Episode 106 · 13 June 2024 · 47:49
"I pay ALL my staff $210K a year": How Geoff Roberts is transforming work
"I pay ALL my staff $210K a year": How Geoff Roberts is transforming work
0:000:00
Tip: click any timestamp below to jump there and keep playing.
Enjoying the show? Subscribe for free
Chapters & timestamps
Click any timestamp to jump the player to that moment.
Who is Geoff Roberts and what is Outseta?
interview#geoff-roberts#outseta#founder
The origin story: why $210K for everyone?
interview#origin-story#salary#tech
Leanne's psychology lens: freedom and ownership
interview#psychology#freedom#ownership
How the model actually works
interview#business-model#explainer
The maths: working 3 days vs 7 days
interview#salary#math#work-days
Show notes
"I pay ALL my staff $210K a year": How Geoff Roberts is transforming work
Episode 106 — Al Elliott and Leanne Elliott (Chartered Occupational Psychologist) sit down with Geoff Roberts, co-founder of Outseta, to unpack a compensation model that sounds too good to be true: every single employee earns $210,000 a year, chooses their own schedule, and gets equity at the same rate as the co-founders.
It started with a random tweet Al spotted. It turned into one of the most fascinating conversations about trust, freedom, and what work could look like if we stopped assuming people need to be managed.
Geoff walks us through the "choose your own adventure" model in detail — how it works, where the money comes from, and what happens when you give people complete autonomy over their time. Leanne, as ever, keeps one foot firmly in the psychology: separating the genuinely radical ideas from the ones that only work in theory.
Fair warning: Al has some questions. And they're good ones.
Top 3 Takeaways
Radical trust can be a business model. Outseta's bet is that giving people total freedom — over their schedule, their workload, their equity — creates more loyalty and better work than any incentive scheme ever could.
The money has to come from somewhere real. Geoff is refreshingly honest about the economics: the model only works because the business is structured around it from day one. It's not a perk bolted on to a traditional structure; it's the foundation.
Autonomy isn't the same as abdication. The "choose your own adventure" approach still requires accountability — it just puts the responsibility on the individual to self-regulate, rather than on a manager to enforce.
🔥 The Model, Explained
Outseta's compensation structure sounds simple: everyone gets $210K a year, works whatever days they choose, and earns equity at co-founder rates. But the mechanics matter.
Geoff breaks down how the flexibility actually works in practice — including the self-regulating nature of the system. Work more days, earn more (up to a cap). Work fewer, earn less. The point isn't to create a free-for-all; it's to remove the assumption that presence equals productivity.
Leanne pushes on the psychology underneath it all: what happens to motivation, identity, and belonging when work becomes truly optional? And Al — ever the pragmatist — wants to know where the budget comes from.
💬 The Question Everyone Asks
"Can this actually scale?" Al asks the question most listeners will be thinking: if you're not a bootstrapped SaaS startup with a specific margin structure, can you do any of this?
Geoff's answer is honest: this model isn't for every business. But the principles underneath it — trust, transparency, and treating employees like adults — are transferable anywhere. Even if you can't pay everyone $210K, you can ask yourself what you're currently doing that assumes the worst of your people.
More From Geoff Roberts
- Outseta Website: outseta.com
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/geoffrobertsmarketing
- X (Twitter): x.com/GeoffTRoberts
Connect With Us
Get in touch, book a call, or find Al and Leanne on LinkedIn — all in one place: truthliesandwork.com/connect
Mental health support: findahelpline.com — UK: Samaritans 116 123 · Mind 0300 123 3393 — US: 988 — Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14
Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.
Full transcript
Expand full transcript
Al ElliottThe dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across 3 teams and 4 systems. And in our case, it's about 216,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it.
Leanne ElliottWhat you should be doing is using HubSpot, because why? HubSpot connects it all— every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation— into one platform every team Can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already knows the full story. And when you know more, you grow more. Nice.
Al ElliottCheck out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.
Leanne ElliottHello and welcome to Truth, Lies, and Work, the award-winning psychology podcast Brought to you by who? The HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. I'm getting so excited, I'm losing my headphones. My name is Leanne, I'm a business psychologist.
Al ElliottMy name's Al and my headphones are securely fastened.
Leanne ElliottWe are here to help you simplify the science of work.
Al ElliottThis is the Thursday edition. Tuesday edition, we have the news roundup, we have the workplace surgery, and we also have a new segment called the, called the Summer Book Club. But Thursday is all about interviews. We have a fabulous guest today.
Leanne ElliottWe do. Today's episode is an interview that actually came about when Al saw a random tweet a few weeks ago. What do you call them now, by the way? That's X.
Al ElliottI think—
Leanne ElliottXs?
