Office Dogs and Brown M&Ms

How little tests of partners help you make better decisions

Welcome to the latest entry in The Workaround. You’re in good company with thousands of fellow entrepreneurs and innovators who have subscribed!

I’m your host, Bob, and my mission here is to share personal, behind-the-scenes stories of ups and downs from my career leading tech startups and corporate innovation.

I write to make you think, smile, and discover a shortcut to success or a trap to avoid.

Here we go…

Some of the office dogs of Ahalogy—page 1 of 4 from our Yearbook.

Our lives revolve around making long-term commitments to a relatively small group of people. Friends and significant others are big examples. But the workplace is no different. Most of our waking hours are spent with the same handful of managers, coworkers, customers, and vendors.

While we spend many months or years building friendships and romantic relationships before making a permanent commitment, our work relationships tend to form after just a few interviews or a half-hour on Zoom. There’s not much time for more than this, but there are some shortcuts we can take to help us make better decisions.

Poker players are great at reading “tells” that give away what the opposition is holding in their hands. Fortune tellers ask leading questions and look for micro-expression reactions to guide them. And you can do this too—simply by paying attention to the little things that can mean a lot.

Office Dogs Rule All

Flashback to Spring 2018: Our startup’s office bursts at the seams. Thanks to a product and team that’s hitting on all cylinders, we’ve stuffed as many employees as possible into our little suburban office space. People are doubling up at desks in our noisy main room. The few huddle rooms we have are scheduled in 15-minute increments. Thank god the weather is warming up because many of our meetings are happening at picnic tables around the parking lot.

We finally decide it’s time to pull the trigger and get new office space. Our Head of People, Jeff, leads us through a comprehensive search over the next few months. Like buying a home, it’s mostly fun to explore new space and imagine it being home for you and your (work) family.

We go from a list of 25 properties down to visits to six of them. After a comprehensive scoring system to keep everyone from going with their personal opinions, it all boils down to a final two candidates, both owned by reputable property managers. The first is owned by Acme (not the actual name). The second is owned by Urban Sites, a company I’m happy to mention, as you’ll learn below.

Both hit on all the points from our wish list: in the coolest downtown area, lots of access to food & drink, historic exposed brick buildings, and a safe path to parking. Even the rent and term lengths are similar.

Jeff is leading our executive team’s final discussion before we need to pull the trigger. We’ve got two contracts in our hands. The whole company is desperate for space and painfully curious about where they will work daily. Jeff asks for any final questions for the building owners, and I suddenly think of something we’ve all forgotten:

“Do they allow dogs?”

I can’t believe we didn’t write this into our original request, but better late than never. After all, we’ve almost always got at least two doggos in our current space at any one time. They are always well-behaved and can’t help but make you smile when you see them snuggled in a bed or bringing you a ball to throw. Jeff nods and adds this to his follow-up list.

A few days later, we’re squeezed back into a meeting room to make a final decision. Jeff ticks off answers to our questions one by one, eventually getting to our furry friends.

He says, “Acme told me we can only have dogs at the office if they are licensed service animals. Urban Sites said they will only allow dogs…if their team can pet them when they stop by to visit.”

That made our decision easy. We went with Urban Sites.

Sure, our office animals were important, but this wasn’t really about the dogs. It tested whether the company we’d be committed to working with would be a good partner over the next five years. Even back then, dogs in the office were a well-known feature of the modern workplace. Urban Sites was a newer, forward-thinking commercial developer who understood this. Acme was an old-school company that didn’t bother to adapt.

I experienced another “tell” when the owner of Acme called and left multiple voicemails with me after hearing they lost our business. I had never spoken with him before and didn’t like the idea of someone going over Jeff’s head to try and convince me. Again, too old school and not for us.

Urban Sites was a terrific partner at every turn, and we were extremely happy with our space. (BTW, if you go to their website, you’ll see video snippets of our office space, including a dog.)

Van Halen and Brown M&Ms

I wish that my “dog” question was something I strategically came up with all along to help us better assess our potential landlords. But it worked, and I’ll never forget it. Later I learned how one of my favorite rock bands, Van Halen, thought of something similar to test concert venues in the ‘80s.

