Welcome to the The VICI Code, where we unlock real stories of small business owners who've battled chaos, crushed doubt, and conquered their challenges. Faith, family, and finances. No fluff, just raw, honest conversations that decode the path to victory, one story at a time. All right, thank you for joining us today as we explore discipline, distance, and purpose, where we walk you through combat engineer to remote advocate, leveraging discipline to scale life and business. But before we jump in, I just want to remind our listeners about how they can try AG1 for free. AG1 has been a staple in my daily routine for several years. Every morning, I wake up and I take my AG1. Just one scoop is packed with over 75 high-quality ingredients, which combine a multivitamin, probiotic, and a blend of superfoods. AG1 has been clinically shown to improve gut health and close common nutrient gaps. As a longtime customer, they have offered me a special deal for you. If you're interested in trying AG1 yourself, you can use my ambassador code found in the show notes. With your first order, you receive one free year supply of D3K2 drops, 10 free AG1 next-gen travel packs, and a free 30-day supply of Omega-3 pills. This is $130 value for free, just using my ambassador code. Now let's jump back in and switch gears to our guest who believes discipline and structure are the keys to freedom, especially in the world of remote work. For over 17 years, Paul Hawkins has been building, leading, and scaling remote teams through various industries. Now, as co-owner of Sidekicks, he helps businesses grow by connecting them with exceptional remote talent. For business owners, Sidekicks helps them scale smarter and reclaim their time for themselves and their team so that they can have a better and more impactful life. For remote workers, they create opportunities to build meaningful careers, support their families, and make an impact from anywhere. Now, Paul and I met through none other than Dan Martell's Elite Group, and I know you're sick of hearing about the Elite Group, but it's amazing. It's a dynamic environment of exceptional entrepreneurs, and it's helped me so much in Vici's first year of business. During a coaching session, I learned that Paul was a fellow veteran, and as you know, veteran entrepreneurship is something near and dear to my heart. So I made it a point to reach out. After hitting it off on our first call, he agreed to share his story on the Vichy Code. Paul's journey from combat engineer to a corporate program manager to co-founding sidekicks, all centered on the purpose of remote work, is ideal for the Vichy Code. His mission to help both businesses and workers reclaim time and change lives, which provides an excellent anchors for a purpose-driven conversation. Paul, Well, I don't think I did it enough. I mean, you're a great guy and hopefully this lives up to all of our other interactions. So I always like to start off at the very beginning, you know, the journey, the purpose breakthrough. So let's go from military discipline to remote leadership. You served as a combat engineer in the army and then spent 20 years leading remote teams. What was the biggest challenge in translating the highly structured, in-person discipline of the military into That is a great, great, great question. Hardest transition. My goodness, there's actually a lot that's an easy transition from the military into managing teams. Like in the military, they teach you so much about small team leadership. Like that is the cornerstone of the Marine Corps and the Army is how to lead and manage a small team, you know, from having two guys in your fire team to nine guys in a squad to, in my case, platoon of 36 men. And then eventually having 20 men in Iraq when I deployed in 2005. That translates really well into just knowing how to structure teams. What does not translate very well usually is like the desire to make people do pushups. So that gets kind of funny. And I found very quickly in the civilian world that people don't, they don't want to do that. And that's kind of weird. So it's, I have found probably the, The hardest transition point from a military man into the civilian world with any kind of leadership structure is going from what I call, Joe, an op tempo. So an operation tempo that's super high with standards that are extremely high with a group of men and women who are used to that standard. and going into an environment where a lot of people are not, right? You have an entire array of different people with different desires, different aspirations, et cetera. And the difficulty is getting them up to the same standard and desire that you have, right? So for example, in the military, as you know, everybody has to do physical fitness. Everyone has to do PT, it's a requirement. And so there's no grumbling about it. Well, generally, everyone knows they're gonna do it. And so when you get into civilian world, you have people that just don't want to, you have people that do. you start to lose common ground pretty quickly. And I think that's actually the hardest part as a leader is trying to refine common ground as Yeah. And I, you know, this kind of leads to my next one, you know, what was the breakthrough realization that taught you how to build trust