Al ElliottI think, I think Musk wants us to call them posts, but we still call them tweets.
Leanne ElliottGood for you.
Al ElliottI'm always going to call it a tweet. Talking of these tweets though, Geoff Roberts from Outsetter, he posted about a tweet about his salary structure. And I couldn't quite believe what he was saying was right. I'm not gonna spoil the story here, but basically everyone from founder to junior developer gets $210,000 a year, can work as much or as little as they want, can work from anywhere in the world, and can earn equity at the same rate as the co-founders.
Leanne ElliottIt is that kind of thing that, that's gonna, it's perfect for the show because it intrigues Al from a business owner point of view, and it really intrigues him, intrigues me from a business psychologist point of view. This is essentially though a founder story, so while we will be pitching in where we feel we should, we're focusing on Geoff and we'll be diving deep into Geoff's background, his motivations, and his experiences as a business leader. Geoff started off at a company called Buildium, which ended up being acquired for $580 million. At the time, Geoff was head of marketing, so he and one of the Buildium co-founders started Outsetter, which which is a membership software startup that helps clients monetize websites, software products, and online communities with a few clicks. So, let's join Al in the studio where we meet Geoff for the first time and find out why he wanted Outsetter to be a very different type of organization.
Geoff RobertsMy name is Geoff Roberts. Uh, I am talking to you today from San Diego, California, uh, and I am a co-founder of a SaaS startup that's called Outsetta. Today, I think we're gonna dig into a lot about our sort of organizational model and compensation model. That's kind of what piqued Al's interest. But generally, I'm a non-technical tech founder. I have a background in marketing, and I've been bootstrapping this business, Outsetta, for the last 7 and a half years.
Al ElliottYou're right, we will be getting onto your organizational structure and particularly your remuneration structure in a second. And so, Just give me the story. How did you start from Buildium, what, 10 years ago to where you are now?
Geoff RobertsYeah, so I, um, I never envisioned that I would work in tech, to be honest with you. I, uh, I went to college and was a writing major. I thought for a long time I would write for Sports Illustrated or a newspaper or something like that. Um, long story short, uh, got out of my undergrad in 2008, right as the economy was tanking. And didn't really know what else to do. So I went back to grad school and got an MBA. The combination of sort of the writing degree and the business degree lent themselves pretty naturally to marketing. And long story short, I was struggling to find a job. I got hired as the first full-time marketer at a SaaS startup called Buildium in 2010. If I'm being honest, it sounded terribly boring to me, but I needed a job, so I took the position. And long story short, I stumbled into a great situation without even recognizing it. At the time, it was a very small company, 6, 7, 8 employees, something like that. They had found product-market fit. They had a very talented technical team and they had no idea how to do marketing. So they took a chance on me. I sort of fell in love with the challenge of growing a startup and was giving a a lot of permission to try things out and sometimes fail, sometimes succeed. But we had a very successful run at that company. I led the marketing team for 5 years. It ultimately culminated in a $580 million acquisition. And during the course of the time that I was at Buildium, I was sort of the annoying business person pulling on the shirt sleeves of the co-founder of the company. His name is Dimitri, saying we need to integrate Stripe with a subscription management system, with HubSpot, with Salesforce, with Zendesk, with ChartMogul, with all these different software tools that were required to run the business. And Dimitri was the CTO of the company. He eventually got exasperated with me and said, you know what? I'm spending more time integrating software than I am building our actual software. Why isn't there some way to launch a SaaS business that's easier than this, where you get sort of all the core tools that you need to launch a subscription business in a single platform? And the parallel that a lot of people like is if you wanted to launch an e-commerce store, Shopify had made that quite easy. There wasn't anything similar for, for SaaS or membership type businesses. So that's where the idea for Outsetter really came from. And we built a homegrown version of what's become Outsetta and used it in the context of that business, Buildium, and scaled on that sort of homegrown tech stack until we were a $5, $6, $7 million a year business. After the exit, when we were looking to work on something new, we sort of looked back at our experience and said, you know what, that tech stack that we built for our own use, there's nothing like it out there. All of these founders of SaaS businesses are still cobbling together all these tools. Why don't we make this our next venture? And that's where Outsetter came from.
Al ElliottTell me about this freedom you had at Buildium. Is that something that you just took that idea and went to Outsetter with? Did you make any modifications?
