Steve Pruneau Of Free Agent Source: How To Successfully Ride The Emotional Highs & Lows Of Being An Entrepreneur

… Choices aren’t binary or a single fork in the road. Choices are on a spectrum of possibilities with multiple ways forward and multiple paths to success.

Being a founder, entrepreneur, or a business owner can have many exciting and thrilling moments. But it is also punctuated with periods of doubt, slump, and anxiety. So how does one successfully and healthily ride the highs and lows of Entrepreneurship? In this series, called “How To Successfully Ride The Emotional Highs & Lows Of Being An Entrepreneur” we are talking to successful entrepreneurs who can share stories from their experience. I had the pleasure of interviewing Steve Pruneau.

Steve has a problem with the waste and dysfunction in traditional consulting firms. As head of consulting operations at the start-up he founded, Free Agent Source Inc, he builds the company to run lean with roles and procedures, not a management hierarchy. There are no consulting partners or gatekeepers between clients and consultants, so each consultant has freedom to do their best work: give straight answers focused on client priorities, deliver value, get it done. He lives in Los Angeles.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I went into the world of work as a young MBA with big dreams and foolishly thinking business was a meritocracy. If I delivered solid results, success would come. I wanted to start my own business someday, but I thought the best route would be to have a successful corporate career first.

CULTURE EATS STRATEGY FOR BREAKFAST My first job of any significance was at a corporate travel agency, Rosenbluth International, on a high floor in the posh One Liberty Place tower in Philadelphia, back when travel management was a procurement solution. This was before the web. As a service business, Hal Rosenbluth, the CEO, put his focus on developing a company culture that took care of internal staff, “associates”, so they would take care of customers better than other travel companies. And they did. Rosenbluth consistently earned the highest industry ratings for service. Hal wrote a book called “The Customer Comes Second”. The Rosenbluth ethos was a really good influence that I carry with me.

STALLED CORPORATE CAREER After Philadelphia and nearly 3 years in Tokyo as Rosenbluth’s Asia-Pacific liaison, I followed a mentor to British Airways in the US and was there for nearly 10 years. It was a good run and I am grateful, but I should have known better than to go from a smaller fast-growing entrepreneurial company to a mature one. As the years passed, it became painfully clear that my own success was mostly in the hands of people clinging to their jobs in the management hierarchy above me. Corporate feudal society is NOT a meritocracy. I didn’t know how I was going to make the leap into starting my own company, but delusions of corporate success were finally killed off and I was no longer a company man.

THE PROJECT-BASED ECONOMY From my vantage point in British Airways and business news in general, the drive for continuous improvement everywhere was making work more transient. It still does. Just about every company on the planet has a portfolio of projects meant to re-tool the business in some way. I love project work. But the future of work itself is becoming more temporary. This creates a lot of financial uncertainty for people and it makes professional relationships more transient.

I WANTED A BETTER WAY TO WORK As an entrepreneur, I wanted to solve those two issues for the project-based economy: financial security and enable long term professional relationships across multiple projects, without people being tied to salaried jobs. Solving those two issues leads client companies to competitive advantage over their competitors.

While I was figuring out how to jump into the wild as an entrepreneur, I worked at Fidelity Investments, which like Rosenbluth has a positive internal culture, and then a software company called Infor. I got out in 2010. Free Agent Source Inc was born.

What was the “Aha Moment” that led to the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?

The closest thing to an ‘Aha Moment’ was a train wreck of a project in 2012 when I worked as a subcontractor at PwC on a software project for Verizon. The project was more about defending the executive’s turf than actual results. This wasn’t my first experience in big consulting but after seeing the same organizational dysfunction yet again, I said to myself ‘no more’.

That experience solidified our commitment at Free Agent Source to the ‘Adventurer Executive’ meme and our ethos of simplicity, openness and results. We want to attract the clients who are the opposite of what I experienced at PwC. We focus on executives who are in business to get things done, to rack up accomplishments. They see business as their sport or performance art. And so do we.

In your opinion, were you a natural born entrepreneur or did you develop that aptitude later on? Can you explain what you mean?

It’s definitely a developed aptitude. I think anyone can develop an entrepreneurial mindset if they are positively motivated enough or pissed-off enough to fix something or want to build something for themselves that the world wants too.

Was there somebody in your life who inspired or helped you to start your journey with your business? Can you share a story with us?

For me, it’s been 100% ‘learn as I go’. Wilderness survival. Since jumping into the wild as a consultant and entrepreneur, there hasn’t been anyone in my professional life with whom I can swap stories and get their perspective.

