UNCHARTED: Breakthrough Success Demands Discomfort, Tough Questions, and Daring Moves

Starting the conversation:

The decisions you avoid are the ones that cost you the most. Facing “no” allows you to discover the biggest wins. Small bold actions over time prepare you for the bigger leaps to come. Rosco Graves Jr., Managing Director at Polaxis, shares about integrating optimism and realism to face the discomfort needed to scale.

Confidence, setbacks, and day-to-day activities make or break business — based on how you think about them. It is time to quit avoiding information that adds depth to your decision-making process. Those comfortable chairs may not even be noticeable until you start looking for them.

In this episode, you will hear about the power of introspection with tips on how to enhance your practice; the importance of who to call about your strategic ideas because it can hold you back; and why having your own decision-making process is the most important tool to engage with your growth strategy. It is the consistent action that empowers your company to move forward, discern what ideas to test, and then experimenting with those ideas. Jess Dewell talks with Rosco Graves Jr., Managing Director at Polaxis, about why it is BOLD to stop chasing the easy wins.

Host: Jess Dewell

Guest: Rosco Graves Jr.

What You Will Hear:

03:40 Confidence is a journey — through both failures and wins.

• Both positive and negative pivotal moments play an equal role in personal growth.
• Confidence can develop over a career. Rosco Graves reflects on his own transition from being meek to entrepreneurial.
• Facing fears and learning through risk-taking are central to “aha” moments as an entrepreneur.

07:10 Introspection is a critical entrepreneurial skill, especially without a safety net.

• Entrepreneurs must constantly monitor whether they are pushing too hard or being overly pessimistic.
• Self-assessment helps avoid costly overconfidence or undue self-criticism.
• Introspection allows you to sense when it’s a right decision or overreaching.

12:35 Comfort is a warning sign — not a resting place — when building a business.

• Challenge your sense of comfort as a cue to dig deeper or reassess your path.
• Feeling comfortable can mask hidden risks or lead to complacency in business.
• Notice how you plan in times of comfort and tune into those signals to get uncomfortable.

15:50 Actively seeking out people who challenge your thinking is essential.

• Rosco Graves maintains a network of advisors who provide both encouragement and constructive criticism.
• Seek out feedback from those with relevant knowledge or experience, especially when pursuing new ventures.
• Recognize that optimism can be blinding, do an honest assessment even when ideas are challenged.

21:55 Two-person businesses create deadlock — three or more is better.

• Odd-numbered ownership groups are naturally designed to avoid deadlocks and provide diversity of perspectives.
• Adding a “third person” or outside advisor can break ties and lead to stronger decision-making.
• Most business challenges stem from people dynamics, not the idea or business model itself.

27:15 Crafting a process and slowing down are game-changers for decision-making.

• Rosco Grave’s decision-making process includes researching options, forming hypotheses, and objectively evaluating choices.
• Pause and let decisions “marinate,” allowing new information to surface before moving forward.
• Having a repeatable evaluation method helps avoid impulsive actions and builds long-term consistency.

30:10 Giving ideas a holding place creates clarity and focus.

• Quit making decisions in the moment, collect and evaluate them in a Present Retreat to prioritize what to act on.
• Discarding ideas efficiently is key to staying focused and avoiding distraction.
• Quickly assessing and shelving or refining ideas minimizes wasted effort and keeps strategic priorities clear.

41:15 It is BOLD to face the scary stuff I need to do.

Resources

• Rosco Graves Jr. on LinkedIn

Transcript

Rosco Graves Jr. 00:00
Small business owners don’t spend enough time thinking about the strategy. We spend way too much time doing. When I had a business partner, every week we had a specific meeting, all we talked about was strategy.

Announcer 00:18
Every leader’s journey has moments that are completely uncharted. There’s no map, only a problem that needs solving. The most powerful lessons in business often come not from a playbook, they come from stepping into the uncharted.

Today, you are hearing a personal account of a specific challenge and the unique solution they forged. This is your space to learn from the real-world experiences of others. Here to draw out the heart of that story is the catalyst for your next bold move.

Your host, Jess Dewell.

Jess Dewell 00:48
You are in the right place for conversations about what it means to be bold in business today, to leverage and lean into what’s important to you and what matters so that the goals that have been set, the results that you have coming your way, set up what you want next, set up and improve the way that you think and feel and the business instinct that you are continuously working to build. In this program, Rosco Graves Jr., the founding member and managing director of Polaxis, is very open with the way our minds influence business, and he actually shares a lot of how his mind works so that we can take a snapshot and bring it out to work with us. There are three areas that we’re going to dive deep into.

The first is, what does it mean to have a comfortable chair and be too comfortable, and how do we get out of it? The second thing is that we naturally seek confirmation bias, and guess what? We avoid it, sometimes at all costs, seeking information about answers that are different than ours or ones that we don’t want to hear, and we’ve got to do that anyway.

And the third thing is that regardless of the process, having a consistent way with which decisions are made helps create patterns with which to lean in and find untapped potential in your company. So Rosco’s leadership spans industry-leading companies in consumer products, oil and gas, and manufacturing. Polaxis is a trusted financial strategic company.