Geoff RobertsCertainly, I think when I reflected on my own experience at Buildium, and Buildium had, we'll get into the nuance of all this in a minute, but Buildium had a much more traditional organizational structure. You know, there was a CEO and the departments that you typically see in a tech company today and management layers and all of that. But when I looked at my own experience at the company, something I realized was I was rabidly loyal to that business and rabidly loyal in terms of working hard on that business and feeling like it was my own, even though it was not. I mean, I, I was issued a small amount of equity in the company eventually and whatnot, but I didn't co-found the business, but it meant something to me and I invested my time and energy in it as if it was my own. And I started looking at why that was. And there were a number of factors. There was certainly the freedom that I was given in the workplace to sort of find my own zone of genius or sort of learn and develop my own skillset, but there was also the way that I was treated as a person outside of just what I could contribute to the company. I was treated abnormally well, frankly, and given a lot of freedom to do the types of things that I wanted to do in my personal life that I didn't see a lot of other companies sort of granting to their employees. And I think I realized very quickly I was in a situation where I could learn a lot from these people. And I could help build this business and I could accelerate my career and all of those things. But they also genuinely gave a shit about me outside of work. And the combination of those 2 things created an element of magic, not just for me, but for a lot of other people that, that worked at Buildium. And that became very important to me and something I wanted to sort of carry forward to Outsetta to the extent that I would say Building a company that serves our employees is my primary objective at Outsetta. There's people that fall in love with the problem space or the technology or the idea of growing a $100 million business or whatever it might be. None of that is me. I view the business very much through the lens of we need to create a great product and we need to learn to serve our customers very well. Because that is a prerequisite to providing the sort of opportunities to our team that I want to. And that is point blank my motivation.
Al ElliottSo let's talk about this cash because the post seemed to say to me, you pay everyone $210,000 a year.
Leanne ElliottYep.
Al ElliottAnd they can choose what days they want to work and they also earn equity. What have I— it sounds ridiculous. What have I misunderstood?
Geoff RobertsYeah. So you hit the 3 pillars on the head. And I would say before we kind of get into all those pieces, it comes from a place of we wanted to keep Outsetta intentionally small. And that comes from a place of in our previous company, Buildium, we took sort of the traditional VC route, raised several rounds of funding, grew very quickly, had a great outcome. It was a great place to work. Like, this was not a negative reaction to that path. whatsoever. We just looked back at our experience and said, you know what? It was so fun when we were a company of 20, and it was a little bit less fun when we were a company of 200. And I think everybody who's been through a startup that sort of goes on that trajectory has that same realization. It is— there's just less politics, there's less administrative burden and all those kinds of things when you're a smaller company. So We started from a place of we want to build a successful tech company. Let's sort of put an arbitrary headcount of about 20 people alongside that goal and say, we're not going to grow past 20 people. We're going to see how far we can push this company with 20 employees. And that's what we started from. And from there we said, okay, we're not going to be able to throw headcount at our problems? How are we going to do more with less? And the first thing we recognized is we'd have to hire great people. So 2 things fell out of that. A, the salary, $210,000 a year is not any sort of magic number by any means. We largely just plucked it out of thin air. But we said that's a good pay rate that we think a lot of excellent people will be very happy with. Let's start with good compensation. The second piece was just flexibility. We think entrepreneurial-minded people are going to thrive at Outsetta, and these excellent type of people that we want to hire almost always have options. And sometimes they might not be ready for a full-time job, but if we can get them in a day a week, 2 days a week, 3 days a week, I'll take that great person working at Outsetta all day long. So those 2, the flexibility and the pay, were just— Point blank, like, how do we attract really excellent people that frankly probably have other opportunities? And then we said, okay, we need to bring these great people into the company. We're going to be small, so they don't really need to focus on management, but we need everybody to act like an owner. We need to empower autonomous decision-making. We need, without management to just kind of set people free and allow them to contribute in the most impactful way possible, how do we get people to act like an owner? Why don't we just give them actual ownership in the business? So, we very quickly sort of backed into this idea of, to a large extent, like everybody's a co-founder in the business. We still use the term co-founder to refer to the 3 of us that technically got together and started the company, but there's no difference in how we're treated versus anybody else. It's the same equity structure, the same pay rate. Nobody's anybody else's boss. So the idea is this structure is appealing to people that are typically a little later in their careers. They're seasoned, they're experienced, they're intrinsically motivated and also motivated by the actual ownership that we give them quite liberally.
Al ElliottI want to ask you about the equity structure, and I don't know how much you can say. So how much can you tell us about how the equity structure It is ridiculously simple.
