Jeff is joined by longtime friend and former coworker Alex Medeiros to discuss Alex's new role as Head of Enablement at Limeade.

Topics discussed are :

• What is CSM Enablement?

• Importance of Success Criteria and targeting the right customers

• Build trust all along the onboarding journey

• Handoff and Onboard Readiness

And many other nuggets that Alex has picked up along the way!

You can listen to this podcast here.

Transcript:

Jeff  01:14

Alright, so I'm gonna I just hit record, and now we are recording for everybody. I think we just had our, as I said, mutual admiration society comparing each other speaking voices because we both hate our own speaking voice. So

Alex Medeiros  01:27

yeah. It's a tough gig, it's, you know, if you're, if you're a perfectionist, it's, you know, the worst thing you could do is listen, go back and listen to recordings of yourself, because there's nothing you could do about it. And

Jeff  01:41

now, you're just on that note, can you just tell your glasses just Oh, no, I'm just terrible. So Alex, I should say we did work together. I always like to start the podcast up podcast off, not the podcast, that's a different thing. But with how I know the guest. And so Alex is it was a very dynamic young man when I started a little place called Virgin pulse, which is actually one of my favorite stories, because it was, for me, one of the first implementation teams created in the history of SAS disciple, as I like to say, I hadn't heard of it, right? That's right. Do you know how to hold it? It's probably good for our listeners, you know, how that whole thing kind of happened? Like, like the whole, why there was an implementation team created and stuff like that, because they will get into your enablement stuff and everything like that.

Alex Medeiros  02:31

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, like all companies starting off, it's everyone is like a catch all for everything. Yeah, that's exactly, you know, the the customer success managers were managing the customer, they were also implementing the customer they had, you know, they had the switchboard to

Jeff  02:51

everything, oh, my god, so hard.

Alex Medeiros  02:54

Totally. And as you grow as an organization, you know, that becomes harder and harder to really focus on strategy, and be the operational front. And then that's when we sort of made a decision, hey, this is not scalable, right? So let's hire a rock star to lead our implementation team.

Jeff  03:15

And then hire me if that rock star doesn't accept it. Either way, you know, the head, and actually, you're selling yourselves a little bit short, the company was going through a replatforming. So there was the need to know how the old system was set up, which was actually pretty hard. It was a lot of configuration, lots of business. So everyone's like, Oh, that's great. You wear a Fitbit and you get your stuff tracked. And you get all these recommendations. And why if you knew what went into that it was like Twitter type of technology, like you needed that data flying in, you need to configure this means that stuff, privacy, because we're dealing with people's health stuff. Oh my god, so. And so there was the replatforming going on, which was kind of like, oh, Alex, hey, I know, you know, the old stuff. You kinda have to know the new stuff, too. And, yeah. So we're going through that, and it was a complex thing to set up. And, and so when I went around, talk to people like yourself, and then you know, Megan, and Kate obviously gave the feedback where it's like a bomb that goes off, right, you're trying to monitor like, let's just say to be Jeff generous, like 30 customers. And then, and then suddenly, like, congrats, we just signed up this new mega corporation with 50,000 users. And this will be your primary concern for the next six months moving forward. Right. It just doesn't scale, as you said, Absolutely. It's

Alex Medeiros  04:40

a full time job. You know, I think it's, it's an it's a whole different skill set that people you know, it's their job to manage the configuration to manage operations, etc. Yeah, and I think you know, going from a small company to a larger company, it's a common thing where the customer success manager is a catch. All right? And so ensuring that as you grow, you sort of have those different buckets, like someone in a team, specifically responsible for operations. Yep. And then a specific team responsible for managing the strategy of the customer. Absolutely.

