Attending the Way
Blair recognizes how a Confucius quote is really bad business advice, but is still moved by how a highly principled creative firm in New Zealand continues to thrive by prioritizing their creative practices and client fit over new business strategy.
“A man, sitting in his house, attending the way, will be heard a hundred miles distant. Work done truly and conscientiously, in isolation, calls unknown friends.”
Links
"Attending the Way" article by Blair on WinWithoutPitching.com
Transcript
David: Blair, today I'm interviewing you, but it's going to be very different. The first different thing is that the introduction is going to be very long, more 20 minutes or so. No, just kidding. [chuckles] No. That's one difference, is a little bit longer introduction, which I've not started yet, so don't start the timer. The other thing is that this is not a typical episode. This is more of a documentary.
Blair: Okay.
David: I am your photographer, interviewer, all rolled up into one. Blair took a hajj. [laughs] I had to look up how you spell that, it's H-A-J-J.
Blair: Yes.
David: Blair took a hajj, a pilgrimage for all of you who don't know what that word means, when I didn't either. It starts in a dark room with him staring at a website for hours, just meaninglessly staring at a website for hours over multiple times. Then he drives 8 hours and 46 minutes with one stop in the middle for a supercharger, fill up to Vancouver Airport.
Blair: Kelowna.
David: Then he flies--
Blair: Anyway, keep going. Yes.
David: This is my intro, not yours, buddy.
Blair: Oh, shut up.
David: I'll tell you when you can speak. Then he gets on a flight for 14 hours and 10 minutes to New Zealand, and he arrives at the holy ground. Now, pick up the story from there. You should feel a lot of pressure at this point.
Blair: Yes. Mecca. I was already in Australia for the month of November, and then we ended up going to Auckland for a bunch of different reasons. One of the reasons was to visit this firm that I've talked about in this podcast before. The firm is called Alt Group. They were introduced to me by Kevin Finn, who I also got to see while I was in Australia. Shout out to Kevin. He said, "Oh, you got to check out this firm. Their website's never changed." If you go to altgroup.net, I think that's the URL.
David: It is. Yes. A-L-T, altgroup.net.
Blair: That website has been the same. It's one page, and it just says in the middle of the page in small type, "This page intentionally left blank." Then it's got an address, and it's in New Zealand. Kevin told me about them when I was first down under in 2012. I emailed the owners, Dean Poole and Ben Corban, maybe six years ago. We have this email thread that goes back and forth with an email every second year. As I've said before in this podcast, I would just stay up at night, the only one up, in my dark kitchen, drinking a glass of wine and staring at the website, thinking, "I wish I had the guts to do that. I wish my website could just say, if you want something from me, find me."
Back in the early days of When Without Pitching, when I had directions to the office, which is fairly standard or was at the time. It's got, "Here's your office, and I'm in Casa British Columbia, Canada," which is a little village in the middle of nowhere. I had directions to the office, but the directions had you flying to Calgary, driving to Banff, driving to the end of a logging road on the other side of the Purcell Mountains, hiking five days, and you can get here this way. You hike five days through the Purcells, and you get to a little village, and then you hitchhike around the lake and then ask for Blair's office.
I'd get comments on that from people from time to time, and the idea was like, "Yes, you want to come find me, here are the directions." They had the same idea with their website. The firm or the marketing of the firm is really built on this idea, the way Kevin Finn explained it to me, is the most powerful idea in marketing is a rumor. I would hear stories about this firm, about people would call and call. They wouldn't work with them. People would show up at the door. They're just so discerning. They're like monks doing this great work, and they're not out there trying to get found.
For over a decade now, I wanted to get there, and I wanted to see if this was real. In fact, when I was leaving, after Collette and I had spent the day with them, when I was leaving, Ben said to me, one of the owners, he said, "Hey, by the way, I got a call from a consultant in London who said he heard about us from you, from Blair Enn's, and he was going to talk about us, but first he wanted to find out if we were for real.