and accountability without being Yeah, that's awesome. So, um, That is the number one hardest thing that people can't get their head around or struggle with with remote employees and teams. There are a couple of things that allow remote workers to build trust really quickly. So let me start about the remote worker first because it translates into what you do as a manager or as a leader in that environment. As a remote worker, that's where I started, right? So when I left the military, I actually helped build hospitals. Believe it or not, I was a construction scheduler, so I was making these schedules for these hospitals all across the nation in 2006. And effectively, I was working remotely. I would just fly all around the place. I'd work from the car, make these schedules, and I'd just do these job site visits. And I learned very quickly that the way to build trust with those general contractors as I was moving around was to work really well and really quickly. So my ability to communicate as fast as possible with them Was the fastest way for them to build trust because they no longer think like well what's paul doing out there like i'm a communication all the time and if they give me a task i do it as fast as possible. And so that is something Joe that i've told all remote workers and all industries that i've worked with, including right now is. outside of being a super awesome human being, which you should be, is work really, really hard to be effective and communicate often with the people you're working with right from the start. And when you do that about 36 days, you're like, all right, cool. Yeah, Joe's got it. I know when I give him something that'll work. And so from a manager standpoint and a leader, as I kind of moved up the chain in those environments, it was imparting that standard, like, hey, here's the standard, guys. When I work with you, I need you to communicate super, super fast. But here are the tools we're going to use to do that effectively, right? Like not using email when you should do text and chat and other methods. And so it really, it's like, it's driving the team to get into the right communication habits that alleviates all of the fears that a normal person would have. It's almost always around, are they working, right? And you can alleviate working Yeah, that's true. I mean, I, you hear this in the accounting industry often that like, you know, just get the work done. Cause you do end up working remotely at times, especially during the busy season where some, some people take their work home on the weekends and they, it's, it's, it's a balance like, Oh, well we trust you to do the work. Just do the work if you're not going to come in, but otherwise come in if you feel like you need some more accountability. Well, here's the million dollar question, Paul, we got some good questions. This one is the best. Let's hear it. Did the transition from corporate manager to co-owner with your wife present any unexpected challenges, I want to ask a clarifying question. Do you mean the transition from corporate life to business owner or corporate life to working with my Out of both, right? I mean, cause you made the transition. It was kind of like two mountains you decided to climb by doing that. Cause you always hear working with your spouses is a no-no. I consider my spouse a co-owner as well. Even though she doesn't come in here, she allows me to come in here and think clearly and make sure that, again, she's my partner in everything. So, you know, not only did you leave corporate to go do your own thing, but you did your own thing with your wife. So you answer this however you Man, absolutely, this is gonna be an interesting journey right here. So let's start, you know what, I'll unpack this in like a couple of parts. This is how my brain, your listeners will find it. I like to take a complex thing and just put it into little blocks. That's my program manager brain. So block one would be shift from corporate to business owner. And I think it's romanticized a lot on social media, like, own your own business and all this stuff. And the reality is, like, it is massively more stressful or harder than anyone realizes. It is not this, you know, sunshine and rainbows that you see, generally speaking. And it requires a tremendous amount of courage. That's all it is, right? Or do you have the courage to deal with the risk? And so after It almost about 20 yeah man 21 years of working in between the military and corporate world so since I entered into the work environment 21 years I got to a point, I said, you know. I think there's more than I want to do, and there is. more I wanna do that's impactful that I can control. And it came down to like, can I control my own destiny? And the timing felt right, like if I'm gonna do it now, it's the time to do it, right? Ironically, I would say like the time to do it is when you're young, because you have no responsibilities, you have no bills, right? Much, much harder when you're 45 with two kids. But the reality is, Joe, what I'm finding, just like our discussions, it seems that when men and women get around like 40 or so, so they're far into their career and they seem to take the leap into owning a business, it's because they have 20 years of experience, right? So by