Navigating an Economic Downturn with Tim Porthouse

Intro: 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, Co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I am here today with Tim Porthouse. Tim is a very experienced, very well- known CEO Coach. Tim, welcome to The Daily Bolster.

Tim Porthouse: Thank you, Matt. Pleasure to be here. Big fan of your work.

Matt Blumberg: Well, thanks. And I of yours. So one of the things I love that you do is you publish an email newsletter called, Things I'm Obsessed about, or What I'm Obsessed about right now, and at the end I'll ask you to tell people how to sign up for it. But you've written a bunch lately about CEOs who are navigating the downturn, so I thought that might be a good topic for today. What are you obsessing about with CEOs managing the downturn? And usually I think the framework in your newsletter is something about your strategy game, your leadership game, and your mental game. So maybe we can use the framework and talk through what you're seeing top CEOs do right now.

Tim Porthouse: Well, thank you Matt. First off, I am, as you say, obsessed about how CEOs are managing through the downturn. It seems to me that the best startup CEOs are balancing both austerity with opportunity, austerity, the best have cut, they've cut early and cut perhaps deeper than they hoped they would have to. But opportunity, I've noticed I've been through three downturns now myself. There's always tailwinds there somewhere in a downturn and the best are finding those tailwinds both with customers, with employees, so that overall it's a balance I've found-

Matt Blumberg: It is not an easy one to find either. So...

Tim Porthouse: ...Yeah, it's a mix of being realistic about the brutal nature of what we're in, as well as optimistic about finding a way. Right.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah.

Tim Porthouse: To pick up on your point there, the three things I always obsess about is strategy, leadership, and mental game. On the strategy side, what I'm seeing is the best startup CEOs have become extremely focused. The 80/20 rule is really in play here at the moment. That means obsessed about who are the real ICP, ideal customer profile customers, but also obsessed with how do we navigate towards a path towards profit on the-

Matt Blumberg: Makes sense. So great. So you're balancing austerity and opportunity. In terms of strategy you're focusing in. What about leadership?

Tim Porthouse: ...On the leadership side there? This is again, another balance. So on one hand, this is an opportunity to do a culture reset. We've seen some extreme examples. Hello, Elon Musk. I'm not sure we want to go that far. But what he's really done well is instituted a high- performance culture, and all of my clients are looking at that, but at the same time, we have to have compassion for the people we're asking to do even more with, and they need our gratitude and appreciation.

Matt Blumberg: So would you say it's a cultural reset or would you say if you need a cultural reset, it's a good time to do it, otherwise it's a good time to reinforce the culture you have?

Tim Porthouse: Yeah, very fair point. I would say that almost all of my CEOs have come out of this thinking. We did get to a period of excess Matt and there was an opportunity to reset around more high performance and what that means. So I would say for most people, it is somewhat of a reset.

Matt Blumberg: All right. Now let's hit what I think may be the most important area of your focus, which is CEO's mental game. So what are the best CEOs doing right now in this environment in terms of keeping themselves sane?

Tim Porthouse: Yeah. I think first of all, you have to acknowledge it is incredibly tough and stressful, first CEOs right now, a lot are feeling imposters. They're working themselves really hard, and so that means, first of all, I'm a real advocate. We have to find a way to ground ourselves. For me, and for a lot of CEOs, that's just some form of exercise like journaling or finding a way just to process the stuff we're going through, but on the imposter syndrome that many startup CEOs feel. It's too easy to focus on what we're not good at, and I challenge my clients to really focus on what are you good at? Lean into your strengths and build from that foundation as well as look at what you can learn from the stress you're feeling. There's always a 2% truth that you're feeling within that imposter.

Matt Blumberg: I love it. Tim Porthouse, high performance CEO Coach, extraordinaire. Tim, tell everyone your website and how to sign up for your email newsletter.

Tim Porthouse: I'm at timporthouse. com. And note that's not like the steak, it's not Porterhouse, it's Porthouse, P- O- R- T house, and you can find my obsessions email every month at timporthouse. substack. com.

Matt Blumberg: Excellent. Thank you for being with us today.

Tim Porthouse: My pleasure, Matt. Thank you.