Rosco Graves Jr. founded it. He’s been working with leadership teams now for over two decades and built his career partnering with decision makers to translate financial data into clear, actionable insights that drive business performance. Starting at Deloitte, navigating the challenges of corporate structures gave him insights and practical experience that he is now bringing as a business owner, as a former franchise operator, and the clients that he is working to grow and grow with.

Pessimist, pragmatist to optimist, pessimist, pragmatist. I know you’re going to enjoy this conversation that Rosco and I have. Where I want to start is mindset.

Mindset around, we both have been around the block a little bit, and we both, in our own ways, I’m sure, have faced confidence crisis. Also, these amazing things when maybe not in the moment, but after we looked back and went, holy cow, I can’t believe I actually had the confidence to do this thing and it worked out. I want to start right there.

Is there a holy cow moment that you’ve had that you were in the middle of somewhere along your journey or looking back and reflecting that you were like, wow, I can’t believe I actually did that. I had no idea I was going on that path and look at how big and amazing this is.

Rosco Graves Jr. 03:54
Wow. I don’t know if there’s one holy cow moment of that. I think there’s a lot of them and they’re the positive and the negative.

I probably focus more on the negative ones. I got through that. That’s what I kind of used.

I think we graduated the same year of high school. That year you would, and you saw me today, I would be almost a completely different human being. I was very meek.

I was very calm. You had to pull information out of me. It was all I was thinking the entire time, but my confidence level was not where it is now.

And me going from someone that wanted to be an entrepreneur at 18, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So I chose my college because I had a scholarship, a full scholarship. And I thought, Hey, if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, you can’t have a bunch of debt.

So go to a school that’s free versus a school that’s not free. And that was my thought at 18. But if you would have given me 50 different business ideas that are wildly successful, I would have said no, because they were all scary.

And just where I am today as an entrepreneur, full-time entrepreneur, doing things every day that I’m not sure about and learning and taking risks is my cumulative aha moment, as well as, wow, this was a crisis. Either my client had a crisis that I helped them with, or I had a crisis and I helped them with that. This is the validation that, you know, you have it.

I’ll pause after this, but I worked for, in corporate America, I worked for a company and they challenged us. One of the executives, when we were getting hired is, you know, yeah, you worked at all these big companies, but it’s easy to be, this is what he said. It’s easy to be successful there because you have all these resources.

You’re working with a ton of smart people. You have this, you have consultants, you can do all this stuff. You have almost an unlimited budget.

Here, you don’t have that. And here, if you’re successful because like you’re at it and you’re figuring it out. And in some ways, that’s what I feel like my life is now, is that I don’t have this great, huge resource behind me, parachute system that kind of keeps me.

You have to figure it out. And you ultimately nine times out of 10, you do.

Jess Dewell 06:08
Nine times out of 10, you do. And in the one out of 10 times, you don’t, what happens?

Rosco Graves Jr. 06:15
Life continues for the most part. You’re not going to get everything right. And I don’t think that’s the goal.

It’s to not have the brand killers, the business killers. And so you have to change your perspective. I’m a perfectionist at heart, but I’ve had to change my perspective to say, I know I’m not going to get this right, but I don’t need to get it a hundred percent right.

And being accounting degree, finance, you want everything right, but that’s either not necessary or it’s just not even feasible.

Jess Dewell 06:45
That’s interesting. On a scale of one to 10, can you sense when you’re in that place where you still have a moment to keep it so that whatever challenge is being faced, it doesn’t have to be the one in 10. It can become part of the nine and 10 of sort of success.

Do you see a point of where you’re actually able to see that decision point?

Rosco Graves Jr. 07:11
I’ve always been very introspective. I’m constantly figuring out after this recording, I will figure out what I should have done better. It’s just what I do.

I tend to be more hard on myself. So it’s something that I naturally do. But to your point, I think that’s one of the things that you have to get really good at an entrepreneurship or when you’re in this space that again, doesn’t have all these resources and all these safety nets to figure out, Hey, I’m going a little bit too far here.

And sometimes it’s, I’m way over optimistic. I am just like, I am seeking people that are going to tell me that I’m right. And that this is the best thing in the world.

You have to figure it out on your own. You have to say, well, I need to slow down or I’m way too pessimistic on this. And I’m beating myself up for something that I don’t need to.

But I think that is like very critical when you’re in this space, even in corporate America, you need that, but you got to be able to figure out where you are. Am I being too hard on myself? Am I being not?

And so I feel like I’m naturally introspective. I don’t know how hard it is for people that aren’t that way, but yes, I can sense, all right, I think I’m good. Or I think I’m actually a little bit overconfident on this one.

Let me think about this. Cause I’ve probably missed something here.

Jess Dewell 08:25
How long from the end of high school to today, did it take you to recognize you have this skill to pull yourself back or to push yourself?

Rosco Graves Jr. 08:34
Probably. So I grad four years of college. It was probably two years after that started realizing, maybe it started in college, late in college.