the time we started Sidekicks three years ago, and looking back, I realized that everything that happened in my entire career from the military to being a program manager to hospital, all that stuff, gave me the right kind of skill sets to be able to do what we're doing effectively with smart decision-making, right? Like I've already learned so many of those lessons along the way that you could just import them. And so the transition wasn't necessarily hard in the sense, do I have the skills to do it? It's like, yeah, you know, we've proven it over 20 years, let's do it. The challenge was, do you have the courage to do it, right? And so I'll unpack this and I'll talk about the wide fork, because that part is really fun, I think it's different for everybody, depending on the industry that you go into as a business owner, right? Some requires a ton of capital to start it up. If you have a brick and mortar store, restaurant, or whatever it is, that takes a lot of money. Some are remote in nature, kind of like ours, and don't require a lot of startup, but require a lot of personal sacrifice to do it. Sometimes you've got software companies, a little combo of both, that need some venture capital money to get it started, but you actually don't need that much. You need two dudes doing some software, things like that. For us, I would say, man, the hardest part was, hey, if we're going to do this and do it right, I need to take every single dollar we make and reinvest it back into the business so we can scale it properly. Because Paul does not want to be the one doing every single thing in the business. And dude, for the first six months, I kid you not, my wife and I didn't pay ourselves not one dime, zero. Every single dollar we made, we reinvested into the company by hiring other people to do the work. And after six months, like my accountant told me, he said, dude, you gotta pay yourself, man. Like the IRS needs you to pay yourself. I said, okay, fine. And so I paid myself$15,000 in salary. He's like, what are you doing? I was like, no, no, no, put it back in. So I would say like to sum that up, man, the hardest part truly from shifting is having the courage to get rid of all the safety nets that exist. You no longer have a guaranteed salary, you don't have the healthcare, you don't have anything, it's all on you, which means everything you do to be successful, there's no one else but the person in the mirror to do it, right? And that can be super frightening when you're used to working on a team where you have managers and all. So I found personally like once you get past that, then you're off and running. You just gotta get past that phase. The second part to your question, like the spouse part, I think I'm just a bit of a unicorn. I'm not going to lie. I'll just let's call it what it is. My wife and I met, I mean, that's probably a whole other podcast, is my wife and I met when I got stationed down in Fort Stewart, Georgia, 2003. There's a long story with it, but I met her and immediately, like, we hit it off. It was one of those stories that truly was. I was like, this girl's awesome. And she's like, I like you. And I kid you not, we got engaged six months later. We got married six months after that. Then I deployed to Iraq for 12 months. That was our first, like, two years of being together. Met, we dated, married, Iraq, two years. And I think that actually created such a cornerstone for us of since we went through all that and nothing else will ever be as hard. And so over the years, man, like she really is my best friend. We just got to do everything together. So we naturally had that relationship. And I know that it's different for everybody, right? Like for whatever reason, that's how it worked out for us. The second part of that is that the, She has a family company called Agency Resource Solutions, which is like the sister company to Sidekicks, and she had been working in that for over a decade, and I'd been helping her behind the scenes with all the IT and technology stuff for her. And so when we did the transition to Sidekicks, we already had a ton of tribal knowledge going in. The reason why it still works is she and I complement each other in the exact opposite areas. So I tend to talk a lot. I'm very much an extrovert. I like technology and planning. I like vision and direction and long-term plans. And she's an attorney, actually, she went to law school. So and she prefers things to be short, succinct, like I'm gonna deal with the thing right here. And she's a master negotiator, problem solver. And so when it's time to do my thing, she literally goes, you do your thing. And I'll bring it back. And then when it's time to do some of those issue resolutions, she has it right. And I think that's why it worked. If we were both the same person, same personality, I think you'd have tons of clashing. But for whatever reason, we have Yeah, I like to always introduce my wife as, we have a lot of similarities, but what makes us different makes us even stronger and we do complement each other really well. So I still don't think I could work with my wife in the same setting. I think it's best for our marriage, but I'll do respect. She is my business partner, no question about it. She's my life partner. Um, I'm glad you