Geoff RobertsAnd if you go to outsider.com/blog, at the end of every year, we publish a post, which is sort of a year-in-review post, and we actually show you the ownership that everybody holds in the company as well as all of our expenses and stuff like that. But the way that it works is every employee in the company can elect to work as many days per week to earn equity in the business as they want to. So, let's say just a simple example across all of our employees, 100 days have been worked for equity in Outset at all time. And if I've worked 15 of them, I own 15% of the company. It's literally that simple. So, the idea is it's overtly fair. The extent to which you choose to work for ownership in the business, Is the extent to which you you own the business, and we've seen drastically different flavors of this. So there are two examples I bring up a lot. The first is our design lead; his name is James. He started working with us in a very very very very very part-time capacity, twenty hours a month. And when he started, it was back in 2018. We didn't have the money to pay him for most of that time, so we compensated him at least half in equity for the time that he spent working on. But again, that's like 10 hours per month, a really, really small amount of time. Still, over the course of 3 or 4 years working in that very part-time capacity, he built up an ownership stake in Outsetta of about 4%. And then eventually, we just ramped him up onto a paid compensation plan for the most part. But if you look at the time that he invested in the company to get a 4% ownership stake, A 4% ownership stake, if you're not very familiar with how tech companies work, is enormous. It is larger than lots of CEOs typically have. In the tech companies that I've worked for previously as a VP, I typically got like a half a percent equity in a business. So, a 4% stake for working part-time is huge. And we have another employee named Bernard who did sort of the opposite. He came into the company, he said, I believe in what you're doing. He's later in his career. He had some financial stability and he said, I want to work almost entirely for equity to start. And in 2 years, he built up an equity stake of about 14%, 15% in the business, which again is this huge equity stake. And a lot of people say, hey, that's nuts. That's crazy. But we're not giving equity to investors. First of all, we're giving it to our team instead. And the other lens through which to look at that is we got an extremely talented engineer, 25 years of experience, had been CTO at other very successful companies working for us for 2 years without really paying him much at all. So you just have to kind of weigh the benefits versus, yes, we're issuing equity liberally, but I would argue it's one of the best investments we've made in the company.
Leanne ElliottThe idea of freedom and ownership is an interesting one, and I always want to help you, the listener, separate the what from the why. So giving equity share is the what that's being done here. If we understand the psychological impact this initiative is having on employees, the why, then we can look at alternatives that may work better for your people or for your business. So let's quickly cover some of the main psychological principles at play through the lens of equity ownership and Geoff's entire approach to compensation. First, equity theory. So equity theory argues that employees are motivated not only by absolute rewards but also by fairness in the distribution of rewards relative to other people in the organization. So fairness is what employees are responding to, and there are other ways to do this. For example, profit-sharing programs where employees receive a share of the profits can drive an equal sense of ownership and fairness across the company. Without distributing actual equity. Jeff's model also allows for autonomy and flexibility, so employees have the freedom to make decisions and manage workloads. Autonomy is a key driver of intrinsic motivation, or how much effort we want to put into our role, and this is the basis of self-determination theory. So self-determination theory suggests autonomy is a fundamental psychological need, and when this satisfied, individuals experience greater motivation and wellbeing, and this leads to higher job satisfaction and productivity. Offering equity is a great way to empower this autonomy, as is flexible working agreements. So enabling employees to design their own work schedules and choose where their working locations will be will have the same impact on employee behaviour and performance as equity share would. So we have fairness, autonomy, and flexibility— some of the whys behind the what. But if there is one word I want you to remember, it's control. Geoff's approach to working patterns and compensation gives his people control, and the psychological impact of perceived control is very, very powerful. Psychologists separate control into 2 main categories. First is the internal locus of control. So individuals with an internal locus of control believe that their actions their decisions directly affect the outcomes of their lives. They feel responsible for their success and failures. In a workplace setting, these individuals are likely to take initiative, seek opportunities for professional growth, and feel more satisfied with their careers because they believe they can influence their progress. The second is the external locus of control. So people with an external locus of control believe that external forces like fate or luck or other people like their boss have a greater influence over their lives than their own actions. Psychologists have another word to describe these employees: disengaged. If you're ever frustrated as a business owner that your employees aren't proactive, they're lacking passion, enthusiasm, or just don't seem to care, it's probably because they believe they lack control. As you listen to the rest of the episode and the incredibly inspiring work that Geoff is doing, try and reflect on the psychological principles that are sitting behind his ideas. And when you're assessing an idea or an intervention, ask yourself, will it provide my people with a sense of fairness, autonomy, or control? This is your why.
Al ElliottSo we now know the what, we know the why. Cool idea. But at this stage, I still didn't quite get it because it seemed like as a founder, I'm, if I use this Geoff system, seemed like as a founder, I'm giving away my own equity. So I had to ask Geoff, what was I misunderstanding about the equity structure and how it all worked? I'm confused though, because does that mean then if I came to work for you and I put in, I put in 80-hour weeks and I really redid everything, am I taking equity from your share then to get my percentage?