I was there for the same reason. I wanted to find out if the idea in my mind of this firm, which is built up to be pretty large, if they in any way measured up. I've had the opportunity, as I know you have too, to work with some firms that you've known from afar because they're famous, and very often you get into the firm and you realize, "Oh, you guys don't know how special you are in my mind, and you don't behave like you're special. Your behavior, the way you behave in the marketplace, the way you sell should rise to the level of status and stature that you have in my mind."
You get in there, and you're a little bit disappointed by the way they behave. They don't see that they're not as special as them. I was certain this was going to be the case, but it wasn't the case. It was the opposite.
David: Success, we could define it in so many different ways, but like in this case, I'll just try on a few things. One is, are they loving what they're doing? Are the people happy? Is the firm doing really good work recognized by their peers? Are they making money? Some of that you don't really have definitive access to, but would you say they're successful in that way?
Blair: Yes. On every dimension.
David: Yes. How big a firm is it? How many people do they have?
Blair: It's 30 people. I've written a post called Attending the Way, that line Attending the Way is a line attributed to Confucius, and I'm going to read the Confucius quote, which is an approximation. It's obviously been translated multiple times as all the Confucian quotes have been. Here's the quote, "A man sitting in his house, attending the way will be heard a hundred miles distant work done truly and conscientiously in isolation calls unknown friends."
I write about this in the post and how to me alt group is the Confucian man in the house. They're so focused on doing good work that they don't put any effort into marketing. Jumping to the takeaway here, the key lesson for me, why I got so philosophical and introspective in this post, it's just stuck with me for days, and it's been a couple of months now. I'm still moved by my experiences. Every once in a while you encounter somebody who is so principled that you know they just would not compromise their principles for anything. I left that firm thinking they'd said some things early in our conversation that I thought, "Aagh, that's interesting, but I've heard it before. It's usually bullshit."
It never was. It was always a deeply thoughtful comment. Your question was, how big are they? I walk in, they're having lunch. They said, "Yes, come have lunch." We have lunch every day at the same time. There are 30 employees and 2 owners, 32 people in the firm. There's a table set for 32 people, and everybody's having lunch. We sit down, and we join them for lunch. We get into this conversation, and I say, "How big is the firm?" Usually, when you ask somebody how big is the firm, and they have 30 people, they'll say, "Ooh, like 30 people."
They said very specifically 32. I said, "You're very definite in your answer." Basically, they'd been larger, and they'd been smaller. They said, "30 people is an extended family. Anything larger doesn't work." They'd arrived at these very definite ideas of how business should be done or how they wanted to do business. They didn't mean that 30, anything larger doesn't work. What they meant was it doesn't work for them. It's clear they tried some things on and decided, "No, we're always going to be 32 people, including us." That was just one example. That's how big they are. They're 32 people. There's a reason why they're 32 people. They will never be larger than 32 people.
David: I haven't met these people. I've known of the firm for years, heard about it through you. If I had met them and chatted with them, I think I'd probably be as admiring as you are. Apart from that, this whole thing scares me even more than our two spoof episodes.
Blair: [laughs] Yes. I know what you mean.
David: My entire professional life, I have been fighting this, and that will be 30 years and two months. I've been fighting this idea that just do good work, build it, and they will come. Because if I were listening to this, and I would say, "Well, I do the same thing. I do really good work, and I have strong principles." They're probably not as strong as the Alt Group peoples, but, "I have strong principles. How come it's not working for me?"
One of the things that strikes me about the answer to that question is that here they are in a very, very small market. Their market is smaller than New York City on its own. They're a big firm in a small market. Maybe you can get away with that a little bit more. There's more than 100,000 firms in the US. Maybe that's part of it. Why are they so successful and other firms that are doing great work are not successful? Does it come down to belief and standards?
Blair: I think a big part of it has to be luck, and we can't dismiss that. I say in this as I'm talking about their experience and what I'm taking away from it of how inspired I am to see people so principled are repeatedly saying this post. This is really bad business advice. This Confucian quote is really bad business advice. If you were to just say, "Screw it, I'm inspired like Blair and David are, I'm going to follow this advice." The odds are you'd probably go bankrupt. That's one of the things that I find so fascinating.