I get a lot of inspiration from musicians, performers and artists because they also create something from nothing, following a vision for what they want. I like to watch artist interviews on YouTube. The artist’s journey, the uncertainty they face and the things they have to work out for themselves… it’s very similar to what I face in business. Choices aren’t binary or a single fork in the road. Choices are on a spectrum of possibilities with multiple ways forward and multiple paths to success.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

We run our company with roles and processes, not a management hierarchy. We work as peers. It makes us lighter, more agile, and it’s easier for clients to work with us too. With no gatekeepers between clients and consultants, long term professional relationships tend to develop from working together. That translates into a real advantage in teamwork with clients. They don’t lose institutional knowledge with us because they can contact consultants directly and arrange to re-engage them for the next project.

A client got back in touch with us recently. Some of their servers had been hacked and they needed help to rebuild the entire server stack for their app. The old relationship was still there. We started right where we left off a few years ago. No familiarization. No questions about contracts or payment. We jumped in, did the work and they paid us. Having an established relationship of trust made the quick start possible. It was a relatively small job, but we love working on a foundation of familiarity and trust like that. We want work and professional relationships to be like that everywhere.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

INDEPENDENCE or some call it AUTONOMY I don’t do well following arbitrary rules or living up to others’ expectations. I can be a strong team player and I like collaboration, but I’m not a good employee. When I was a kid, this trait wasn’t as clear to me and I didn’t know my life would be this way. Looking back, I’ve consistently picked my own direction. I would not have left the corporate career if I didn’t have a strong independent streak.

INTEGRITY Integrity is important to me. I like working in a crew of people who trust each other and the only way to get that is for me to be trustworthy and reliable. Don’t be a burden on the team. Take care of my own stuff.

HAPPINESS and PLEASURE I fall into the “pleasure seeker” category, meaning I appreciate some down time on the weekend. Some indulgent food and wine. Do fun things. Go on adventures. Travel.

All that balances out the stress of work and building a company. And with the need for independence combined with a desire to live a happy life, you can imagine I don’t put up with assholes or toxic situations very long. [smiles]

Often leaders are asked to share the best advice they received. But let’s reverse the question. Can you share a story about advice you’ve received that you now wish you never followed?

I remember at British Airways I confided in my boss, the VP of US Operations, I was concerned about losing career momentum and years were passing by. He is among the best I had the pleasure to work with during my corporate years. Solid integrity. No politics. I admired him and still do.

His response was; “You’re still young. You have plenty of time.”

I wasn’t young. I was mid career and nowhere close to where I wanted to be. His advice was for a company man and I eventually figured out, my future is not as a company man.

Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them create a work culture in which employees thrive and do not “burn out” or get overwhelmed?

The only way I know to address burn-out is to build the company from the ground up with a focus on sustainable relationships across all stakeholders. Founders and business owners create company culture, whether they intend to or not. Their values, how they treat everyone around them and what they prioritize as the most important outcomes, define company culture.

If you make caring for people a priority in your business, then you and your people will not burn out. If you choose investors who have a sustainable approach to growing businesses, meaning they balance investment priorities with sustainability across all stakeholders: internal staff and customers, then burn-out is less likely.

If your priority is hyper growth, blitz-scale, a big cash-out payday… if you choose investors who are exclusively focused on getting the highest multiple from their investment as fast as possible, and if all that is more important than people (and it often is), then your company will likely become a burn-out machine. There’s a steady stream of CEOs and HR executives who prioritize high return on investment over people. Some try to disguise their true priories with things like employee satisfaction surveys, free food and games in the break room. It usually doesn’t work.

What would you advise other business leaders to do in order to build trust, credibility, and Authority in their industry?

Speak your truth, whether it’s about your own personal and professional aspirations, your company’s current financial situation, current state of product development, expected product ship date, whatever. Don’t fake, hustle, or hide. Make sure every deal is sustainable for the other side, whether it’s with an employee, contractor, supplier or customer. That means, genuinely care about the other person and their situation. That earns trust and credibility, which are basically prerequisites.

Becoming an authority on anything emerges from true dedication to your craft. If you genuinely love the business you’re in, if you want to make your business better and if the world will benefit from that, then eventually all your efforts will become a gut level feeling of confidence — gravitas. People in your company, clients, competitors, industry observers will feel your gravitas and may even call you an authority. That’s a great honor. But if you call yourself an authority, I’m calling bullshit.

Can you help articulate why doing that is essential today?

Business runs on trust. I don’t see that ever changing. Humanity is more connected now than we ever have been. We’re essentially living in a village where everyone knows about everyone else, but at massive scale.

The more trust and credibility there is in your company’s organizational culture, the more productive and fulfilling it will be for all involved. The same applies to entire societies at a national level. The wealth of entire countries increases or decreases by the amount of trust and credibility that exists in every society.

With a foundation of trust in our relationships among consultants at Free Agent Source, our clients and with suppliers, all the administrative overhead of doubt and guarded behavior melt away. We achieve more and work is a lot more fun. That’s an extraordinary advantage over the competition.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?