guys get to make it work and you know, you're right. Courage is really the biggest thing, you know, um, blind courage. You know, when you, when you're our age and you've seen enough and you've got experience, it's a little bit easier to have that courage. I see a lot of youngsters these days kind of just jump into it. And honestly, I rather them do it now than later. You know, you can learn a lot by just picking yourself up off the ground. So, um, Real good advice there. I want to get a little bit more deeper into the mission behind Sidekicks. The mission's actually twofold. We don't see this very often. It's a twofold mission, helping businesses reclaim their time and helping remote workers build meaningful careers. Which of those two missions was harder to define? And was there a challenge early in Sidekicks history that Harder to define. I'll be honest, Joe, I don't think either one was harder to define. I'd say that the definition of it came naturally after a few months of realizing the kind of impact we're having. So I'm going to ask this a little bit differently. Often people come up with like, here's my mission statement, and then they do the things, right? We had a semblance of what the mission was, but after we had some success and we saw the impact of people's lives, we're like, I think I know what this mission really is, right? And so we actually kind of revised, recreated the mission statement probably about three, four months into what you're reading right now. And where we where we land with this was really kind of twofold like we realized that there was an opportunity to have a dual mission because it requires that, right? So first off is helping the business owners, right? So helping them build out a remote team, this is usually almost always based on service. That's what we, that's our nature is like service work, right? Not sales. And so by providing these remote service people who are trained and we've got a whole system around them that the owner doesn't have to find them. They don't have to train them. They don't have to replace them. Like we've got all that, right? So it's kind of the easy button for them. is that they then can focus almost all their attention on their sales teams and the growth of their business, right? So that is what we try to do is provide you service workers and executive assistants so that the business itself can save time to do more sales and the business owner can save personal time to lead, grow, mentor, et cetera, the business, right? So less service for them, more sales for them, growth for them, right? So that's the winning strategy for the clients. But what we found, Joe, is like, you can't do that and ignore the other part, which is, well, what are we doing for the human being themselves that we're providing to these business owners? Our niche, for sure, if you look at across all of the remote workers that we support, we've got almost 500 or so with sidekicks that are across the nation. I mean, they're like in every single state. By and large, they're moms. We're almost always moms, right? There's a few that aren't, but they're almost always moms. And having watched my own wife with my kids, my mother-in-law, what she did for her children, and the quick impact we saw for moms across the nation when they were able to work at home, provide for their families, make an impact, have purpose, still be home to take care of the kiddos, I do like I can't think of more impactful thing and it has been that way I like the number of times we hear this has changed my life for both clients and sidekicks is like daily all the time. Because it's it's if you think of the flip side for for so many Americans right now is. Things like childcare are so expensive that it's like you get a decent job and you spend all of the money going to childcare. So you get this job to commute two hours a day, to put your kids in childcare, to be stressed out, tired, you get home at six o'clock, you barely see them, they go back to bed, you do it again. And we wanted to break that paradigm. And so now by and large, like I said, it's mostly moms who are able to do their work and do That's great. That's, that's actually a lot more, uh, purposeful and meaningful than I had thought the answer was going to be. That's, that's tremendous. And, you know, it is a catch 22 with daycare. I mean, we, we choose to, uh, uh, we chose that Leanna would stay home, my wife with the kids and she's got her own little side hustle that she does and it does really well. So sometimes it gets a little chaotic when she's doing well, cause then it's homeschooling the kids and you know, all the other things. And now we got a farm and chickens, but that's another podcast as well. But yeah, but being able to keep her home or someone home is huge. And you know, that's, I loved hearing that answer. Can you tell us a little bit, I'd like to know some more details, where a business breakthrough for one client also resulted in Yeah, I'd say it happens all the time, especially with our executives. For any of the listeners out there that are business owners that have never had an executive assistant, first you need one. Because it will rapidly change your life in massive ways and you just don't know it. It's very normal, almost the same