And then afterwards there’s the technical and regardless of what you do, there’s a technical, you got to be able to do the job and whatever those skills are in my opinion. And someone probably told me this, and I think I try to tell this to young people as well. Then you have a whole nother side.

That’s the soft side. And I started recognizing that I need to understand that piece and delve into that. Especially if you’re trying to lead people, you got to figure out that side.

And as you move through and matriculate through a career, that becomes more important than the technical.

Jess Dewell 09:21
Okay. I wish I was you. I’m still figuring this part out.

That’s not what I’m like two years after you decided.

Rosco Graves Jr. 09:29
But again, I’m so introspective. I’m like constantly thinking about what did I do? And I didn’t do that right.

And at the same time, still not talking to anybody. You meet me in the grocery store. I’m saying hello.

I’m very cordial, but I’m too scared to actually say anything to you. So I got a lot of time in my head that I’m just spinning.

Jess Dewell 09:46
I actually think that I’m going to write a blog post, things that people tell me in the checkout line at the grocery.

Rosco Graves Jr. 09:54
That’s a great one.

Jess Dewell 09:55
Because I’m like, what made you think I can actually answer your question? Okay. So I’m hearing you highly introspective, yet not necessarily just talking to strangers about it.

Have you always been introspective?

Rosco Graves Jr. 10:10
Yeah. I think I got it from my parents. I’m also someone that can sit there and just watch the world.

And so like between those two things, I spent a lot of time. Right now I could go outside to a park and just sit there and just watch people for hours and have the best time of my life that I can remember. I think it’s just part of growing up or how they raised me or whatever.

But I can’t think of any time where I haven’t been that way.

Jess Dewell 10:33
I’m asking about that because I am not as introspective as you by nature. All of my energy comes from interacting with other people out in the world. And that’s my catalyst is action.

And action usually involves things outside of the self. And so I’ve been working on how do you become this? And this becoming, there’s part of me that says, why do I have to be becoming my whole life?

And then there’s a part of me that goes, all of us picked a thing to do and maybe that’s mine. So I have to work hard at the introspection piece. So if you don’t mind, I’d like to stay here a minute because for those out here who are like you, I want them to be able to claim this power that they have even more and be like, I didn’t know I could use it in this way.

And for people more like me, there is a way that we can use maybe just one of these things to help us launch faster, recover better, bounce higher, choose scarier. I’m going to put that out there. If you were to break down your introspection and your ability to, because you’ve now said it several times of something happened, I’m going to assess it.

I’m going to make some decisions about it and move forward. Are there a few things that come to mind that you can articulate and identify? This is part of my process.

Rosco Graves Jr. 11:54
It’s evolved over time. What do I need to do here or how I’m being introspective?

Jess Dewell 11:59
Yes.

Rosco Graves Jr. 11:59
If it is a little bit, and this may be weird, but it’s like, how calm am I? Sometimes it’s calm in my decision-making, but then also am I missing something in this process? I need to be confident in my decision-making, but at the same time, I can be too calm in this process and that becomes more scary.

I focus on when I’m complacent, when I’m calm, but not like a good calm. I’m just, life is good. Those are the times when I tend to go, I need to dig in versus life is great and I need to pull out, if that makes any sense.

Jess Dewell 12:35
It does. You’re describing like comfortable cherishness.

Rosco Graves Jr. 12:38
Like it’s the comfortable. So that’s one of the things that it may be good. It may not be good, but like being comfortable isn’t where I need to sit.

It’s probably something that I have worked on over time where I’m more comfortable in the uncomfortable. So comfortable, that’s when like the red lights, the flashing, that’s when the sirens go off because I’m missing something or I’m not doing something I need to because the comfort is just, it feels so great. In business, I think that’s one of the things.

Your business is going up. Your business is going down. It’s the comfortable places.

And I totally understand it’s hard. Trying to get a dollar is hard. So when you finally get 10, you feel great.

But at the same time, you can’t be complacent and say 10 is going to be for the rest of my life. And so that’s where I tend to lean in, lean out. We talked about this like working.

So then, okay, I’m comfortable maybe, but then maybe I need to be working on something else. I need to be thinking about something else. Life is so great right now and what am I going to buy?

That’s the other point. When I get to the point of, ooh, in two months, I’m going to go buy this and this. Bingo, red flags, sirens.

Are you missing something? Are you sure that in two months, that’s going to happen?

Jess Dewell 13:52
Okay.

Rosco Graves Jr. 13:53
And for me, I’m a numbers guy. Pull out a piece of paper and am I truly going to get there? A lot of times, that’s not actually going to happen in two months.

It’s going to happen in six months. Or man, I completely and utterly forgot about, I need to really be investing over here. That’s where I need to go.

So that’s one of the things that I’ve used is, all right, how comfortable am I? And if I’m too comfortable, this is actually when I need to figure it out and lean in versus, hey, it’s time to just sipping the Mai Tais and hanging out.

Jess Dewell 14:27
Okay. Now I’m going to ask a silly question. Do you have beaches in the Dallas area?