FEUDAL LORDS CREATE A CULTURE OF SERVITUDE Some founders and CEOs I’ve met seem to want their own corporate fiefdom rather than a business that produces something of value for customers and internal staff who work there.

COMMAND-AND-CONTROL IS NOT THE ONLY WAY In other situations, executives may mean well but seem to think the only way to run a business is to create a command-and-control hierarchy throughout the organization. Maybe it’s just habit from corporate life where that way of running a business is assumed and rarely questioned.

The overall mistake is, when you run your company as a command-and-control hierarchy rather than with roles and procedures which allow for autonomy focused on defined outcomes, your company is weaker than more agile competitors.

To avoid that…

FOCUS ON OUTCOMES In most businesses, customer orders are specific about what’s to be delivered and for what price. In other words, there are specifically described outcomes to be gained from every exchange between buyer and seller.

But executives and business owners often suspend that discipline with internal operations. Employees are typically paid for time at an office rather than outcomes. If you run your business with clearly defined outcomes at every level every week, instead of paying employees to be present, then the company will deliver at much higher levels.

MAKE YOURSELF USEFUL TO OTHERS As CEO and / or Founder, you are the leader of your community and the keeper of company culture (whether you like it or not). Your financial future is best secured by making yourself useful to internal staff and customers. I mean a mindset of interconnected relationships: an ecology of sustainable relationships throughout your business, all engaging in exchanges of value. I ask myself all the time, “Am I making myself useful to staff, consultants and clients in our business?”

Ok fantastic. Thank you for those excellent insights, Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview about How to Successfully Ride The Emotional Highs & Lows Of Being An Entrepreneur. The journey of an entrepreneur is never easy, and is filled with challenges, failures, setbacks, as well as joys, thrills and celebrations. This might be intuitive, but I think it will be very useful to specifically articulate it. Can you describe to our readers why no matter how successful you are as an entrepreneur, you will always have fairly dramatic highs and lows? Particularly, can you help explain why this is different from someone with a “regular job”?

For me, business is a performance art. We build the business to attract an audience and perform for them. It’s like the thrill bands and musicians describe when they look out from the stage and see an engaged audience yelling and waving with their performance. It’s never the same from one performance to the next. In my business, there’s always a different mix of people; our people, the client’s people, and people from the client’s other suppliers who are on the project with us. Some performances are great, some bomb. Those are the highs and lows.

Do you feel comfortable sharing a story from your own experience about how you felt unusually high and excited as a result of your business? We would love to hear it.

No matter how many clients we have, it’s always a thrill when a new client says “yes” and engages us. It’s a new adventure. It’s a chance to meet new people, work together and get their project done.

But more than any particular moment of high excitement, I feel a deep sense of satisfaction from having survived. There have been so many demands from banks, insurance companies, annual workers comp insurance audits, company registration over the years… the guy who stiffed my company for a month of revenue, the lawyer who didn’t follow-through with the civil suit to collect and never returned the retainer, our first direct client went bankrupt… all while starving for cash and building the business.

It’s like getting dropped into the wilderness; animals, bugs, rough terrain, bad weather, cold nights. Early on, there is failure, despair and doubt. Over time, after solving one small problem after another, we find ourselves still in business. Those mental scratches and cuts turn into scars of experience. Having that experience and knowing I can survive outside the comforts of a salaried corporate job is enormously satisfying no matter how difficult any random day may be.

Do you feel comfortable sharing a story from your own experience about how you felt unusually low, and vulnerable as a result of your business? We would love to hear it.

Every business needs a first customer to start. My opportunity to start Free Agent Source came when American Apparel in Los Angeles licensed the Infor employee time and scheduling system, which I knew very well. They didn’t want the high cost of vendor consulting services. They wanted independent consultants.

I was contacted by a guy who claimed to be COO of a small unknown IT consulting firm in San Mateo called “Cevera”. Let’s call him “Shifty”. In spite of those red flags, the one thing which made it doable was, he had a prior professional relationship with the CIO at American Apparel to whom he introduced me. I trusted her right away. It was worth the risk, so I took the gig and brought in a couple of other consultants to work on the project.

American Apparel had creative energy everywhere. They were determined to not become a corporate bureaucracy. What I saw in founder Dov Charney; he was passionate and cared deeply about people who worked there, especially people on the factory floor. American Apparel as a manufacturer in downtown LA would not have come to be without his positive hustle. Although the downside was, the company was stretched financially.

By the time we were finishing up the first phase of the project around 6 months in, American Apparel’s financial situation was deteriorating. Payments to my company through Cevera became slower and slower. Eventually those creeping delays over several months had me stretched out to the point where I was getting paid 90 days after invoice. I liked the project and the work. What I should have done was stop work until payment terms were met. Rookie mistake.