Geoff RobertsYeah. So the equity is a moving target with this model because the denominator is always going to be the total number of days worked by all employees all time for equity. So every day that number moves as long as more people are working for equity. So if 100 days have been worked for equity today, maybe tomorrow it's 105 or 110. So it, it is a moving target. What that means is if an employee stopped working for equity altogether, but other employees kept working for equity, Their ownership stake would erode a little bit over time, and that's okay. That's just how the model works. It actually, from a business perspective, gives us some degree of protection in terms of somebody can't just come build a huge equity stake and leave and retain all that equity. They would retain a percentage that is reflective of how much time they chose to work versus all of the other employees, all times.
Al ElliottFast forward 10 years, it's a $580 million exit, and your friends are going, Geoff, what the hell have you done, mate? You're getting 15% of this and some dude is walking away with the same. How would you, how would you talk to your friends and tell them that they were wrong about this?
Geoff RobertsYeah, I think there's 2 things there. One is if this other dude is walking away with the same 15% that I am, that means that dude made the same sacrifice that I did in terms of the amount of time he invested in building the company in lieu of paid compensation to earn equity in the business. So, although I am the co-founder, quote unquote, The sacrifice that was made for that ownership was absolutely the same. And my mindset is that employees should have the same financial windfall, the same benefit on account of making the same investment in the business, point blank. Aside from that, I think the other thing people tend to look at is You're issuing equity so liberally that your equity stake as a founder is smaller than what you would see with other founders in a more traditional structure. That is generally true. I'm not going to say that is not true, but we're also deliberately not raising funding from investors, which even in the case of Buildium, that's going to dilute the founders and how much ownership the founders actually have. So, there's not going to be dilution from an outside investor. There's only going to be sort of dilution from other employees that have devoted their time and invested their time in growing the business. And I personally feel much better being diluted by teammates that we've brought into the team that are contributing every single day to the growth of the company, much more so than I would being diluted by somebody that's just writing a check and handing it off to our business.
Al ElliottYou've almost answered the next question I was going to ask you, which is, so do you have an opinion about VC companies? Do you have an opinion about people who do take on funding?
Geoff RobertsYeah, I think in general, there is way too much polarization of opinions around bootstrapping versus taking VC money. Versus any of these decisions about how you finance a business. I think it's all nonsense. I think there's a time and place for all of these different routes. And I think people have turned this into this sort of tribal discussion and pick a side and take a side, and you're either a bootstrapper or a VC founder. But to me, it's all about Harmony. And harmony in terms of how you finance your business, what your goals are in the business, the type of product you're building, what you want to get out of the experience of building the company. All these things need to be in harmony. And I'll give you some examples. So, if you want to build SpaceX, you're not going to bootstrap it. It would be— even if you're Elon Musk, you're not going to bootstrap it. You would need hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. This is this crazy idea with massive upside. You're going to need all kinds of expensive equipment and engineers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You would be out of your mind to try to bootstrap a business like that. That is a venture-track company. That is a big, ambitious swing where you're going for the biggest possible outcome as fast as you can. And you need to run the business that way. At Outsetta, we're going for much more of a calm company. We know we want to stay small. We know we need to attract great people. So we've built all aspects from how we organize ourselves to how we finance the company to support our objectives with the business. And to be fair, there are some things we haven't gotten right. I am the first one to tell you that Outsetta is probably a bigger product than we should have tried to bootstrap. It's really— to get into what the product is more than we've discussed so far, it's a CRM, it's a billing system, it's an email tool, it's a help desk. It's basically a platform that brings together all these tools needed to run a SaaS or membership-type business. But that means it's really like 4 or 5 software products as opposed to one. And it took us a lot longer to sort of get the business to default alive than it might otherwise if we had bootstrapped something smaller. So we were sort of out of harmony there. We tried to do something probably too ambitious for a bootstrap model. We've made it work and like we're benefiting from that now, but we had a really hard first 4 or 5 years in business as a result of those components being out of harmony. And I think that is the takeaway that I want to talk about. I want to preach about, I want to encourage other founders to think about is what's the product that you're trying to build? How do you want to build your company and how do you make everything else in alignment with those objectives?
Al ElliottSo I just want to make sure I'm getting this straight because there's a third aspect I've not even touched on it. So first of all, if I came to work for you, I could work for you for essentially very small, um, very small pay, very small salary. But for every day I worked, I took a percentage of equity in the company. So that's option number 1.
Geoff RobertsYep.
Al ElliottOption number 2— so that's basically self-regulating, because if I did 7 days a week as opposed to 1, I'd get 7 times more. I get that. Then the other option is I maybe don't take any equity But I decide I'm going to take a fraction of the $210,000 divided by 5, and I say I'm going to work 3 days a week, and that's— and I'll earn— what's that? $100,000?