Jeff  05:25

And you can focus on the strategy and the renewal and the advocacy stuff. I also there's so many finding, like so on the catch all that's for people who have heard me speak about this before I call that project Pangea, right? It's right, you suddenly need Okay, it's time to do some continental drift here. And now North America becomes onboarding and then there's stuff like that. But I also found and tell me if I'm wrong here, there are I think there's a distinct personality difference between the onboarding enable, well, it's just a implementation resources. And then the CSM type of resources, right? Where I found that the CSMs are like, the huggers, the people and implementation more like it's been great knowing you these two, three months, I, if things go, well, we never have to talk again. And then they like just a lot of these short term smash and grab type jobs and move along. Go ahead. Great knowing you like, yeah,

Alex Medeiros  06:26

yeah, I think, you know, you need a good cop, bad cop. And, you know, even that's kind of putting it a little aggressively. I think, at the end of the day, we all want the customer to succeed, we all want them to win. You know, and the reason behind certain decisions are because we want the customer to win. And sometimes, depending on which side of the fence you're on that might not perceive be perceived that way. But I think, you know, having a team focused on the what can you and what can't you do, operationally, is important, because then as a Customer Success Manager, you can sort of, you know, I worked with this team, they are experts in this. And unfortunately, we can't do this right now. But we are going to prioritize it to make it a capability, right? Because if you sort of start frankensteining, everything, yes, not a verb, if you start frankensteining, everything, while while giving the illusion that that's a win for the customer, it becomes hard to support that Frankenstein piece, right? And it makes it hard for the rest of our customer base as well. So I think it's there's an art to conveying that message to the customer that, you know, we can't do this. And this, here's why is because we want to make sure that what we do deliver to you is quality. Right? And you know, bulletproof? Right? Yep. And that's kind of the I think the CSM has that should have that skill set to, to do that. Right and and find alternatives that are tested that are quality, then accomplish the same goal that the customer is looking forward to.

Jeff  08:22

No, that's that's a great summary. And where's the implementation? People are more like we've got 90 days like which checkbox would you like? I kid but if you've got a whole, like, you know, I will say full stack CSM kind of done it. All right. Yeah. So now you're in this enablement role. And so, like we joked about before, talk to me like I'm a five year old. And tell me exactly what you're doing with this enablement role these days.

Alex Medeiros  08:56

Absolutely. So, you know, I, I've been in a customer success capacity for over 20 years combined, and about seven years in a leadership role on the enablement function. So, you know, I think, enablement, traditionally, I think a lot of people think of enablement as sort of the baking soda, right, and I use the soda there with me.

Jeff  09:24

Wait, is that the powder or the soda? Is that the gold can or the white box?

Alex Medeiros  09:28

It's the whole thing. It's all thing right? If you think about it, right. Baking soda is used for everything right? You have bad breath, right? You have baking soda toothpaste, you want to make your teeth white baking soda, right? You want to take get rid of a stain, baking soda, right? You want to build a volcano with vinegar and baking soda. Right? Right where it's like a catch all thing and while there is some truth to that and enablement is a catch all to help fix processes to help you know I just made sure that things are running smoothly. I think it's important. This is something that I'm pioneering right now in my organization that I'm in is really defining enablement for the benefit of the the organization and for the benefit of the enablement team. So I kind of view enablement in four different buckets. The first bucket is learning and development. So learning and development I find to be the central artery of enablement. Right. So, and that includes onboarding. So

Jeff  10:38

customer learning and development or internal learning and development or both?

Alex Medeiros  10:44

It is it is internal learning and development. So, good question. So, it's more, you know, in the capacity of, what is it that the customer success team, kind of building a path to them to make sure that they are trained on things like, products? Right, on and even things like, professional development? Right. So working with leadership to say, what are some things that the team is struggling with, that we can build curriculum to help them with? Right things like managing difficult conversations, things like, you know, doing a zoom call online, right? What are those? What are those sort of, you know, rules of the road there? So that's my first bucket learning and development. Second is solutions enablement. So that's, that's more like, product enablement, I sort of coined that that sector as the hallway to product, right. So they're the ones that they they're sort of in charge with making sure that what product releases is then packaged up in put into a sort of digestible way for the customer success team to understand

Jeff  12:02

this is so interesting. I think back in the day, this was the product marketing team was responsible for this, but they never use the product, God bless them. Like they're great at some other things, but they never use the product. So there was always this, which is why you're trying to fix it, I'm guessing. Yeah, this is great.