way, man. Like as you own your business, you're very controlling. It's your baby, you don't wanna give it up. You don't wanna give over things like I got it, right? And you become very self-reliant, which is cool. And probably really good for the first six, eight months, like you gotta be scrappy. But you will tap out, you cannot grow your business the way you need to until you get an executive, you might be able to discern to some extent but you're going to sacrifice a lot of things to do it right and so getting an executive frees up your mental space to do all the things that only you can do. How this relates to your question, Joe, is we've had so many clients say, look, not only do I have my time back, but I have my life back. I'm no longer spending three hours a day doing email. I'm no longer stressed out doing this client work. I now have mental space to actually plan the business how I want to plan it, lead my team, train my team. I have extra time for my kids, et cetera. And so what we've seen is when that happens, when the business owner is like, Oh my gosh, dude, like, like, I don't even know what to say. I wish I'd done this 30 years ago. That intrinsically massively motivates the executive. So the executive is like, yeah, right. They're all, uh, the right kind of people that we hire have a service-oriented heart. They wanna serve, they wanna help, they have a helpful heart. And helpful heart people get really jazzed up when someone says, thank you, you're helpful, right? That's like their work love language. And so when the business owner is super jazzed, the other person is super jazzed, and now the other person being the executive or the sidekick, and they find great purpose, right? So they feel very purposeful, they feel useful. they have good purpose in their life, and it's off to the racist man. So like they kind of feed off each other. And the same thing for the other positions we have, like they're so impactful to the in-office teams that they support. It's the same thing when they do really well and help them out, the other people are like, oh my gosh, this is great. Like I can do these things, you rock. And it's Yeah, the underlying word that comes to mind for me there is accomplishment, right? As a business owner, there's never enough time in the day. We can have a banger of a day and you can walk away where you should be feeling accomplished, but you feel like, all the things I didn't get to, right? And you get down on yourself. But when you have that executive assistant, taking care of you, you're getting more done and you feel like you're actually getting somewhere. Whereas that EA comes in and I mean, we all want to feel important, right? Every human being from when we were a little kid till we're on our deathbed, we just want to feel important and helping other people you know, do things you're, you're not as an executive assistant, you're not only feel like, you know, important, but you know, you're accomplishing things, you're getting you're feeling accomplished, you're helping somebody else accomplish things, and you're accomplish your thing. So it's kind of like you're winning twice, you know, as that EA, you're doing your work, but then you see the what that's freeing up um, the executive to be able to do, uh, yeah, accomplishment is, is, I think is the underlying word for both of, Yeah. I, I, I, I couldn't agree more. It's just, it's how I feel in my situation. Um, so real cool. You also have a podcast, it's called the remotely speaking podcast. What's the biggest misconception you're trying to disrupt about remote work culture and No, that's a great question, Joe. Thank you for putting time into them. The remotely speaking podcast. Yes, this is our first year. We finished an entire year's worth of episodes, which is awesome. There's a fun statistic there. Like once you get past 12, you start dropping into like the top 1% of podcasts. It's like, it's not a really hard barrier for entry into actually being seen, but it takes a long time, as you know. It takes a long time, a lot of effort. So the remotely speaking podcast, like what we're trying to disrupt, I would say, is the, I don't know, disrupt's probably not the right word. I would say education, right? Trying to educate the masses that remote work is okay. It's okay. In a lot of scenarios, it's the best scenario. In some scenarios, it's not the right scenario, right? And so what we're trying to do with it is show that, look, in many scenarios for your business, remote work can be a super, super smart addition to your game plan, right? Either your entire team is fully remote like ours, or you have a combination, which is very normal. and then what that combination can do for you, right? Like it's a force multiplier, in my opinion, when you have remote workers outside of your traditional base, because you get to find super great talent that's not just localized to where you are. So you can open up your aperture to the whole United States to find great people. Second, they don't have as many distractions as everybody else. They just don't. You don't have that normal water cooler and stopping by like, hey, Joe, what's going on, man, right? And you talk about the game. Those are five, 10, 15 minute type things throughout the day that doesn't