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My name is Mark Rubin, and I'm a dream weaver. I hope these widgets help you weave your dreams into reality. All right, this story is about organizations. It's about a company that I made, because I like to be organized. So the story goes like this is I had been working for other people for a few years, never really liked it and decided I'd work for myself again, and I was thinking about the kind of thing that I wanted to do. And one of the things I've noticed in life, is this ridiculous question that kids get asked by adults. What do you want to be when you are love? What does that mean? That question? Doesn't mean anything be? What does it mean to be something? Oh, I want to be a doctor. Okay, great. What does it mean to be a doctor? Like when you're when you're a kid, and you're like, I want to be a doctor? Okay? Does it mean that you want to do paperwork for 90% of the day? Does it mean you want to battle with insurance companies to get paid money? Does it mean that you want to scale an office staff of administrative people and deal with like cleaning an office? Like all the requirements of the law that comes with being a doctor? Does it mean that you want to help people heal? Which I think, I think so a lot of kids that would say they want to be a doctor, that would be the main, I think, idea of why they would want to be a doctor or like a firefighter, or like whatever they want to help in different way they think are meaningful, but what happens is when we use the question, what do you want to be? That is a ridiculous question, because what does it mean to be a doctor, if 90% of your time is paperwork, if a person who wants to be this imaginary thing, called a doctor with a imagine is helping people 100% of the time, and then find themselves doing administrative paperwork 90% of the time, and like cleaning bathrooms, like do they imagine, like that's sort of a requirement of the job at different times. Because that's the game of building a business around something where you have to be something. And the other thing about being something is that most things that people want to be are trading time, effort and risk for reward, which is money, which means people are doing work in exchange for money, which is a one to one relationship, which for most people means that if they want twice as much money, they have to work twice as hard, or produce twice as much output. And to me, like, that, was not something that I wanted to do. Okay, be both in terms of like imagining that I would be something I never imagined that sentence like that meant anything. And second, I had never wanted to be constrained by other people. And so what that meant is I had to have my own business. And since as a kid, I always had my own businesses in the neighborhood, like I understood the different parts of business, which is always a marketing, sales operations, HR, finance, admin, and special projects. In every business, I knew enough about those things that I could do those things. So it didn't matter to me what it was that I was going to do, because I wasn't going to be anything. Okay, I was just going to do stuff. And my objective was to do a thing that created as much time as possible for me to do whatever I wanted. And that included in the build up phase, but also later in life. So what that meant, in my analysis of what I wanted to do was I wrote down the characteristics and properties of the thing. That would be a business that will be the ideal business, based on my understanding of where things go wrong in other businesses, and the intricacies of running things and the difficulty of running things and how hard it is, how hard it is to run things because of human beings and their behavior. And so, I thought so what are the what are the five criteria of business that I would do? The first one was simple. And by simple, I wrote simple with a dash as possible. Simple as possible, because and if that was a criteria, like if I thought of any other business that was simpler, anyone, I wouldn't do the previous one. Okay, I would only do the one that was the most simple of that I can think of like the number one. So it couldn't be number two or three how to be the most simple one because I know based on my experiences in previous jobs that complex things are nearly impossible to get right, with a high quality and keep people happy. Because when it's when it's challenging when it's when it's complex, you can take a great person and ruin them with complexity. And I'd seen that in myself. And I'd seen that in other people in organizations that are complex. where the work is complex, like a micro turbine company, or electric utility, leaving software. It's simple. The next one was services, not products. There were two reasons for that. The first reason was with products, you have to maintain inventory, but you have to have like a warehouse with like shelves, put stuff on them, move stuff around forklifts. You know, at the scale, I was imagining big warehouse, lots of forklifts, lots of people in the warehouse, moving things. And that's not fun. You know, I didn't want a big warehouse, which meant I couldn't sell products, which meant I had to do services. And the second reason I want to do services is my wife had a background in marketing products require a sales team. But services mostly require marketing. And since I had like a Marketing Pro, that I was married to, I thought that'd be a good asset to deploy in this new system. So it was simple services. The next one physical location, is I wanted to go to people's houses, I didn't want them to have to come to me, because I heard enough and seen enough about restaurants that, that were great that it failed because of construction projects, or retail locations where the neighborhood changed different ways, or like a highway got put in or some like traffic, you know, variable occurred, where there was major construction for like two years, like who knows what, like, I did not want to rely on the randomness of life, or a channel for customers to come to me. So I wanted to go to them as many vehicles. So it was simple services, mobile business, I wanted labor. That was basically unskilled and trainable. So basically, the doing of the work, whatever it was, I didn't know what I was going to do you not be but do what was I going to do could have been anything. But I wanted to be able to train the people doing the work in a repeatable way. So I could scale. So there was no special skill. There was experience skill. Always is, but But I mean, a special skill, like a special degree or like a certification or like HVAC licensing. I didn't want any of that. No special skills as a laborer. The last one was quirky, because I know there's riches in the niches. And the narrow or niche in a business system, the more you can concentrate in marketing, for example, if you have a business that targets I'm going to say women, you know, age, you know, 40, to 50, to live in a certain distance from the city that have basements and attics that that move every five years, that knowing that niche is super important for coming up with marketing campaigns and tactics, to try to drive awareness into whatever it is that you're doing. Where if you have a broad idea, like like lawn mowing, for example, it's harder to differentiate yourself in those markets, because there's a zillion people doing it. Probably better, faster, less expensive. I don't like to compete on those things. Okay, so basically, having a narrow niche where I could excel, and be the best in the niche is better, in my experience when you're throwing marketing dollars at something. And so quirky is a thing that enables me to understand is it a niche? Is it quirky? And so I wrote these five things down on a piece of paper, I was in San Francisco, all of a sudden, I wrote them down, I'm drinking a cup of coffee in a coffee shop, plotting my next moves, and I saw a one 800 got junk truck drive by which is a junk removal company, lube trucks. And I looked at my piece of paper, and I was like simple services, mobile, you know, those special skills, and it's, it's quirky. And then then there was a campaign on TV for like, gotten milk, which was it was the milk industry was promoting milk. And so it was kind of funny, as as quirky enough, and I ended up buying a bunch of these franchises. Because they're scalable, they're simple. And my experience with this organizations led to this idea of what would be an organization but I would want to have it was the opposite of everything I've experienced over there everything that I didn't like about the other thing I just said what is the opposite I wrote it on a piece of paper and then I saw a truck rocking by and that's why