I've got the strong sense, they didn't say this directly, that if the clients started to go away, and they no longer beat a path to their door, they would just keep doing what they're doing. One of them is a painter, and one is a sculptor, and they're always working on things that are not for clients. They build things. They're always doing things that are not for clients, and I'm not going to talk about what these things are.
They're just so cool, but some of these things will eventually make its way into the work that they do for their clients. The two of them, this doesn't apply to any of the other 30 people who work very hard, the two of them have created some freedom for themselves to be artists. They are effectively artists in residence. They met in art school. They didn't work in a design firm. They didn't know how this was done. I get the strong sense that they're doing their art, and this business has grown up around it, and if the business went away, I'll bet you in 10 years, you go back to the same place, and there'd be these two men doing their art.
They're just not monetizing it or to the extent that they were before, and I think that's one of the takeaways is they are artists first, and they are business people second, almost incidentally. I think of myself as a little bit of an artist, and as I say in the post with words being my medium, and in a very, very small way, a little bit of a philosopher, but I'm also a business person.
I'm probably a business person above that. I'm not sure, these two things are in tension with each other, but if yourself as an artist, if you're focused on the work to the exclusion of everything else, you're likely to be poor. The odds are you're going to be poor, and these two have built a business where they're clearly not poor. They seem to be thriving, but they don't seem to be distracted by it either. I'm of two minds of this. I'm so deeply moved and impressed by what it is that they are doing, and I want to do more of it, but I understand that this is not wise business advice.
David: To me, what this comes down to is what I do, I'm very successful at what I do, but it's one of 20 things, and my principles are more important than the success of this 1 venture out of the 20, and if I can't be successful and still believing like I do, it's fine. I'll just go do something else, right? I built a business where 100% of it is prepaid, no exceptions, there are no refunds, no exceptions, there's no references, no exceptions.
That's like one-tenth of what the old group is doing, but it's just an illustration to me of these principles, and I'm fine moving on. The other thing, too, that really came to mind as I was looking through my thoughts for this and your notes was, remember the episode I interviewed you on? This was a core concept for you. You can't want it as badly as they do. I kept thinking, "Man, that is a banner that we could hang over these people."
They don't need it or want it as bad as the client does. The client wants to work with the Alt Group more than the Alt Group has to work with this client. That's what I mean. We could hang that banner over their experience in a way. I forget which episode it was, but the whole point you were saying was like, who wants it worse? They're the ones that are going to get beat up in the negotiation.
Blair: Yes, and so they're not tripping over people, anybody or anything to go work with somebody. As they said to me, if somebody makes it to the door, that's a pretty good qualifying step. Yes, they made it to the door. That's a good first step. Once they're working with the client, oh, they care so deeply. Their expectation is we will work together forever.
David: That's why they're so careful.
Blair: That is a stated expectation. Obviously, they only work with senior people in the organization. I don't even hesitate to talk too much about their secrets, what they do or how they do it, because it's really their story to tell. The mystery is part of the allure. Once they're working with the client, I'm convinced that relationship does not feel like a typical relationship with another creative firm.
David: Right.
Blair: I walked with one of the owners into their biggest clients experience center, which they designed. These people are clearly on the team at the highest level. They are deeply enmeshed in their clients' businesses to the extent where some of what they do is take equity stakes in some businesses. They don't just take equity stakes, they put cash and services in. They are deeply aligned philosophically, values-wise, and they're working at the highest levels of their client organizations. They're a painter and a sculptor.
David: They don't turn that switch to 100% until they've decided they want to work with this client, the client agrees, and then they move forward. I didn't mean to imply that they didn't care about it after they landed it. No, they cared a lot about it after they landed, they just didn't care too much about it beforehand. It's just interesting to think about-- They've decided what's good for them. I could see other people, like those of you listening, you could decide very different things for yourself.
