I'm excited about today's podcast. I have a founder of a company. I have an author of the book, Holy Shift, moving your company forward to the future of work. I have Dan Michelson with me here today. Dan, it's great to have you on the podcast.

Yeah. Hey, Sean, I really appreciate the opportunity. I've been listening to your podcast as I've told you. So it's really really cool experience to be on it.

Now you found it in common, but what I want to talk about, obviously, is your book, but I like to kind of get into a little bit of the background. So when did you know you were an entrepreneur and how did you know you were an entrepreneur?

Ah, you know what? To be honest, I'm still figuring that out. So I spent 30 years working for initially for large companies. Then I went to a series of restarts.

One company we grew from 50 people to 5,000 people. So it was the chief marketing officer and chief strategy officer, really in the healthcare tech space. So if you ever go to your doctor's office, and they pull up on electronic record, you could say, hey, I know a guy.

So that was me who did a lot of that work along with a ton of other people.

And then for the last 10 years, I had an opportunity to restart a company. So it was a 15 year old company and grew that company from 50 people to 500 and became a staple, not in the clinical side of healthcare, like electronic records, but on the financial side of healthcare.

And it also became one of the top 20 companies in the world on glass door. So the secret sauce, if you will, the growing and scaling those companies in both cases was culture.

So not just the culture within the company, but also with customers. So this was a place in both cases where people love to work and customers love to work with us.

And so at the end of COVID or kind of like in between that time, it was time for me to take on a new challenge.

And I saw this issue that every company was struggling with how to bring people back.

In my little piphany was, okay, well, maybe there's a way to bring people forward and to use this opportunity as a catalyst to create a better way of working.

And so I left my kind of semi perfect job after 10 years to starting common and to write this book. So the book is really about the mindset shift that needs to take place in the company is really about creating a tool set, a SaaS application to help support that shift.

Yeah, a couple of things that you brought out that I think is important to and I say this to the audience. Some people are not designed to start a company.

You would be better off joining forces with someone who's already kind of got it off the ground, but they don't know how to scale it.

And because it's a different skill set.

It's a very different skill set. And I've always said, like, if I, if somebody's, if I didn't have any money right now, I will go up tomorrow, whatever, and it all went to crap.

I'm not necessarily sure I would start a company as I would probably interview with a company that I could dramatically improve and then get equity based on, you know, what I did for the company instead of getting it off the ground and spending those two years. I don't care who you are.

It's getting it off the ground takes a period of time. I think there is that unique skill set and taking something that already breathes and making it muscular.

Well, you're totally right. And so for me, you know, I was working for these very large 10, 20,000 person companies, right? So that kind of experience.

Then I read about the sleepy little company with 50 people that was losing a ton of money and I'm my first child, my daughter, Emma, with just about to be born. And I'm like, perfect.

I'm going to take a pay cut and go to a company that may not make it to tomorrow.

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