occur, which means you don't have the switching costs, which means you get more work done. And that's what happens. And so depending on the style of work, remote workers can get a tremendous amount of production done for you as a business owner, so you can increase production. And then thirdly, which literally happened to us when we had a hurricane come through Greenville last year, is if your operations go down because of an event, powers out, natural disaster, you name it, you have these other remote workers who can keep the lights on for you. And we've seen that time and time again. So it's like a contingency plan for your business. I recommend for If your industry can handle it, every single business should have at least one out there that's like, just in case something goes awry, Joe can do this stuff for Paul, right? That's kind of how we do it. So that's part one, really. It's kind of debunking this notion that people are working at home in their pajamas and not doing anything, right? I'm sure there are people out there, and that's probably where that comes from. But to me, that's easily debunked if you apply correct I agree. Yeah. We were flirting with the idea of shifting to more of a hybrid environment this winter. So over the next couple weeks, next couple months, we're going to be trying to work from home as if this is what the future is going to look like. It's just, I want to be home more often. I'm also, we have one, a member, our team who is fully remote. And so we've been able to, you know, like you said, we don't get those water cooler moments, which is actually, yes, better for productivity, but we don't get to connect. Right. So our week, our date, we have our daily team meetings, but one of those, uh, week daily meetings is a little bit longer than the other ones because we do silly icebreakers, right? We just try to get to know that person a little bit more and we want them to know more about us. Because again, Joe can't just walk down the hall and go sit in your office and annoy you for a few minutes and sidetrack you, which I do to everyone else here. But Yeah. So we're, we're experimenting with the remote. And, um, I think historically for me, it's just been, it's been tough at home, but I think it's just all about, you know, setting up boundaries. Right. Um, a hundred percent dude. Yeah. So my wife came in the other morning when I was working from home, she's like, I just can't help myself. You're here. And I'm like, I know, shut the door. I'll be out, you know, in a little bit. Uh, but as we shift over to a more, you know, semi-permanent situation like that, I know she'll respect those boundaries and I know eventually we'll get into a rhythm. And I think that's why we're starting to kind of role play it now before we get into the chaos of tax season. So, but yeah, I think it's, and like you said, contingency-wise, it's a great plan. It's always good to be able to, oh, big snowstorm, kids Yeah, there's no need to go in. Yeah, not now, not now. Like I said, and I recognize there's lots of industries that just doesn't work. You can't have remote landscapers. You can't remotely build a building, right? You can't remotely cook food, right? So you have industries that doesn't quite work. For everything else that uses a computer, like there's about zero reason why you can't do it from time to time. And what we found is like, it's really healthy. that even if you have everyone coming to the office all the time, super, super healthy to have them go work somewhere else twice a week, they get a change of scenery, they get some freedom from it, they feel empowered from it, they tend to stick around a lot longer rather than coming to So I want to get into like our next segment, you know, purpose, pillars, legacy, you know, reclaiming your life for life's pillars. You know, you preach the remote work allows people to have better and more impactful lives. For the entrepreneur listening who is currently overwhelmed, what's the first step they should take to leverage remote talent and reclaim their time? for the pillars of faith, family, and You read my bio. Thanks, Joe. Number one thing, absolutely, for a business owner, if you're gonna get a remote person, is to get a remote executive assistant. Time yesterday. Absolutely, 100%. Like, if you want to increase all the other things in your life, you have to make room in your life for those things. getting an executive assistant. So executive assistants absolutely do not need to be in the same room with you. In fact, like why? I find no reason for that because there's usually a thousand things that need to happen that have nothing to do with people being around each other that you're trying to offload, right? Like we don't need to be sitting next to each other if she's doing emails, right? I don't need to sit next to my executive April if she's ordering stuff off Amazon, like that's unnecessary. So getting someone who has their own flexibility in a remote state, who's already kind of in a happy spot, because they're able to do that, can perform extremely well for you. That's the first thing you gotta do, man, is get an executive. And when you do that, you're gonna start, you know, we hear the term, buy back your time, but really it's just getting space back in your