Geoff Roberts3 days a week is $126,000 a year, right?
Al ElliottSo I can do that. That's correct, is it?
Geoff RobertsYep. You can work anywhere, you can work as much as you want, and you can choose the mixture of cash and equity that, that works for you. So we call it kind of a choose-your-own-adventure company. compensation model. And the idea is every employee can come in and say, based on my life circumstances, based on what I know about the business, here's how much I want to work and here's the mixture of cash and equity that works best for me. So, just as an example, myself right now, I actually kind of blew up the model a little bit, but right now, I'm working 3.5 days for cash compensation in Outseta and 1.5 days for equity. So, I work a 5-day workweek, but 3.5 days out of that is paid, 3.5 days is for equity. I make a salary of $147,000 a year, and then I'm continuing to build my equity stake the other day and a half. That's what works best for me. I'm the youngest of the 3 co-founders. I have a young family. I'm not financially wealthy on my own beyond this. 2 of my co-founders are at a different stage in their life. They have a little more financial stability and they are both prioritizing the equity component a little bit more than I am because that is what fits their stage of their career. And our whole team does this too. We've got somebody else who works on Outsetta 2 days a week. She does 1 day paid, 1 day for equity. It's all kind of a mix of what works best for you.
Al ElliottThis is so incredibly simple that I don't understand why someone hasn't done this before.
Geoff RobertsYeah, I think there's a few things that keep people from doing this. I would say there's more people experimenting with similar models, and I think you're gonna see that continue to grow, which is good. And one of the reasons that I I talk about this. I think this is such an opportunity that people innovate a lot in terms of what they're building, but not how they're building their companies. I think the media in general, and particularly the tech media, if you go watch the movie, The Social Network, the underlying message is if you're a founder, you should hold onto every scrap of equity as tightly as you possibly can. And it's almost a game of how little ownership can you give up so that when you do have this exit event, should one occur, you make as much money as humanly possible. And there's nothing wrong with that. I have no problem with people that choose that route. That is a deliberate decision to maximize their personal potential outcome by holding as much equity as possible. I would say, obviously, we're on the opposite end of that. But the way that I would look at it is that founder has to work with other people that they cannot incentivize with equity to nearly the extent that we can. So, whether that's contractors or hiring people onto their team, I would argue they can't recruit the same level of talent that we are able to with our structure. And the bet that I am making is equity only holds value if you build something of value, and getting the right people on the team is one of the best ways to ensure that you build something valuable. I want the best possible people on our team that I can get on our team, and I'm happy to give them equity in order and good pay and flexibility. And all these things in order to get them working with us. I think that increases our odds of success dramatically. And from my perspective, I've always looked at it like let's say we sell Outsetta someday for $50 million. In my mind, that's a phenomenal outcome. I would I would die happy, and that would be great. I would feel really weird if I walked with 48. million and distributed $2 million to the rest of the team. To me, sure, would I want the $48 million? Of course I'd want the $48 million, but that would feel weird to me, especially when I had people that worked with me over the course of a long period of time, to not see them reap those same rewards. I would be much more comfortable and honestly much more excited if I made $15 million and $35 million went to the rest of the team. To me, like, think about the difference in celebration, uh, when that occurred. Think of how awesome that would be to celebrate with the team that all participated that materially in the success of the business. That's the day that I want to work towards.
Leanne ElliottPretty cool story, but we're about to really start putting the pressure on Geoff. Join us after the break to find out if this structure Did you know that the UK's number one management podcast— that's us, by the way— and the UK's number one marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network?
Al ElliottWe actually have a lot in common. We both use behavioural science to help people do better at work.
Leanne ElliottAnd we both had to wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode.
Al ElliottAnd 2 out of 3 of us are devilishly good-looking. Gonna say which. Phil, host of Nudge, UK's number one marketing podcast. It's brought to you— we need to do this in threes—
Leanne Elliottthe HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.
Al ElliottSeamless, seamless. Tell us about your latest episode, Phil. We've just done an episode on fake fandom and how New York indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work. And we talk about the behavioral science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff, and do some big things about how this affects the world of politics, business, and brands as well. It is.
Leanne ElliottIt's such, it's such a good show. Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioural science in your marketing. But there's also just some really interesting episodes that'll be right up your street. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better?
Geoff RobertsIt can.
Leanne ElliottAnd Are We All Just Status-Seeking Monkeys?
Al ElliottI am. Go and listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. But thanks.
Leanne ElliottBut come back.
Al ElliottYeah, come back.
Geoff RobertsDefinitely come back because Nudge isn't as good as this.
Al ElliottSo come back. I'll cut that out. Keep that in.