Rosco Graves Jr. 14:33
No, there’s probably some beaches at lakes, but I do not go to them. No, they’re not. But there are places, my wife and I go to travel.

Jess Dewell 14:42
I was going to say, I’m thinking that you’re going out of the Dallas area to sip Mai Tais. Was that a right assumption to make? For whatever reason, if somebody says Mai Tais are their favorite, I know they’re beach people.

Rosco Graves Jr. 14:54
So I was actually going to say, I don’t know that I’ve had a Mai Tai. When I actually said it, I’m like, I don’t know if I’ve actually had a Mai Tai. I think I have once, but I think they’re sweet if I remember correctly.

And I don’t like sweet drinks.

Announcer 15:10
Feeling stuck? Like what got you here won’t get you there. The pressure to grow is on yet.

The path isn’t clear yet. You don’t have to walk that path alone. This is the bold business podcast.

Like, and subscribe wherever you listen. Your host, Jess Dewell is the strategic partner you’ve been looking for. Asking the questions that truly matter.

It’s time to break the inertia and get the perspective you need to make your next move.

Jess Dewell 15:45
In your business, who balances your thinking by thinking differently?

Rosco Graves Jr. 15:53
So I have a group of people and I need to actually extend that group, but part of it is myself. Again, I have this introspectiveness. Part of it is that I have a group of people that I can go to that I know I have.

We all have the people that are going to great idea. I think it’s called the mom effect or something, right? As you go to your mom and your grades were the best, you were the greatest kid in the entire world.

So you always have those people. You need those people. Sometimes you just need that pick me up, but I’m always searching for those that also will tell me that’s a bad idea or a question.

And it doesn’t mean I stop, but what it means is I need to understand where they’re coming from. So I did have a business a couple of years ago that kind of came to me. So then I started thinking about who can I talk to that kind of has more experience in this than I.

And so I talked to a couple of people and then I specifically said, who can I talk to that’s going to tell me no? Part of that, I think balancing it out, right? And so it was hard and made a list and took me two months to actually reach out to those people because I know what they’re going to say, but ultimately that’s what I had to do.

I had to put on the big boy britches and because that’s actually what’s going to help me out. I would have invested in something that wasn’t going to work out. It was somebody saying, you sure about that Rosco?

Now I then had to take that, do my own research, do my own work, but hearing that helped. So it’s having that group of people and we all know it. I try to focus more on people that are going to tell me the right stuff and build relationships with people that don’t feel like they can’t have that conversation with me.

Those people that are going to do it out of experience to do it out of knowledge, not just, hey, I just don’t think that makes any sense.

Jess Dewell 17:36
Thank you for sharing how long it took you to reach out to the people who you knew were going to tell you no, but you really knew you wanted to talk to them. Right.

Rosco Graves Jr. 17:43
Yeah.

Jess Dewell 17:43
We all have that. I know the answer and I know the answer is not what I want the answer to be and I won’t face it. And I know I spend time each week in doing some strategic work on these bigger ideas, all of these things, priorities, and how do we go forward?

Is it the right thing right now? How do we know if a pivot is coming? Things are changing, but we can’t find the pattern yet.

Rosco Graves Jr. 18:04
Exactly.

Jess Dewell 18:05
And it takes me weeks sometimes to be able to face some of the things that I am very uninterested in facing.

Rosco Graves Jr. 18:12
What a lot of people do is they focus on all the positive. And in some degree, I think that’s where I think overall, I’m not a pessimistic person. I’ve had some people tell me that I’m an optimistic person, but I think I’m balanced.

And what I’ve seen sometimes is optimism can be your biggest impediment to success.

Jess Dewell 18:34
Yeah.

Rosco Graves Jr. 18:34
You go down rabbit holes, you focus on stuff, you work through stuff that is never going to work, but you will never see it because you’re so optimistic or you’re just going to figure it out and it’s no, that just won’t work. I can always go back and say, I knew this wasn’t going to work. Want to hear that it wasn’t going to work.

It to work. There was something in me, had nothing to do with the numbers, had nothing to do with the market. All this is telling me one thing, but I just wanted to do something else in this way.

That’s probably going to be wrong, but I’m willing to accept it because this is just what I want to do. Now I should not eat double cheeseburgers, but I really have to have one today. And I’m just going to, and I know it’s bad for me, but this tomorrow I’ll eat healthy, but that’s what I’m going to do.

Jess Dewell 19:20
That’s interesting. I have had those experiences in business and actually with business partners, Rosco, and they were businesses that failed. What I wished I had done was listen to the cues earlier, because I probably could have gotten it to be one of the nine times that worked in some way.

Instead of avoiding it all, there was nothing salvageable about it. And I’ve done that a few times. And I think some of it is a belief in an idea.

I think it could be the belief of people. I think it could be the actual potential that is really there. But then all of those things are true.

But then in spite of all of that, we did not have the right talent to do some of the things. In each of those cases, our values were not the same. The other person believed something inherently different than I did.