You could say, "Listen, I never want to manage a team, so it's just going to be the four of us," or, "I only want to work X amount a year," or, "I only want to influence this particular vertical or horizontal." There's room to make these sort of decisions everywhere. I had never heard the phrase attending the way. Is there a more modern definition? Is there some way we would say this where it doesn't seem like it was 100 years ago? How would you say that? How would you interpret it?
Blair: It's more than 100 years ago, and interesting, this quote was sent to me by my friend Carl Richards, and it was sent to him by a mutual friend. Then I went to look it up. It's like, I said, "I can't find this quote anywhere." We got in this deep philosophical discussion around the actual translations from Confucius, and everything written that's been attributed to him is an oral representation passed down over many years, and then at some point written down, and then translated across multiple languages. There's this ongoing discourse over what do we actually attribute to Confucius, and what do we not.
Without going down that rabbit hole, I think this is a modern version of whatever it is that Confucius was trying to impart, and it's really just do the work. Attending the way is essentially somebody who is focused on the work, just deeply committed to doing the best possible work they can. Even in isolation, there is something about that person and that work that sends energy out into the universe and calls people to them. That is a really romantic notion that I absolutely want to believe is true, and I believe it's true in part, in some ways that we can't understand. Again, I think it's horrible business advice.
David: Yes, exactly. That was the next question, what are we supposed to take away from this? Having seen the inside of 1,000 firms, probably 500 of them have told me something like that, "We're different because our work is different. We pay attention a different way. We listen more."
Blair: They all mean it, right?
David: They do mean it.
Blair: They don't understand that you've heard that 100 times before. You've had the same person say, with the same level of emotion in their voice, that same line, and it's just bullshit. You don't tell them it's bullshit. You think, "Oh, good for you. That's nice that you think that."
David: It's also cruel for me to immediately say it is bullshit. I could say to myself, I could say, the odds are this is bullshit, but I want to listen because what I was going to go on to say is of these 1,000 or so firms, I would say that 20 or 25 of them are really, really remarkable, and their clients know it, too, and they make a lot of money. If you ask me, what should we take away from this? I would say, listen, there are people that have that sort of confidence and commitment, and that's enough to drive the day.
For the rest of us fools, we're going to have to supplement that a little bit. What do you want listeners to come away from-- Maybe it's just the inspiration of the story. It doesn't have to be a business lesson, but what do you want them to come away from this with?
Blair: What I'm moved by is by how principled these people are. I finished this post wondering out loud, "Well, what are you, the reader, supposed to take away from this?" What do I take away from it? I take away from it the idea that as we go through life and the life of our business, I think when we're young, we're quite principled. We build a business, and then with the business, as it grows, we have these obligations, the obligations to team members, the obligations to families, the obligations to ourself, a part of ourselves that wants more and more and more.
I think as we grow, the principles get reordered in our principle stack. Doing the best work possible, what Confucius says is attending the way, moves down the stack, and then growth moves up. It's okay for growth to be high in the stack. Then even more growth and more financial growth and more headcount growth and all of these-- Then at some point, an exit, and then you wake up one day and look at your principal stack, and you're still saying the same things about how principled you are, and you still hold that principle. It is still a principle of yours, but it has moved down the stack. It has been replaced by these other things.
To me, the takeaway from this is, okay, let's look at the principal stack. What's changed over the years? What am I a little bit uncomfortable about? How do I need to reorganize the principal stack? What needs to move up higher? I confess to some of the things I've done over the last decade or so that I've never been comfortable with, and I've done them anyways, under the banner of growing the business.
They were all in moments when attending the way, doing the best work possible fell down in the order of the stack. What do you take away from it? I think I'd like everybody to read the story and take away from it whatever it is that they take away from it, and just look at your own principal stack and ask, are you comfortable with the hierarchy of what principle you're placing above other principles?
David: Maybe they don't all have to stay in that order as you get older.
Blair: Yes. You can still hold that principle, but maybe you move it up or down in the stack.
David: Yes. Thank you, Blair.
Blair: Thanks, David.