Making Time for Strategic Thinking with Christina Perla

Announcer: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg. I'm co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and with me today is Christina Perla. Christina is the co- founder and CEO of Makelab in Brooklyn. Christina, welcome to The Daily Bolster.

Christina Perla: Thanks for having me. This is super cool.

Matt Blumberg: This is super cool, but not as cool as your business. Tell everyone what Makelab does.

Christina Perla: At our core, we 3D print parts and prototypes for brands and agencies that are building physical products in the CPG and hardware space. If you think about all the products around you, they all go through a process of prototyping and product development aided by 3D printing, and that's exactly what we do.

Matt Blumberg: You described your business to me once as the Kinkos of 3D printing, which I think is a great, great description and something that the world needs.

Christina Perla: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: What we need more of as additive manufacturing gets more and more prevalent.

Christina Perla: Yeah, the Kinkos is the model that we're building towards. We have one location today, but something that we noticed was our client base, we are a B2B business, vast majority is very local amongst Brooklyn and Manhattan. We're in Brooklyn, so I could safely say within a five to six mile radius. Our hypothesis and what we're building towards is to be hyper local in other areas and centers of design and engineering.

Matt Blumberg: Excellent. Well, it'll be great to see how your business unfolds.

Christina Perla: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: Tell me what's on your mind today.

Christina Perla: A lot of what I've been thinking about is as a founder that has... We have a daily business. We have customers today. We have traction. We're an operations heavy business. I feel like I'm constantly straddling the line between maintaining and building the operations versus strategic thinking and how are we going to be the Kinkos of additive manufacturing and 3D printing. For me, a big topic that I've been thinking about is how to delegate when you don't necessarily always have the option to delegate and how to squeeze in that strategic thinking into the normal day- to- day or week.

Matt Blumberg: It's a great question. They're questions that every founder faces. How do you make time for the things that are important, but not urgent? And then how do you think about delegating decision- making in a world where you're still the leader of the company? It's a small company. You may not have an enormous team, but you obviously have some people to whom you can delegate. I think it's a great question. I can offer two different frameworks to think about it. The first one is what I call the Big Rocks Framework. I didn't come up with the name. If you've ever seen or read Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, or any of those books, and Stephen Covey did some companion videos to them. If you just Google Stephen Covey Big Rocks video, there's a five to seven minute video that is 100% worth watching. Essentially the point of it is that your life, your day- to- day at work, is full of lots of different sizes of rocks. You have big rocks, you have medium- sized pebbles, and you have sand. You have to start with the big rocks. Because if you start with the sand, you never have space for the big rocks. There's a much better visual. But the point of it is, if you think at the beginning of the quarter or the month or the year, whatever your period is, what are the two big things I must do this quarter that are not my day- to- day? You then have to figure out how to make time for them first. Whether that's going onto your calendar and blocking out strategic thinking days or hours or weeks or an offsite, you don't have to do those things all the time, but you do have to make time for them first. Otherwise, your life will get consumed with the small things and with fighting fires. But I want to move to a second framework, which is one that I got from my dad. My dad was also a career entrepreneur in tech. He either developed or got from someone else over the years this decision- making two by two matrix framework that he taught me early in my career, which I think is incredibly useful. I'm going to put this on screen. I realize some of our listeners are on audio, so I'm going to describe it as well. But the two by two matrix has on one side of it familiarity with the decision or with the problem. When you're delegating something, the person's either familiar with the problem or not. And then on the other axis, it's the consequences of making a bad decision. Those consequences range from it's terrible consequences to it's light consequences. Like every good two by two, there are actually four boxes in it. It's really straightforward. If someone can make the decision because there are low consequences of getting it wrong and they're familiar with the problem, you let them make it and you don't even need to know about it. The opposite corner to that is the person doesn't have a lot of familiarity with the decision, and it's a huge problem if it goes wrong. That's one where you want to be involved. You can't delegate it. You want to make the decision together with someone. Maybe you make that person do the legwork, come to you with a proposal, but that's one where you really do need to be actively involved. Unfamiliar territory and high risk, high stakes. And then the other two boxes, either the person on your team is familiar with the problem and it's a big mistake if it goes wrong, or they're not familiar with the problem, but there's not a big issue if it goes wrong, those are ones where my dad's framework always says, " Go ahead and make the decision, but at least tell me about it, so I know about it and I can help clean it up if there's a mistake or if I spot something." I don't know if that's helpful, but I have definitely found this helpful. It is so easy as a founder to want to just make every decision yourself. It's not healthy for the organization and it's not healthy for you.

Christina Perla: I completely agree. I try to delegate as much as possible. I think for a lot of founders, the middle ground, the gray area is what's tough. It's not the I make the decision or you make the decision, it's the level of awareness that you have as a founder for the in- betweeners, which were the three of the boxes on that visual. That's what I find myself talking to a lot of other people about as well.

Matt Blumberg: All right. Well, I hope that's helpful. It's always good to see you, Christina.

Christina Perla: Likewise.

Matt Blumberg: Good luck with 2023 at Makelab.

Christina Perla: Thank you.