And for whatever reason, we both knew we worked.

Rosco Graves Jr. 20:14
Exactly. I think a lot of times the signs are there. What happens is it’s not that you didn’t see it, it’s that you knew there was a stop sign and you just went down on the gas pedal.

That’s really what it was. And so all of these things, because we tend to then say, I’m just not good at this. No, you had everything.

The problem was you didn’t want to stop. You chose to push down and it’s for everything else. And so I think partnerships are very difficult.

In fact, last Friday, I had breakfast with a new person, really great. And she was saying she’s never doing partnerships ever again. She’s done with partnerships.

And there’s several people that I’ve met with that have said that. And I totally understand how you can get there. But to your point, I think that’s one of the things in partnerships that we don’t do is we don’t sit there and really, especially if it’s a two-person or that kind of thing, or near 51, 49, like those kinds of partnerships versus a one person’s got 80% of the company, the other person’s got 20.

Now you have a boss, right? Or you have someone that can wield a little bit more power. But we don’t think about all those other things that factor into how do we make this a success?

And because we want to get the idea going, we want to do all these other things when it’s not the idea that’s going to make probably be the issue. It’s going to be the two humans.

Jess Dewell 21:36
Yep. Yeah. I might be alone in saying this.

One person businesses, it’s like the song. One is the loneliest number. One is the loneliest number.

It is true in business too.

Rosco Graves Jr. 21:51
Yes, exactly.

Jess Dewell 21:52
And where I will go out on a limb, most people are like, so I just need a partner. I am anti two people in a business ownership structure. I am pro odd numbers of people, three, five, seven, because then there’s never a tie.

And so one of the things, and you may end up thinking about what I’m saying. I end up being the third person a lot of the time, or I end up being an outside set of eyes to somebody and a silent partner who’s actually not that silent. Your point about the equity split and something like that.

So create, instead of having something where you can have a tug of war and a tie, standing it up and having a triangle, because then it’s just going to land somewhere. We need a tiebreaker.

Rosco Graves Jr. 22:35
Yeah. I’ve never had anybody tell me that. So that’s, I’m going to noodle on what you’re saying.

Never had anybody succinctly go to, yeah, two person partnerships. And actually when the person was talking to me the other day. So there is some benefit and some thought to, I think of more people.

Alexis, I’m right now, the owner that probably is not going to be the case going forward, especially longterm. When I look at like where we would be, it would be a group of us. It’s not just necessarily two people at some point or it’s three, it’s five.

Then you have different perspectives. Then you have people that are vested. Where I’ve sat and where I sit with some of my clients is that kind of paid tiebreaker.

I’m not, I don’t have any equity, but where I want to do is help them get to what’s the right answer. I really like the three. I’m going to spend a lot of time thinking about that because I think that really does help.

You still need to have the right talents. You still need to be able to work together, but now you don’t have this. Because I think one-on-one gets more personal than one-on-three, one-on-five, that kind of thing.

So there’s a lot of stuff that gets involved when you start going into, all right, this is what I want to do and we have to figure it out.

Jess Dewell 23:46
I’ll share a personal story because actually this, it happened in a weird way and it was when we were no longer the owners. My first company had five owners. Two were silent partners.

One was the majority owner, the inventor, creator, person, and everything. And then my now husband and I. After we were acquired, the two silent partners went away.

So there were just three of us. The person whose main platform it was that was like, Hey, I got this idea. Come work with me left.

And so then it was just Ryan and I with the acquirer, the company that did the acquiring. All of a sudden, we became fractured. I had a particular objective, which was around sales and marketing and growth.

And he had a particular objective of developing what he was told to develop. And we both lost some autonomy in our ability to work together in the sense of he had constraints and I had constraints. I believe that it was totally competing priorities.

So I had to say no and push, and he had to say no and push. And that impacted us not only at work, it impacted us in our life too.

Rosco Graves Jr. 24:49
Right.

Jess Dewell 24:49
A lot.

Rosco Graves Jr. 24:50
That’s why I was like, Oh boy, that was going into business with your spouse. That’s a whole nother level there.

Jess Dewell 24:54
You can either not or you can’t. Turns out, I think we could do it if we didn’t have competing priorities. And knowing what I know now, I would try it again, but it’s been 25 years.

Rosco Graves Jr. 25:07
It’s been more than five years.

Jess Dewell 25:09
Just five.

Rosco Graves Jr. 25:09
It’s been five.

Jess Dewell 25:10
I’m willing to try this again, maybe. But I do think it is one-on-one. And I was using us as an example because we are also now married and have been married for a long time.

But I will say that we have to be so careful. And I actually think we do it better in business sometimes. Having, I would call them ground rules, are rules of engagement of how do we want to make decisions?

And if we don’t, that’s where it doesn’t matter if we have one, two, three, even number odd number involved or uninvolved.

Rosco Graves Jr. 25:41
Man, that’s a great point. And I think that’s one of the things that thankfully I worked for some really great corporations that kind of taught us things. But that’s one of the things that I also, maybe going back a little bit of like how I get there and I don’t have a structure written out, but I have a kind of way to make important decisions.