Leanne ElliottWelcome back. Let's get back to giving Geoff a hard time, shall we? Al, you had some concerns at this point, didn't you?
Al ElliottYeah, you can't help but like Geoff because he's so enthusiastic and he's so selfless as well. But my tiny little brain couldn't quite get around this obvious problem. Why does everyone get paid the same? But some tasks require much more expertise than others. For example, customer service compared to being a senior developer. So I wanted Geoff to explain how they get around this. Let me just be your CFO for a second and go, one second, Geoff, we've got— let's just use argument's sake, 10 people, because nice easy numbers. So I've now got a wage bill of $2.1 million. Um, and my revenue is, let's say, $5 million. And we're like, yeah, but we need this. We need someone just to do tech support. Sorry, not email support. It's just literally email support. We need them to do it. But Geoff, you've got to spend all our budget. So what do you tell me? Where's the money coming from to pay for that?
Geoff RobertsYeah. So this, this is a circumstance we have very directly in, in our business. We have these lower-level tasks that still need to get done. And we've looked at all of these things through one of two lenses. One is, is this something that we can outsource to an external contractor that is not part of our full-time team? The other is, is this something where we can divvy up the responsibilities amongst the full-time team? And we've done certainly a bit of both. So when it comes to support specifically, we are a support-intensive business, to be honest with you. It is a big project or a big product. There's lots of different integration points. We integrate with all sorts of different technologies. We have a lot of support, particularly early on in the customer lifecycle. And we knew we couldn't just go out and hire sort of junior-level customer support reps, and we saw inefficiency in doing that anyways. You've You've interacted with such people. They don't have the ability to solve your problems in most instances. They're sort of just saying, hey, we've received, you know, your incoming customer service request, and they route it to somebody else who can actually solve the problem. So we said, let's just cut that layer out altogether. And the primary thing that we do in this regard, we actually do both of the things that I mentioned, but everybody on our team does support. Every single person, all of the engineers, myself, everybody else. It's non-negotiable. We tell everybody this upfront. If this is a problem for you, then you're not going to work at Outsetta. This is just part of the gig. And you can argue that there's downsides to this. We have extremely senior software engineers that are hugely valuable employees spending some of their time doing customer service. You can tell me that is not the smartest thing to be doing financially. I think there is certainly some truth to that. But the flip side of that is every single person on our team is confronted with our customers' issues every single day. And I think there's so many positives that come out of that. It's actually been pretty beneficial to the business. From a customer service perspective, really believe that good customer service comes from interacting with people. This is a little bit of my personal opinion/baggage, I guess. Like, I've never had a good support interaction with a chatbot, frankly. So I think customer service and delivering competent customer service from a person is only going to become more of a differentiator going forward. I do think there's a time and place for AI tools where, you know, you can talk to them and interact with them and Um, have some dialogue with them back and forth, but ultimately when you need serious help, it should come from a person.
Leanne ElliottI can definitely see how this would work, but I have a feeling you, the listener, have one thought on your mind. It's fine for Geoff and his co-founder. Their last company got acquired for $580 million. Can this work for us normal folk?
Geoff RobertsLet's rejoin the interview where Al asked exactly The question I always get about this is everyone's like, oh, you're independently wealthy, or that exit at Buildium was significant enough to you that you don't need the cash and it doesn't matter. And this is just like you're running your business as a charity. That is not true at all. I am not financially wealthy by any means or any serious means. I'm reliant on my paycheck from Outsetta to pay my bills even still today. So it doesn't come from that place. Certainly an influence that led us to have all these discussions about staying small and drove us towards this structure was a book called Reinventing Organizations by a guy named Frederic Laloux. That book talks about an organizational design called self-management, which we've also adopted, which basically means there's no bosses, there's no hierarchy in a company. You hire a smaller number of people, you sort of empower them. And that book became very impactful to us early on. Both myself and Dimitri and the rest of our team read it and said, okay, there's something here. If we want to stay small and we don't need this management layer and we need to hire great people, this is a way that we can organize ourselves and work. To make all those things possible, all those things true. So that was part of it, certainly, just the appeal of this way of organizing ourselves. I think more on a personal level for me, I want to reiterate that I want Outsetta to make me a lot of money. This is not demonizing making money. whatsoever. That is an objective of mine, point blank. I want this thing to make me wealthy. But I think I am a person that has a good relationship with the concept of enough. I would also say I have expensive tastes. Like there's plenty of expen— I like fancy food. I like traveling a lot. Like I know how to spend money if I have it. There's lots of things I could spend money on. But I've always had a sense of, is there really a difference between $20 million and $100 million? If I made $20 million, I know for a fact I could live a lifestyle that is ridiculously good and rich and whatever you want to call it. I don't need the $100 million. Yes, it would be nice to have an extra $80 million in in your bank account, but I just get fired up more by the idea of if we could distribute that to everybody else on this team and everybody else could have sort of a really impactful event for their lives and their personal wellbeing that allows them to do the sorts of things that they want to do with their lives. That just gets me more fired up. And I actually think about this. If we do ever sell the company and this sort of financial windfall occurs, I really think it would be so much more fun if you made everybody multimillionaires as opposed to one person and everybody else got like a Christmas bonus. That's kind of a mindset that has permeated a lot of things in my life. I know what I want. I know when enough is enough, and I know the things that matter to me and try to prioritize those.
