He didn’t.

I was relieved that’s all he had to say. But then I grew more concerned….what the hell was he talking about?

I actually didn’t know. And being the immature CEO that I was, I didn’t ask.

Fast forward a few years and during my time running Contour I never fully understood what he meant. I heard him but never got it.

It’s been ten years since we had that beer. I understand what he meant.

It’s taken a while. Perhaps it was becoming a husband or a father or a second time CEO. Or perhaps it’s just being the old guy in the room, but I can see in others what Darryl meant.

Being consistent is hard. It’s hard as a parent and it’s especially hard in running a company. Most of the time you have no idea what you’re doing, piecing it together a you go. You’re trying to sound purposeful, but on an undefined path it’s hard to be consistent.

Most entrepreneurs are creative in some way. To generate an idea takes some level in ingenuity. And so being consistent feels like it can be in direct conflict to the craziness people need to create because it’s boring.

Over the years I’ve found the opposite to be true. Discipline has resulted in more space for me to create while providing the consistency others around me expect.

If you are running a team everything you do gets replicated. So if you are random in your cadence, the team will be random. If you don’t document your work, they won’t either. The list goes on, but your approach on the details speakd more to your consistency then anything else you do.

Everyone has their own process for being consistent. Here is what works for me…

My Day

I try to start it the same time every day, before 6am. This isn’t a work thing, it’s a life thing. It takes a week but your body adjusts and appreciates the regularity. This has gotten harder with kids unpredictable nights, but it still works. By the time everyone starts their day I’ve already accomplished something.

I use Evernoteand start my day with a short list of what I need to work on next. I’ve tried blocking time as they show in 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People. It became too complicated so I went back to a simple list. It provides focus and relief when each item is completed.

I took email and slack off my phone. I’m on my laptop enough. I could never resist not clicking the icon and just checking what’s going on.

I use Calendly and block out the same 3 hours, three days a week, for any phone calls. This channels interruptions to the same window of time. I don’t schedule anything on Thursdays or Fridays, it’s my chance to think.

I make it home for dinner. It matters for my family and in return it matters for me. It’s hard to come home, cook dinner, and have energy but the habit has helped a lot.

I try not to open my laptop after 8pm when the kids go to bed. If I do I stay up and lose my morning rhythm. Waking up early has forced more discipline to when I go to bed.

My Process

I don’t have meetings. I have sessions. It’s a mindset for me that makes me think about how we make each workout better. Whether 1:1 or with a group we run a session together no different than if we held sports practice.

Agenda structures rarely change. We practice getting good at running the same types of sessions for several months before we evolve the structure. Growth in team size is what impacts these changes.

We start Moment with a 10am daily stand up. This was company wide up to 30 people, now it’s by team. It’s the same time every day regardless of your time zone. It’s our chance to connect with each other, even if for just a few minutes.

We have one leadership team session every Monday at 9am pst for 30-60 minutes. Each team replicates this structure with a weekly session of their own. The agendas doesn’t change much. We review our numbers, last week, this week, and schedule changes. What we do as a team, starts the company cadence for the week.

I hold 1:1 sessions with each member of my team. I try to never miss them as this is their time and my job is to be there for them. They set the agenda and I can add to it. I didn’t start this until about two years into the company when we built teams and leads.

We have a company session every other Tuesday for 1.5-2 hours. It started as planning our next two weeks and now it’s my chance to address the team and the team leads chance to engage the whole company. This isn’t a beers and BS session, it’s practice for playing at higher level.

We have a board meeting every six weeks. I used to think this was dumb. I’ve come to realize that a leadership team needs it. It forces us to step back, analyze what’s working, and discuss that with the board. We don’t make presentation decks, just write a running google doc with our analysis and topics to discuss. We share that whole doc with the team after the meeting. They get the same information the board does, no secrets.

We run the team on trimesters, not quarters. Quarters happen too fast. By the time you plan one, it’s nearly over. With trimesters we can make bigger goals. Most important we can afford to take the whole team offsite for week to kick off a new trimester. These sessions have let us knock down nearly all the walls that live between us, while working to build, shape, and define our culture. We document every offsite so new teammates can understand our past.

I’ve sent 70 business updates over the first five years of Moment. They started every other week and over time they have moved out to 1x per month. They force me to step back and think about the business. They aren’t list of stuff we’re going to do. They include short paragraphs of analysis with snapshots of data that we are learning. Everyone receives this same update via email…all the employees, investors, and board members.

I write everything down and require our team to do the same. We start every kind of project with a brief. It makes us define the why, what, when, and how. We still struggle to read them in detail, but we’re getting better.

Every team has a data dashboard and nearly everyone on the team does a short weekly update that is shared company wide. We teach early on how to read and analyze data. It’s equivalent to learning proper technique for passing a ball.

My Weakness

Slack makes it too easy to read, follow, and comment on everything. I’m still working to improve at communicating less. In particular being better at grouping my thoughts into one post instead of a string of comments.

Being Inconsistent

Things I see people do when they are inconsistent.

They change their team session times. For whatever reason they aren’t able to hold the same session at the same time every week.

They use complicated charts because they think lines and bars are boring. If lines and bars are boring they assume people won’t read them.

They don’t document their work. Whether it’s the structure of a Trello card, a brief or a process they do it in their head and then have to explain it to everyone else. You should assume nearly everything you do needs to scale beyond you in the future and therefore however you run things today is how the next person will run it.

They add more than one piece at a time. Everything you add, whether a feature, an idea or a market takes practice to learn how to do it well. You want to build into complexity over time.

….All of this is easier to do when things are going well. When shit hits the fan is when your consistency really gets tested.