And I think that is abundantly key is you have to have a way, even if it’s wrong, you have a way. Versus one way, I do it this way. One decision, I do it this way.

Another decision, I use data. Another decision, it’s 100% gut. Fifth decision, I’m going to ask my uncle and whatever my uncle tells me I’m going to do.

None of that works together. And you can’t replicate, even if it works once, you can’t replicate it because there’s no science behind it. So one of the things I think that when I get time, I’m going to go to a class and just audit a class, but like the scientific method, I think that we just missed the scientific method.

And so I’m just going to audit a class and just this, just like scientific method, because you need some way to evaluate things over and over again. And that’s how you get to consistent success versus off the whim, off the cuff. Yeah, it can happen.

And that could happen. Now I’m going to do it again. And we get this confirmation bias because it happened the first time, lucky the first time.

And you just don’t want to be honest with yourself that I just got lucky. I’m stopping because I know I can’t do this again.

Jess Dewell 27:13
So what is your process for making important decisions?

Rosco Graves Jr. 27:17
Yes, I don’t have it written out, but part of it is research. Part of it is creating a hypothesis. I always have these hypotheses in my head all the time, but create a hypothesis, research it.

I’m a numbers person. So at some point I’m going to put some type of, even if it’s a numbered scaling of this is a five waiting, and this is a two, that just is how my mind works. And because I’m an execute, when I get to a certain point, I’m an executor.

And what I’ve done in the past, I moved too fast because that’s what I do. I get stuff done. And the only way you get stuff done is you get stuff done.

But when you’re trying to think about ideas, time actually helps. And generally when I set it aside, that’s when I run into someone randomly, something happens where it’s, Oh, I never knew that. That changes my research this week to really like, you have to look at decisions.

And this person said, advance, kill, refine. That’s what I try to do is, all right, as I go through, is this going to work? Is it just something I don’t want to do?

Or I don’t feel like I’m confident, kill it. All right. I did this.

It works. I did this, keep going. Now I need to refine.

I’ve had to, again, slowing down has been like magical for me because once I get in my head, see goal, hit goal. And that isn’t always the best when you’re talking about doing something new and new ventures.

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Jess Dewell 29:20
The ability to go, I’ve gotten as far as we have gotten, and now we’re going to pause business instinct. I also use business instinct in another way, Rosco, which is somewhat our intuition. I know right away this has potential and it has high potential, whatever my threshold is.

For me, there’s 70% potential here. I’m like, ooh, I want to look at that sooner. If there’s only 10 or 20% potential, I put it in a different holding place and I look at it quarterly or annually because I don’t want them to go away.

I actually have done this on paper too.

Rosco Graves Jr. 29:52
Wow. That’s really great.

Jess Dewell 29:53
Because I don’t know about you, but I take notes. So you should see my notes for our thing. When I’m out and about, it could be in the grocery store line, it could be in my car.

So it’s a voice memo. I have two places. I have an electronic place and a physical place.

Jess Dewell 30:05
Okay.

Jess Dewell 30:05
Look at this. I’ve got actual sticky notes of all my ideas in the last week.

Rosco Graves Jr. 30:10
Wow.

Jess Dewell 30:10
I am an idea person. I’m going to put it aside. I actually start with my ideas.

They go in WhoBin and I review them once a week. And if I have potential, like in the next 12 to 24 weeks, I’ll be like, cool. I’ll look at that a little bit more now.

I throw away like 60% of my ideas.

Rosco Graves Jr. 30:29
But that’s great. Yeah.

Jess Dewell 30:30
So that was a learned thing. And I actually feel very proud of that. Going back to our original conversation of how your version of interest, I’ve actually made a physical process with which to work where you’re introspective, I do this because I’m like, I got to get rid of all of this stuff so I can put my energy where it can really work.

Rosco Graves Jr. 30:47
But honestly, if you didn’t, if you didn’t throw away 60%, I feel like it’d be worse because then your filter isn’t tight enough. And you’re spending a lot. I literally had this conversation with a family member recently where it’s no, actually quitting isn’t the, isn’t, that’s not the enemy.

If you figure out it’s not worth your time. Yeah. And so you do it quick, fast, just move on.

Right. And so the research helps, but there’s a little bit of that business instinct. My wife has been very helpful to me that there’s instinct in you.

You got a feeling. And sometimes that is pushing you or pulling you away from things. So to listen to that, you know, as you go through, you feel it as I do my research, as I look.

And again, there are, I’m going to look at all the places that say, this is the greatest thing in the entire world. I’m going there first. Sorry.

That’s what’s happened. That’s going to take me some time, but I’m eventually going to go to that website and go to that research and go to that paper that says, this is the worst idea in the entire world. I need to see both.

Yep. I need to see both. Without seeing both.

I’m not balanced and I’m going to, it’s confirmation bias. And wow, I need to actually do that. The idea boxes, I got something that I like it.

Yeah. Electronic.

Jess Dewell 32:00
I have a name.