Alex Medeiros  12:16

Yeah. And I'm glad you brought that up. I think the product marketing team, it's, they are sort of our partner with desperately. So product marketing, they are the ones who still own the messaging, still own the positioning, and even still own the collateral builds, right for to supplement that. And then we then we're sort of the aggregator. And we work with product marketing we work with, you know, even things like security and legal, we work with pricing all of those things, and we wrap it up in a nice bow tie. And then we then are the ones who serve that to the customer success team. So that's kind of the you know, how it all comes into play. The third is operations. So this stream is responsible for the inner workings of the new enablement team. So think of, you know, software's out there like Gainsight, Salesforce, etc. They're sort of that the oil have the enablement machine to make it all run together. And then finally, our last piece is the customer and consultant relations arm. And that that that branch is responsible for that what wakes them up every day is they think about how are our customers doing, right. And the way they measure that is they head up our NPS score. And then so they're the ones who administer the NPS survey, they also administer customer health score, which is another concept that we have. So that's kind of what keeps them up at night. And again, it's like taking all of that together. It's I've found to be a very foolproof model that covers everything. And people really understand what enablement does, right? Everything else is, you know, other departments manage that, but that's kind of that's my mission right now. Back to your question is just kind of trying to brand my team within the organization to help the organization understand us and then also help the team understand their specific roles within the enablement team.

Jeff  14:34

Got it? Do you have a team member for each of those sort of four functions? You guys just kind of divide and conquer or vision?

Alex Medeiros  14:41

I would love I would love to have you know, we're getting there. Yep. Right now it is a little bit of a scrappy kind of experience. But But vision I think, in order to be most effective, having someone underneath one at each one of those branches They will want the best experience in my opinion.

Jeff  15:03

That's great. What are what have been some of the pain points of getting this launched up and off the ground?

Alex Medeiros  15:11

I think GM, you know, sometimes who's on first happens, okay, with with other departments. And just kind of understanding everybody's role in everything. You know, I think your point of Product Marketing is a very good point, right? Of kind of educating and understanding, okay, what is what is it that product marketing does? And what is it that enablement does, right? And defining what those rules of engagement are? I think, enablement really serves as an aggregator as well. You know, I think I think it's important to have someone that's not in any department, right? It's to sort of be that glue, right? Because it's like, if you don't have someone that's not, you know, that's unbiased, if you will, you have product marketing, doing their thing. But then like, how do they deliver that to the stakeholders, right? And then you have another, you know, another department doing their thing? And how do they deliver that to the stakeholders, right? But if you have enablement, being that aggregator and then packaging it up and delivering, that's what, that's where the magic happens. So I think, you know, getting back to your original question, I think it's just understanding the rules of engagement, has had some difficulties to it. And I think, trying to think if there's any other

Jeff  16:51

I remember, we were chatting about this a little bit when we first kind of cut up again, because just for people that don't, Alex, I haven't talked for a few years. So one of my first questions was like, how does this play in with other teams that need enablement? Or likes a new salesperson joins up? Do you do get them all ramped up? And onboard? I just want to

Alex Medeiros  17:11

know the answer to that one. But yeah, yeah, it's a little bit of who's on first, you know, I think enablement is a really hot topic right now. And I think a lot of companies are doing it. You know, and with even within the company, I think a lot of departments are following suit. But, you know, if I had to predict I think enablement is, the way to go for enablement is to have it all under one umbrella, it makes sense to sort of be that those gears for the organization, right? Not have a little sprinkle here, sprinkle here and have like these rants

Jeff  17:47

Oh, you're doing that too? Oh, because I'm doing Oh, no, using that tool, I found this better tool. Now. I already paid for two years for it, though.

Alex Medeiros  17:55

Exactly. Exactly. Yes, it's, you know, having that can lead to a lot of inefficiencies, which is kind of the counteract of what you're trying to do with enablement, which is increase efficiency. So

Jeff  18:11

I just knowing you and how efficient software we're looking for, but just as much attention to detail that you have. As soon as you're explaining everything, to me, I just saw like a massive Lucid Chart in my head with decision points. And I'm not making funny like that. Absolutely. I think this is the way to go about doing that. Right. Like, there's so many of these things, and these actions and decisions that are happening, that if you don't have it sketched out, it's gonna be make make up as you go along. And then that's no good for what you're trying to do. Right?