It was an awful feeling having no news about payment for the other consultants. It was miserable and privately humiliating, driving home at night, trying to figure out whether to borrow again to pay rent and food next week. I’d walk through the door at home to bravely face my family. Not only had I left a solid airline career at British Airways a few years before (with travel benefits to anywhere in the world), I had walked away from a regular job the previous year.

This was the lowest point in my jump to life in the wild.

Based on your experience can you tell us what you did to bounce back?

I finally wised up and went to American Apparel’s accounts payable department even though I was a subcontractor and not a direct vendor. They were sympathetic and shared the current status of payments to Cevera. Payments had been late, but American Apparel had sent more payments than Shifty at Cevera had told me. Cevera was using all the noise about American Apparel’s financial situation to hold back cash and squeeze me. I confronted Shifty and that was the last I heard of him. He ghosted me and his CIO friend at American Apparel.

It was hard to keep thoughts and emotions in check. Here’s what I did to keep it together:

• I focused on what I could control.
• I prioritized what I could control from most important to least important.
• I kept a narrow focus on only the top priority problem until it was solved, even though some of the lower priority problems would continue getting worse while not being addressed.

The next morning I met with the CIO to explain the situation, that I wasn’t receiving payments and was owed for about 90 days worth of work. She was shocked and embarrassed that such a sleazy deal went down on her watch, not to mention by someone she trusted as her friend. (He became Shifty to her too.) She was quick to implement a supplier agreement with my company, Free Agent Source, which was true to the integrity I saw in her from the beginning. American Apparel became our first direct client.

She couldn’t make up for about 30 days of payments that were already out the door to Cevera, but there were 60 days of payments that had not been paid. We agreed I would invoice for that work directly from my company. All open invoices to Cevera were ignored from then on. The new invoices from my company, Free Agent Source, were paid. In the end, I lost about 30 days of pay. But I got a lot of experience from that first tussle in the wild.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Five Things You Need To Successfully Ride The Emotional Highs & Lows Of Being An Entrepreneur”? Please share a story or an example for each.

My business is about giving attention to people and solving their business problems. To do that well, I need emotional reserves to handle other people’s concerns and fears. Here’s what I do to replenish emotional reserves.

[1] Keep a happy list of gratitude and abundance.

[2] Nurture a diversified personal life.

[3] Simplify my personal life.

[4] Don’t delay personal experiences.

[5] Business is a performance art. Don’t rush to the end.

We are living during challenging times and resilience is critical during times like these. How would you define resilience? What do you believe are the characteristics or traits of resilient people?

Resilience is all about developing emotional reserves and the determination to press on with whatever it is you do, in the face of every kind of resistance, risk and adversity.

Did you have any experiences growing up that have contributed to building your resiliency? Would you mind sharing a story?

I grew up on a farm in rural southern Missouri, the Ozark hills. I don’t think my childhood experiences uniquely contributed to building resilience. But growing up there made me realize I am comfortable being alone. There was plenty of time and space to be alone on the farm, especially in summer when I was younger. During high school years, my parents were divorced and my older brother had gone to college. It was just Mom and me.

Knowing I can be alone without feeling lonely made it easier for me to put my sights on goals and destinations further away; first Nashville for the MBA, then Washington DC, Philadelphia, Tokyo, LA, New York. I know what it’s like to land in a city and not know anyone.

They say, running a startup or even a large company can be “lonely at the top”. And there have been many moments during difficult times when I could feel the weight of uncertainty, especially at night. I finally understood what people are describing when they say “it’s lonely at the top”. For me it’s not loneliness. It’s solitude. I’m lucky to be wired this way. Even though there are multiple founders and a whole crew of people in this business together, I think being comfortable with solitude has made the entrepreneur’s journey possible for me.

In your opinion, do you tend to keep a positive attitude during difficult situations? What helps you to do so?

I’m definitely a “glass is half full” kind of guy. I see opportunities in just about everything. In difficult situations I’m looking for and waiting for an opening to turn it around, get out or find some other resolution.

Can you help articulate why a leader’s positive attitude can have a positive impact both on their clients and their team? Please share a story or example if you can.

For me, a positive attitude as a leader is really a positive vision of what could be. The very best businesses (like actors in movies, musicians in live performances or athletes in competition) inspire us to imagine what is possible and what could be better.

I do that on client engagements too. If I can show clients a positive vision of possibilities for their business, maybe it will inspire them to make their own choices to build a better business.

Ok. Super. We are nearly done. What is your favorite inspirational quote that motivates you to pursue greatness? Can you share a story about how it was relevant to you in your own life?

Calvin Coolige

“Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On” has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race.”

How can our readers further follow you online?

On LinkedIn: “Steve Pruneau”

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevepruneau/

On Twitter: @StevePruneau

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success and good health!

Thank you. It’s been my pleasure.