Rosco Graves Jr. 32:01
Oh, there you go.

Jess Dewell 32:05
And actually I have the, in my notes on my computer, I have my now and near note where I’m like, I put my voice memos and I put my other random notes if I’m doing other things.

Rosco Graves Jr. 32:15
Let me ask you this question, having those thoughts, and I’m sure some of those thoughts are random. Some may be associated with current business or future businesses, but do you ever have a situation where you have completely new business idea, but somehow that thought or the work for that affects something current or gives you insight into the current?

Jess Dewell 32:39
Yep. And what I ended up finding is one of two things. So this new idea, how much in the scope of my exist, like redirection, how much in the scope of this is with redirection?

Is it truly a new idea? The majority of the time it is not. I think it is.

I want it to be if it’s within here. So then the real question is how come I think it’s new? And is it because of the way we’re doing business?

Is it because of who we’ve defined our ideal client to be? Is it because of the way our infrastructure and our resources are allocated? And so I end up using some of those new ideas that are for other things that actually improve what we’re doing.

So because it’s outside and I get to look at it differently and I’m like, wait, it’ll actually work here. How awesome. And some things, if it’s systematized, it will always work for a new business.

Rosco Graves Jr. 33:33
Yeah. I think that’s why it’s good. We don’t spend enough time, small business owners don’t spend enough time thinking about the strategy, thinking about we spend way too much time doing.

I have time on my calendar. When I had a business partner, every week we had a specific meeting. All we talked about was strategy.

Jess Dewell 33:51
Yep.

Rosco Graves Jr. 33:52
Not, did this get done? Do that because you need it. The reward, the benefits are just amazing.

Think about just wild and crazy stuff because that’s where I find something that’s it. Hey, that actually works with my business or it may not work, but if I’m only focused on what I do and that’s my entire life, I don’t see these other ops that can impact my business significantly.

Jess Dewell 34:15
Did you keep your strategic time?

Rosco Graves Jr. 34:19
I do, but part of it is I’m not disciplined in it, but part of it is right now, last probably four months, the minute my head hits the bed, my mind starts going. And so I have it every night. So I don’t need it.

It is just, it flows. And so I’m trying to work on calming that piece, but yes, it does happen. There are certain things or certain activities.

Last couple of weeks I’ve been walking my dog Saturday morning. That kind of becomes my time to, then again, I’m this introspective person, so I’m constantly, but it is at least a time for me to, and so now that’s part of it. This is where I am.

What about this man? Am I spending enough time here? Do I need to really lean in there?

It’s all of those kinds of things. And then with my team, certain aspects, I’ve started to build that with my team so that we’re having those conversations, but yes, it needs to be structured. I’m getting there.

Jess Dewell 35:18
I will tell you, embrace that it’s showing up at bedtime and I hope- And that’s hard for me to do. Unsolicited advice for you, paper and a pencil, or go into the closet since you’re not alone, voice it out into a memo and just get it out and say, I’m going to give myself five minutes and I’m just going to write. I’m going to give myself five minutes and I’m just going to talk.

And then hopefully that will help with the rest of your sleeping versus arguing with it, facing it, taming it. There’s a true element of that, but you’re right. I actually, when my mind goes crazy like that, my discipline in my present retreat isn’t what it should be, which means I’m not using the time appropriately if this stuff is showing up other times.

Because the other thing I will tell you is by having that, I’m much more, not only efficient with my time during the week, I have less distraction in terms of switching to, I don’t evaluate new ideas as they come up anymore. Everything that is a word, if somebody or something shows up and it’s fleeting and I can’t say yes, because I know I haven’t done enough present retreat time, or it’s really a no, and if it can’t wait a week, or even we’re recording on a Friday. And so my present retreats are always on Mondays.

If it can’t wait over the weekend, then even that short of a time, I’m like, okay, I’m sad to miss out. That’s a boundary slash buffer that I have created because I know ideas are awesome. And once they start coming, they always come, but we can’t explore them all.

It doesn’t matter who we are or where we are in the organization. And it creates real fatigue for the team.

Rosco Graves Jr. 36:58
Yes. Yep. Yep.

And so we’ve all worked for that boss that every day had a new idea and you were constantly, and to your point is fatigue. And that’s where I think the process comes in, right? And what happens is what bubbles up to the top is what I like, not what is the best thing to do, what is, that doesn’t work.

And so we have to, again, to have consistent success to in any business, you need that ability to have a process that’s going to give me 50, 60, whatever your number is percent chance of success, not 40, 70, 30. That’s, you’re not going to have success that way over a long period of time. I think that’s another thing like we just get into, we’ve had a great year.

I’m a genius. That’s one year or the opposite. I’m terrible because I’ve had a bad six months.

Yeah. Six months.

Jess Dewell 37:53
That’s exactly right.

Rosco Graves Jr. 37:55
Short period of time.

Jess Dewell 37:56
So we’ve been talking a lot about introspection and I appreciate this. Have you, will you share a time where it got in your way and held you back?