life. And I can say even personally, dude, for Faith Fitness Family, for sure. And I added in there like, Food Fitness Faith Family Friends, that's my F5. Notioning, yeah, exactly, is really hard to do those things if you have no time. And as a business owner, you already know you don't have any time, you're super stressed out. You get stressed out when you're working out because you feel like you should be working on the business, right? It's this self-perpetuating cycle that's no good. And so if you can just free up even two or three hours a day, every day, and devote your time for just those things, everything gets better, right? I will say it until I die, Every single thing in my life, including my faith, has improved and increased by me focusing on my fitness and nutrition. That's the base. I don't think we can be the people we need to be until that's straight. If we don't work on you inside and outside, you can't be the excellent person you need to be for everybody else, Absolutely, and this goes into my next question, which I feel like I know you well enough I could possibly answer this question, but I think it's important that our audience hears how you do it. How do you personally structure your schedule to ensure family time and dedication to learning new projects are prioritized over the endless demands of the That is a great question. Yeah, like million dollar question for everyone, like how do you do it? And everyone does it a little bit differently. I finally decided, I don't know if I capitulated or just realized that this is the truth for me as a business owner, that there's no such thing as work-life balance. It is a myth, but there is work-life integration. And the second I decided to do that, everything improved immediately. And what I mean by that is with the exception of certain things that during the week, let's say like a church service, for example, on Sunday, everything is the same for me every single day. And that means I'm gonna do some work. I'm gonna feel good about that. I'm not going to feel stressed out that I didn't work in the business. And I'm gonna plug and play, play time with my kids and my family every single day, not just the weekends. So for me, I'm an early riser, military dude, you know, man, like, so it's about 4.30 or five o'clock, wake up. But I have certain things I'm gonna do first thing in the morning that are just for me. I have non-negotiables that I work on reading and some other, read my devotional straight into working out. And so the way I've been able to balance it, Joe, is making sure I get me time absolutely before anybody's awake, right? And that ensures once that happens, I'm like, I'm good. It doesn't really matter what else I do during the day. I'm not gonna feel stressed out about it because I got my me time in. So it is be time at first straight into hardcore production. I work better in the morning. And so from basically say eight thirty nine all the way to about one o'clock, it's going to be like just hardcore. The kids finish school and about one o'clock to probably about five is going to be some semblance of. play time, right? Go adventure, go outside. There might be some phone calls we got to make, but we just got to deal with it, right? And there might be a recap at the end of the day, around four or five o'clock for work stuff as well, right? Hey, let me get set up for the next day, play again. And so that's just how I structured on Yeah, I've got a similar schedule. The earlier in the morning, I get most of the things that require they're personal things, right? You know, the reading, the solitude, you know, just, there's a lot of things I get done early morning for anybody even knows I'm awake. And that's huge. It's huge to have those, those morning rituals, those morning routines. And then, you know, just today, cause I had a little bit of time this morning that I did some work from home, you know, I was able to cook breakfast, You know, not everyone gets to do this, but you know, it's the life of remoting. So like I'm in that transition. So you try to find the winds where you can play and catch with, you know, a football in the living with my little buddy, little five-year-old son, like, you know, just finding that little bit of time to connect. Cause dad is actually working right now, believe it or not, you know? you know, they don't understand that, but they see you're there. So they think you're available and, you know, just satisfying that. And, you know, then getting off to, off to the races and then really trying to be present at home at night and just, you know, really trying to tie up the loop, close the loop on family stuff at night. It's important. Yeah. Great, great bit of advice. You and I live a very similar life as you already knew. Yeah. You know, I do have another question. You mentioned you love the challenge and growth that comes from it, right? We know on the other side of that challenge is really something special. But what is the biggest professional or personal challenge you're tackling right now? Perhaps it's something related to the future of work or scaling sidekicks. You know, what is it that you know will lead to your next I got a list, man. It's like a list of things. What's that? Like, well, you know, it's this. Look, I