Alex Medeiros  18:44

Absolutely. I think, you know, sitting down giving yourself time to sit down and think and plan is Uber important. No, and that's something that I, I gave permission to myself to do is literally in a notebook, just kind of sketch out. Yeah, the streams and then the responsibilities. And it just makes you feel more confident and and talking to stakeholders to be like, here's what it is, you know, and here's why it makes sense. And, and also, in that process, testing it out right before releasing, talking to confidence to say, Did I miss anything, you know, is there and hit hit me with it, you know, like, give me the What about this or what about that and let's test it out. And you know, I did that and then this is this was the end result. You know, as things evolve, will it will it will the model to evolve probably, yeah, but yeah, I'm a big lever in, just give yourself time to think yeah, so time on your schedule and and allow yourself that

Jeff  20:07

and I love Do you ever use Miro M-I-R-O? Oh, it's a great tool for doing that. That's a big fan because my, my handwriting is terrible. So if I sketched it, I wouldn't be able to read it. They're like, it's terrible. So I do use that tool that's for process flows. I use it once a week MRO Yes, they are they you know, Miro calm. So you know, Lucid Chart kinda looks like very developed very, like very engineering, they kind of put colors and rounded edges and stuff like that around it. And I've got a lot of templates, it's a great product, and free to free free for what you're doing. If you need to start integrating and using a lot of things, and maybe it's a little bit more, but I'm not, I'm not a stakeholder or shareholders, it's gonna ask you,

Alex Medeiros  20:53

is this brought to you by Miro? Is this is this podcast brought to you by No,

Jeff  20:58

that would be a great idea. No, they were former customer of mine, I onboard them, or my team onboard them for for a customer that I had. And so, so I got to know him well, and they were just really there. You know, when you meet a company, and they're like, probably like what you're discussing. He's doing all the right things like, God bless the CEO that allowed for this to happen, because it's the right way to do it. Right. So I just kind of always had that vibe about them. So. So there's exposure that you're looking for, there's making sure you get it all down. Right, right. What's the big initiative this year for the for the enablement team?

Alex Medeiros  21:37

Yeah, there's a few actually, I think, you know, the, the sort of quick win, I'll start off, like I want to make quick impacts where I can. And I think one of them and for your listeners, this is probably a good tip is to really review your different communication streams. Right? I think we live in a world today, we're so lucky to live in a world where we have so many avenues to communicate with one another. You know, whether you're a team shop, whether you're a Slack shop, there's like so many different things you could do. But which is awesome, but also can lead to inclusivity and overwhelming.

Jeff  22:25

There's a hot topic in the CS community these days. I'd love to get your I don't know if you're just gonna give me a guy. No, but it was basically, do you set up slack with your customer? Take a stand out.

Alex Medeiros  22:41

If you if you want your weekends, no. If you want to relax on the weekend from we not? And actually, you know that goes for the customer too. Right? Yes. For wants to relax on the weekend. No,

Jeff  22:56

you know, the whole thing was I try and I'm like, I try and put that down like a like a sick animal whenever it pops up. But like, I just view it as it suddenly distorts what's important. Right? I don't know if you ever heard about the quadrants of importance, or whatever it is. But some of these urgency is not the urgency that day. Wax breaks all those rules, right? Oh, absolutely. She Oh, I see Alex's typing. Like

Alex Medeiros  23:25

you're waiting on agile, oh, the dots, the dots. And then it like goes away. And then it comes back. And you're like, oh my gosh, like are they? Yeah, totally. Yeah. So I think, you know, auditing your communications and like, and, and this is something the enablement function serves, right? Because nobody else thinks of doing it, because they're all in it. Right. And that's why the getting back to enablement being separate. They can look at it globally and be like, Alright, let's take an audit. Yeah, they're all the teams channels that everybody's using, what are all the chats that everyone's using? Yeah. And taking all of that, and reducing it to one or two. And really leveraging the features of the technology, I think people they sort of blend in a teams with a chat room. You know, and it's so much more than that. Right? So, so I think that number one, that was a quick win for this year that I was able to achieve. And that you know, that's, that's done so much benefit for the team to be like, Okay, this is my one place where I go to exchange best practices with the team. There's another place that I go to get product questions answered. Right, and it's not 50 different things going on. Yeah. So that's number one. And I actually on

Jeff  24:59

that point I'm sorry. And these are, you know, non prepared questions. So you know that you're really my

Alex Medeiros  25:07

freebasing for sure.