Rosco Graves Jr. 38:08
It almost happens every day to some degree because it’s my introspection and my perfection. I put those together, but I have to sometimes like even emails, I have to set a timeline and I will literally just set a three-minute, two-minute, whatever, because I will spend 20 minutes on the email because I need to, I really need to figure out, should I highlight this yellow? Is that the right color?

Or should it be pink? Or should it be red? And I just have to set my time and say in two minutes, this email is going to go out and I’m moving on.

I’ve tried to understand paralysis, paralysis analysis. It probably has reared his head. There was an opportunity that I will say that I had a business idea of a very boring business that no one would ever want to do.

And I’m like, Hey, I think this could work. And I did some research and kind of what I thought was nobody was doing it. And, but I didn’t have, I was doing a bunch of personal research, there was no action.

Go ahead and talk to people. I didn’t go out and it was, I would have had to buy these businesses. So it was a private equity kind of thought process that I was going with, but I didn’t actually have any action and didn’t go out.

And I’m trying to be a little bit of not saying what it actually is. It’s not that I had the greatest idea in the world, but I just don’t know what happened. It was all in my head.

There was no, let me go talk to people. Let me go look into buying that business. Let me go to a trade show.

It was all just stuck in my head. At the time I was potentially transitioning out of corporate America, staying in corporate America. I really didn’t want to be entrepreneur full-time at that point in time.

So I was doing things and I get this job and it is for a company doing the exact thing that I thought about. Now, I could not have probably done what they would have done at scale. And it was like a startup.

So they were still doing this stuff. I could have been where they were, but it’s like, I had that idea. I was right there, but I was too scared.

And I was still stuck in like my head. I was right down this same path. I would have just been in the finance department or whatever, but I was in this path, but I didn’t do anything.

So I get it. I get the concept. I’ve done all this research, but I just didn’t move on it.

Didn’t end up working with them, which is perfectly fine, but it taught me two things. One, I have some intuition. Like I was going down the right path, but then what kept me?

And a lot of it was doing way too much spreadsheet work and not enough. Let me go talk to people. Let me go see this.

Let me go. And so now what I’ve tried to done, living this entrepreneurship life, I got to try it. I got to get out there.

I got to talk to people. And this is where you and I are different, where I have to force myself a little bit sometimes, but that’s what is going to help educate me and get there. So I don’t know if that’s a great one or not, or.

Jess Dewell 41:13
It’s perfect because it actually led right into my next question that you didn’t know I was going to ask, which is I want to know what makes it bold to have a process for decision-making to work with these ideas and hypotheses that we have and actually take action on them.

Rosco Graves Jr. 41:28
What makes it bold to take action?

Jess Dewell 41:30
What makes it bold to do the work to find out if you have something to take action on?

Rosco Graves Jr. 41:35
So part of it is I’ve gotten to a point where the scary stuff is the stuff I need to actually do. And nine times out of 10, after I do it, I’m like, that wasn’t actually that bad. I don’t know if you were a thrill seeker or if you go on roller coasters or you did any of that stuff when you were younger.

I never did it when I was younger because I was way too scared. And now it just is. I feel like my brain moves 10 times faster.

So my wife and I, we’re at a pool with some friends of ours and our goddaughter and they have two slides and they have a diving board. And so goddaughter says, hey, I’m going to go down the slide. She’s going down the slide all day long.

Rosco, would you go down the slide? I don’t really want to go down the slide, but it’s scary and I’m not going to die. Let me go down the slide.

So I go down the slide, did not have enough water on the slides. I felt like my whole back was like ripped off. It was like screeching sound as I went down the slide.

And again, it felt like I was going a hundred miles an hour. I was talking to some other guys the same way, playing football, playing sports, like things move slower. Whereas now it just feels like the whole thing is shaking, but it wasn’t a huge scary thing.

It was just a little bit scary. So then after the slides, then it becomes, hey, go down the diving board. I haven’t been on a diving board since I was probably 12.

Again, I’m not going to die. So now it’s, yeah, I’m going to go down the diving board. I didn’t try a flip.

That’s why I stopped. But it’s doing these little bitty things. Yeah, you’re not going to die.

Everything’s going to be fine after you do it. Try it. Even these small things then help you to ask that question in a room, talk to someone that you wouldn’t, like be that bold for me, for my personnel to be bold because it’s becoming a part of my life versus I do everything I only want to do.

And now, when I need to do this, it’s like Mount Everest. Whereas if every day I’m doing something that’s a little bit, I’m a little bit scared about it, then it just becomes part of my life. And even to the point of sometimes, man, it’s been a while since I’ve done something new.

Boom. Whereas 15, 20 years ago, doing something new, that’s a lot.

Announcer 44:05
And that brings us to the close of another powerful and fresh perspective on the Bold Business Podcast. In today’s volatile landscape, growth is a double-edged sword. To truly thrive, you must engage with your strategy, not just react to the day-to-day.

Without absolute alignment, your company faces a stark choice, outmaneuver or be outmaneuvered, grow or get left behind. Thank you for listening. And a special thanks to the Scott Treatment for technical production.