It’s an old story that was an urban myth until verified by Diamond David Lee Roth himself. The VH crew had a big stage setup that required some unique elements that most venues were not used to. This often led to lesser performances at best and physical danger at worst—after all, you really shouldn’t be doing splits or drinking Jack Daniels from a rope with faulty equipment.

So the boys wrote a contract rider with very thorough instructions for the venues that hosted them—things like “fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes…and no brown M&M's in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

The M&Ms thing wasn’t a rock star diva play or a way to get out of paying for damages if they speared a speaker with a Stratocaster. Rather, it was a way to test whether or not the venue they arrived at actually paid attention to their equipment needs. The band would walk in, look for brown M&Ms, and refuse to perform until the important stuff was double-checked. And they might have destroyed a backstage dressing room or two to communicate the point completely.

They don’t make bands like this anymore—rest in peace, Eddie. But we can learn from this in our work lives.

Try These in Your Work

Many opportunities to look for the little things are out there. In our recruiting business, this plays out often as hiring managers and candidates do their dance. Here are some favorites:

• Did the candidate write a thank you email? You might think this is old school, but it still means a lot—mostly because it signals that you care.

• Are dirty dishes piling up in the office kitchen? It’s a sign that the company culture might be crummy.

• Is there something in the employment contract that seems insignificant and inconsistent with industry norms? At a minimum, you’ll want to dig for some decent rationale behind it.

• Ask interesting and unexpected questions when you’re interviewing with a company. For example, “Oh, you’ve got your office Holiday Party coming up…Are significant others included?” Answers to questions like this show much more about culture than words on a website.

Like in my office space example, little things can also be great ways to probe vendors and partners for trustworthiness. Here are a few things I like to do:

• When I say the timing is not right and suggest we connect in three months. Do they actually remember that and return? Adding such a reminder task in their CRM takes an organized and eager person 10 seconds to do.

• If you download a piece of content marketing from a company, are you immediately bombarded with daily sales spam? If so, move on.

• Is the salesperson you’re speaking with simply reading off a script, or are they genuinely curious about and interested in you and your business?

Finally, for you startup leaders out there, I dare you to log on to your email marketing software to see if that investor of yours who promises to be “founder friendly” unsubscribed from your marketing emails. I still hold a tiny grudge over one of these, but I’m grateful that I now know who is wise enough to realize we look at stuff like this.

Note that we should never take any single one of these tells as the main driver of our decision to work with someone. But they can help break a tie or nudge you to look deeper for more evidence in an area you might have ignored.

And the whole act of looking for tells should be approached in a playful way, just like when you’re at the poker table. The stakes can be high in business, but it’s still just a game, and we have many hands to play before our careers are over. Hopefully, this tip will help you win a few more chips in the years ahead. No thank you note required :)

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How we might work together…

• My team and I lead Hearty, a boutique recruiting service that helps tech-forward companies hire proven talent. Our senior team of operators sources and screens, saving you time and money. When you need help, let’s chat.

• Looking for Influencer Marketing and Content Creation? The team from our previous company is back by popular demand with A2 Influence. We’re ramping up now and would love to share more.

• Feel free to schedule time together during my Open Hours for questions, feedback, networking, or any other topic!

• Find me on LinkedIn or email.

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BONUS: Cool Content of the Week

A little something I found meaningful. You might agree…

An App to help you stop using Apps

Nearly two months ago, I cold-turkey stopped using TikTok and News apps. I realized that they were wasting my time and warping my mind. And, boy, do I feel much better and more productive lately! I just wish I stopped earlier with the help of this app:

Clearspace is an app designed to help you stop app addictions. Its features include a forced “intention setting” before you get to open specific apps and the ability to set time limits on how long you use them. I’m just hoping there’s a viable business model that doesn’t involve another tax on attention…

Bigger picture, this is an area we’ll see much more innovation around in the years ahead—including through the application of A.I. Our brains were not programmed for modern technology, which unceasingly invents new ways to distract us. So, we will increasingly defend our attention with technology and use it to help us reprogram our minds. Or maybe we’ll just unplug…