Jeff  25:09

So, I have seen many organizations try and tackle this problem, and then making it worse by just creating a voluminous amount of documentation, right? Like, oh, best internal chat thing, like, Oh, I gotta go search through the team's drive or the G drive and pull up the PowerPoint. How does that get worked into the DNA? So that people know like, oh, I go here, or that's the answer is this or x y&z?

Alex Medeiros  25:37

I love that question. I think documentation is crucial. But it's, it's got to be organized in the right way. You know, it's kind of like, you know, when you go on, like, Apple's support page, right? They, they organize it by product, right? iPhone, iPad, watch, right, etc. So they've, they've, they've really cracked the code in terms of organizing your documentation. Again, that's another piece that enablement can help with being a sort of a third party of all right, everyone's doing their own thing, like, let's all come together and organize documentation. And so I think, you know, teams chats should be more like real time kind of quick answer. But if you have very organized documentation, and easy to find things, your sort of random chats are going to be smothered, people are going to know where to go. Yep. So they definitely play hand in hand, I would say, I think, but I think too, in the defense of customer success manager, or any user that wants their things, we need to do a better job at organizing documentation, and coming up with a master category system, that that's easy to follow and also updated, right? It's got to be crucial that, you know, everybody's, that it's valuable to the organization to make sure that documentation is up to date, whenever a launch is released, whenever new products are released, we go back, and an update, right. It's kind of like, you know, when when Apple launches, for example, there when they launched their, their new phone that day, in September, when they usually do it. As soon as Tim Cook gets on stage and gets off the stage, you go on their website, and it's all updated. Right? That's, that's the type of stuff that's next level that we should all aim to be at, of like, the preparation is very important. I think we get clouded with the launch, oh, we got to get that done quick and good. But it's like, even if it's at the sacrifice of a few weeks, or a month, even that you have your stuff together, it is way worth it, then prematurely releasing and internally having no idea of what to do. Right. So I'm a big, big believer in that. And I know you are too. Yeah,

Jeff  28:27

it's just, you know, like, put the whole Confluence system in and everybody has to go there. It's all. Absolutely, yeah, there's just craziness. But it's actually this kind of can segue into my next question, because I'm imagining but I'd love to hear back from you that if I was, you know, the VP or the C CEO, or whatever the CEO in this initiative comes about, I would set some KPIs up that would be I will know this is successful, eventually not saying this year, whatever. Yeah. If ultimately, right, like internal NPS is high, right? So of all the CSM is we're at like, you know, sixes and now they're in eights or nines, like great, great, awesome job, right? Maybe there's some additional scalability abilities. So you can handle 10 to 30, maybe 40 just thrown those random numbers out, every company is different. at it, I get those, right. And then B, what are some of the other things that that you'll know where your job has been successful? I

Alex Medeiros  29:27

love that question, too.

Jeff  29:29

And I really wish I put this in our Google Doc, but your answers have me.

Alex Medeiros  29:36

No, this is all stuff that's in my mind. It's fine. So viewers on the phone, Jeff did an amazing job, which is kind of, you know, or just prepping me a little bit with a few questions, but you know, yeah, a lot of these. This is just a really organic conversation. I really

Jeff  29:53

like coffee talk. Yeah, it's just coffee talk.

Alex Medeiros  30:00

But, you know, I think, to measure success, I love how you just positioned, it's exactly how I believe in it. As well as that our customers are the customer success team, right for for CSR enablement. So, in that we treat them as customers. And we actually, I do a bi annual survey with them, and measure how we're doing right. And then I also angle it in, in in making sure that I asked questions on those streams that I mentioned before. So how do you feel? Do you feel supported with learning and development? Do you feel supported with customer relations? What do you think of Gainsight? Or any of the software that we're using? And, you know, solutions enablement? How are you feeling that the release process is going etcetera. So really zoning in on those, and that, that, to me is is crucial, and making sure that that needle continues to move in the positive direction. And then also making sure that I capture, you know, suggestions, recommendations, etc. I think sort of the second little tear to that is, we also have a suggestions box that we've built, that folks throughout the year can submit suggestions on things like process improvements, training, recommendations, etc. Because we want to make sure right, again, treating them like a customer, that we are listening to them listening to their pain points, and developing projects to address those pain points. So I would say, you know, the in combination of those two, if the needle moves in the positive direction, and were building projects, addressing those issues, that to me measure success for an enablement function.