Al ElliottWhat an incredible story. I recommend you go and follow Geoff on Twitter or go to the Outsetter blog. The link is in the show notes. Geoff's unique outlook on life would lend itself perfectly to a podcast, and guess what? He's launching one in the next few weeks. Here's some more information on it. Your podcast is called Life Profits Podcast, and it seems to be It seems to be about this idea that there is enough that you balance profitability, money against life. What have I misunderstood?
Geoff RobertsYou're totally right. So, the podcast, first of all, is upcoming. It's not out yet, but it will launch this summer. And the phrase life profits or life profitability is not mine. It actually comes from the co-host of the podcast. He's a guy named Adi Pinar, but he wrote a book which was also a huge influence on me that kind of put language to these ideas that I'd been talking about for a while. And the concept of the book, it's called Life Profitability if you want to check it out, is as entrepreneurs, every entrepreneur, including myself, can tell you from a financial perspective exactly how well their business is doing at any point in time. We look at this stuff obsessively. We check Stripe. We know what our revenue of our business is every year. We review the financial performance of the company quarterly, whatever it might be. We do not do this same level of accounting in terms of the extent to which our business does or doesn't enrich our lives. And from my perspective, the entire point of entrepreneurship should be to enrich your life. There are instances where maybe that's not true and Maybe you're working on something far larger than yourself. And that is not true. But I think in most cases, people go into business to try to enrich their lives. And when I look out my window, I see a lot of miserable founders that are depressed. They're working crazy hours. They're always stressed. And Addie's book made me pause and think. And the number one thing that came out of reading his book is throughout the 7 years I've been working at Outsetta, I will check myself every month, every couple months and say, how much is this experience actually enriching my life right now versus making me miserable? And the key part is it shouldn't be like entrepreneurship should just always be delivering bliss to you because that's not Reality either. Entrepreneurship is hard. You're going to have high periods and low periods. But if you're not looking at whether this business that you've created is actually making your life better, you're sort of missing the point. So that is something I have made a much more deliberate attempt to sort of check in on with myself from time to time and course correct to the extent that I can. Because ultimately I want the business to support a life that I'm excited about and that our employees are excited about. Um, and that's the, the primary KPI for me.
Leanne ElliottThank you so much, Geoff. What an incredible, incredible story and so much great inspiration. And I think definitely one to, to reflect on and think about how these overarching principles might work well in your business. Do subscribe. Join us on LinkedIn where the conversation continues between episodes. Subscribe for our new LinkedIn newsletter. That's very exciting too. Um, anything else? Follow, follow, subscribe, subscribe. Done.
Al ElliottYes, and join us on Tuesday for our world-famous weekly workplace surgery and a news roundup. On Thursday, Lee, who are we speaking to?
Leanne ElliottYes, join us on Thursday. I'm very excited about this. We will be talking to Dimple Debalia. She is founder of Roots in the Clouds, an author, a coach. She will be talking about her cutting-edge work supporting a holistic approach to addressing organizational trauma and moral injury often experienced by people working in industries with high emotional labor. So things like humanitarian or health work. It really is a fascinating, fascinating conversation. So many practical tips for business leaders, for employees. You do not want to miss it.
Al ElliottThanks again for joining us. We will see you next week for lots more good things. Don't forget, we're on LinkedIn if you want to join the— continue the conversation. You'll be speaking to Leanne. Go search LinkedIn for Truth, Lies and Work. And as Leanne said, brand new newsletter. Exciting stuff.
Leanne ElliottBye.
Al ElliottBye-bye.
Leanne ElliottWhich is a membership software startup that helps clients, which is a member, which is a memberware. You have to ask yourself, um, are you gonna cough in the middle of that? Yes, I am.
Al ElliottJoin us on next Tuesday.
Leanne ElliottJoin us on next Tuesday. This conversation will be spinking— spinking conversation. We will be spinky— spinky.
Al ElliottHave you had a lunchtime drink or something?
Leanne ElliottYes, join us on Thursday where we will be joining—
Al ElliottSpanking.
Leanne ElliottFuck you, I just got through it.