Is Self Care Overrated? - Michael Kelly - Episode #38

Michael Kelly is the Managing Partner at Developer Town that works with established companies to create software aimed at key business problems or opportunities. 

Michael helps corporate leaders and founders craft a vision for new products by working with them to put together strategies, teams, and funding to help launch, validate, and grow those products and businesses.

Discussion Points:

• What myth or bogus strategy do you want to bust?  2:27
• How do you find outlets for energy on harder days: 8:00
• Agencies talk about impacting society with their culture and environment. What does this mean to you? 22:25
•  How has the experience been working with contractors? 35:58
• How does the open book concept work and how does the finance work when you work with other agencies? 45:42
• What's exciting you about the future? 51:44

Takeaways:

• If you're not deeply energized by the work that you're doing, and it's not the thing that's fulfilling you, then maybe that's more of a sign of a problem than a sign that you need to take time away and recharge.
• In the total human experience, this concept of leisure, that we're very focused on right now in today's world, is such a small part of the human experience. Leisure is a very, very new idea.
• We're made to work, we're made to produce and we're made to take care of each other and we're made to challenge one another.
• Our clients are only successful to the extent that we're successful.
• What I want to be the best in the world at is helping companies build and launch new digital products.
• To build a product, you need to understand a market, you need to understand your customer, you need to understand the competition, you need to understand the context in which you're building and deploying this thing. 
• Product launch engages every element of what we do as a business, design, marketing, software development, engineering, data, science, all the DevOps.
• We want to make sure everybody in the business knows how we make money. We want to make sure they know how much we're making or how little their mate we're making, unless it's a global pandemic. And we want to make sure that they know, we win as a firm, that everybody wins through profit sharing.
• So when you have an unhappy client, it's not about that client, this is a seed that has been planted, is this seed going to bear fruit? Or is this seed going to bear weeds, you do not want weeds if you're an agency owner.
• From a market perspective, as an agency, we are choosing to lean into financial services and healthcare as two industries that we want to do more in, we're going through high trust certification right now, we're trying to get the regulatory house in order.

Links 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/developertown/
• Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldkelly/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/developertown
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/developertown
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/developertown/
• Company website: https://developertown.com/

 

Busted Myths:

Self Care is all about Leisure.