Jeff  32:08

Oh, that's great. Well, I feel like I've gotten sort of the full picture now. What What, what, what did I miss? What did I not ask? Like, if you were to say, Nope, that pretty much covers enablement like, well, like now, another hour, we go, like, what did we do we cover everything. Are there other sort of little things that you want to get in there?

Alex Medeiros  32:26

Yeah, I think my notes here, I think, I think we Yeah, I think we I think we covered I think maybe one thing to double click into is just project management.

Jeff  32:45

seven subjects have signed? No,

Alex Medeiros  32:47

it is, you can actually remind

Jeff  32:49

me it's a little project management in them, right. So

Alex Medeiros  32:52

they absolutely do. And I, you know, I can learn from you on this as well. I think project management, having that skill set is such a universal skill to have under your belt, not and it's not just for project managers, you know, I think it just Orgonite it really shapes you to become a leader, if you have project management skills, and you can organize the chaos, that's what people are looking for having somebody that can take noise, and bring it down into actionable steps, knowing what the principles are. So that's one thing I

Jeff  33:35

know, it's, it's huge. And I do recommend, and there's there's courses out there as well, where this is like, project management for CES professionals and things like that, and, you know, they're cheap, you know, and but they're awesome. And then because because you need just that flavor, right? As you say, you don't need to know the whole PMP route where you can manage a spatial being built, like, it's, you don't need that, right. But, you know, that's what we did with bringing Basecamp in and Virgin, it was like customers, they, they just want to see that, you know, you're gonna get them from from A to Z. And this is the process and we've done it before, and we're walking you through that. And then you know, and then just the skills to be able to get there from from one thing to the next and stuff like that. So

Alex Medeiros  34:19

yeah, absolutely. And I think you know, it also protects your team's bandwidth, right? Very much like when, you know, in your world when you ran implementation, like you knew based on projects, all right, that this person on my team has four massive things

Jeff  34:39

or implementations, they take 90 days to 120 days, so their full capacity and

Alex Medeiros  34:44

you're done. capacity and I think approaching solutions as projects is similar, right? Because it it's it's like, you can only do so much and you can only solve for so much so I I found it very helpful to undergo project management skills so that you can treat each solution as a project. And, you know, put the time out and have data to support that to be like, Hey, this is great. But we're going to put this on the back burner, because we're now working on these for others. We're cooking these for other things. If you want the back burner to come here, I gotta put one of these on the warmer Oh,

Jeff  35:29

so somebody said that because that is now that's what they teach an agile project management, right? It's like, our the way I always say it is, with probably too old for some people listening, but your mom gives you four quarters to go to the arcade. I could do four games of Space Invaders. I could do two games, a space invaders and two games of asteroids. It's up to you, you tell me how you would like to spend this time and money?

Alex Medeiros  35:53

Absolutely. Yeah. And every project is different. You know, it's, it's, you know, it, a project can be a dime to use your quarter analogy. A project could be a quarter, right? So like, you have four quarters that you have in your pocket. But maybe one of those quarters is two dimes in nickel, right? Yep. You know, I'm

Jeff  36:15

just laughing because you bring it up old SNL jokes for me, and I'm just trying not to quote them. But ya know, it's it. But also, the other thing is that you're in the ability to break a large task and to chunk it down into small tasks, not for everybody, right? Like, oh, we get this big things, you will be the steps to get there. Right, like, high task subtasks. Right. It's like, in some just, you know, as I said, some people are huggers and some people are, you know, not like, the other one for that, but oh, well, thanks. Because I actually felt them in one thing I always ask and tell people is that, that's what I brought into the CS field was this project management thing, which, you know, being able to bring just the minimum viable amount of structure into the CS, you know, feel dominated by empathy and things like that. But it's like, let's throw in like, 5% project management here. And I think everything will be okay. So yeah,

Alex Medeiros  37:14

absolutely. Yeah, I think it's universal. It's just the principles of, you know, it's not a Six Sigma thing, but just principles of project management of thinking through things right. Getting back to our earlier in the conversation, giving yourself time and permission to think things through. And building structure is the principles of project management. And I think, Gosh, everyone should just looking in on those skills, because there

Jeff  37:47

I've never, I've never seen a more detailed project plan than I've seen ones for weddings. I'll just leave it on that. But

Alex Medeiros  37:53

boy, that's a whole different thing. That comes with not just project management, but like, emotion, emotion and dealing. Yeah, somebody else can take there's something for everyone in this world. That's why there's a doctors, wedding planners, all these things. It's yeah, but not not for me for sure. I'll take I'll take other projects.

Jeff  38:15

Oh, 100%. So we've been very gracious with your time, but I do try and wrap things up by wondering what your your COVID hobby was. While we were all you know, living, sheltered in place.

Alex Medeiros  38:28

Yeah, I love that question. Um, you know, I've always, I've always been a music guy, you know? Oh, yeah. So just music getting gets me through a lot of things. You know, there's, there's maybe no hobby, per se that I picked up on but, you know, just

Jeff  38:53

nature, you had to use the ability to always just dive in and find more and just, yeah,

Alex Medeiros  39:00

yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think. Well, maybe. Okay, so maybe this. So I've also read a lot. And usually I'm a nonfiction kind of guy. Believe me, I've been getting into trying to dabble into fiction. When I read it's a little bit on a selfish vibe. It's like, I want to get something out of this. And fiction doesn't really everyone's like, Yeah, but fiction you can escape and like, the same

Jeff  39:28

I'm the same. I'm not a fiction, or I used to growing up and everything but now and now it's fine on the on all the business books, it's like three chapters, and I'm like, get it I get the point. Stop nailing it. Excellent. Yeah, exactly. I get it Do do do this thing for 10 hours, 10,000 hours, and I'll be back. Okay, gotcha. Okay. Yeah,

Alex Medeiros  39:45

exactly. And then the rest of the chapters are the same. I dabbled in a few fiction over the over sort of this this time period. And it's funny, just to double click on this just recently, Tim Ferriss Will you introduce me to actually, he he just published a list of which I haven't delved into it yet. But it's a list of books for now, a list of fiction books for nonfiction readers

Jeff  40:17

actually haven't listened to first for a while. I think you came out with that massive like book that was like the size of the Bible. And I was like, oh, man, and I just couldn't and I just, or I think I switched from Android to iPhone and all my podcast went away. I just never signed up that up, though, because that's

Alex Medeiros  40:37

yeah. How forwarded to you it's a it's an article that that he wrote. He has like five bullet Fridays, and I think I think that was part of it. I'll forward it to you. i I'm gonna go through them and favorite all of them to like, I'll add them to my Amazon reads. Yeah. A good reads as well. Yeah. So yeah, I would say those then just kind of staying healthy with working out trying to make that continuous priority. mental breaks, you know, making sure that I get some vitamin D make sure my sleep is on check. Yeah. So yeah, just just trying to stay stay healthy.

Jeff  41:18

Sounds like you learned all the lessons from that we used to preach at our previous employer, which is weeklies habits that we're talking about. And just to give you

Alex Medeiros  41:27

a little little up here, so So for your listeners, so Jeff went when he started out, oh, no, no, this is good. He just went, he went for the gold. And he started a boot camp. Outside. I think it was like week number one or two. Yep. And why

Jeff  41:47

it started because I was like, Hey, it's okay, if I just bring myself here because I'm not I don't have enough time with the commute to workout in the morning.

Alex Medeiros  41:55

And it was so popular. Everybody took it. And like if Jeff was on PTO, people would be like, nah. And it was it was great. It was a highly successful thing. And just a huge testament to just you adopting the values of the culture, the organization being a team player, it was just, it was really, really, really cool.

Jeff  42:21

To kind of see I appreciate that I still have good memories. I love the fact that it was in front of like, a broken down Ice Cream Factory. Like you just have this very like Thunderdome.

Alex Medeiros  42:34

And actually, here's the irony, that place is a lifetime gym.

Jeff  42:41

If people don't know the massive in normal fitness places, which Yeah, it is. They're awesome, but that's awesome. Well, Alex, thanks for being so gracious with your time. I'm gonna, we're gonna hit stop here. We'll get all your socials and everything out. And we'll we'll wrap up after a stop on the recording. So thanks so much. We'll reconnect in a year on this and we'll we'll find out how the initiatives have gone. And just hold on one second. I'll just stop the recording here. Say

Alex Medeiros  43:08

thank you, Jeff.