will admit I struggle with this. You know, everyone's like, it's never, you know, your top three priorities. I'm like, what about top 30? Can I just switch them out? And that's how my brain works. So I'd say there's a personal challenge and a work challenge. So the work challenge, I'm not going to call it a challenge. I call it like it's an opportunity. that can launch us correctly into the future. And what I mean by that is like, we have grown so much and so well, we have 15 employees now, and we started, I mean, we started three years ago this coming March, right? So we're not even three years in. And what I'm finding is that, hey, right now is the time to solidify all the systems, the foundational items, the processes, which were already good, but they need to be updated and solidified to double. Like if I double the company right now, what would break? If I double the company right now, would my communication channels not work properly? Would I not be able to communicate with my clients effectively? Would I be able to scale the way we interact with our clients and sidekicks? Those kinds of questions. And so right now, the biggest challenge that I'm faced with that I'm working on is honestly like rebuilding the foundation of sidekicks. behind the scenes without breaking anything, to allow us to do that, right? And so out of that are tons of little miniature projects that come out, you know, you could have like, I need a new phone system, or I need my CRM to have this and that, whatever the message is, we want the foundation to be thicker and stronger than ever before. So that if we double, we don't fall apart. Right. And so that's number one, personally, I mean, it's a combo of Let's say there's two things on the first line, because you will one of them, you'll know. So on a fitness end, like I have some very hard fitness goals I'm going after. And it requires showing up every single day, doing some rather boring stuff, eating some rather boring food. But can I do it without fail? For like 12 weeks? Can I do it for a year? that's a huge challenge. But what I'm finding is 10 weeks in, like my life has completely changed from where I decided to start 10 weeks ago. And already I'm like, yeah, I don't really wanna go back, right? So a challenge with that is like, can I keep this up in a meaningful way, in a sustainable way that will continue to change body, mind and soul kind of indefinitely, right? So that's part one. And then the fun thing is like, I decided to learn Spanish So like I speak other languages dude, but like I actually have a Spanish lesson today because I'm crazy. But here's why here's why I love so I love learning languages. The reason I use a challenge like this is because I found that it does two amazing things from a business owner standpoint is one, it will light your brain on fire, which means your brain will get into ultra learning mode because you have to step back and learn like a child again. And your brain does all sorts of crazy stuff to do that, which allows me to learn the other things a lot faster. And then the second, there's three things. The second thing is it forces me to think very, very hard on how I communicate clearly. which means as I learn a language, I can apply those lessons to how I communicate with my team, right? Because when you speak a foreign language, one word can slip it up and mean something very different, right? So can I slow it down? Can I speak correctly? Can I communicate correctly? Boom. And then the third thing, which really helps is learning a language and speaking a language to others is probably one of the most terrifying things ever, right? You go try to learn, you don't wanna look stupid, you sound ridiculous. What I found when I do that, Joe, every other sales call I have afterwards is the easiest thing on the planet. I'm like, yeah, whatever, right? Like sales call is not stressful because speaking French to crazy, hard French lady, that's terrifying. Those are my challenges, Very good. I love those challenges. There's no question that on the other side of those challenges is another layer, another version of you that you just keep breaking the mold. And I look forward to seeing you break through those and I'll be cheering you on, man. Um, you know, as we, as we get here to the end, I just want to recap for our audience, uh, some key points, some key takeaways, you know, the military foundation of trust and discipline. Um, you may not have been through the military, but you'll hear that very often trust and discipline. And that's, that's a very important, uh, those two pieces are very important ingredients to success, not just, uh, in, uh, business, but in life. And then also the breakthrough of reclaiming time through remote work. As I said, I'm currently doing it. Paul's made a living of doing it. And we've seen over the last five years, the world's totally shifted to accept, sorry, to accept, to accept the remote working environment. It's helped people get closer to their families. It's helped people be more productive. It's just made work and life a lot more agile and nimble. And then the dual purpose of helping both businesses and families thrive. I do feel like I can relate to that. Here in our office, we come in every day helping clients. where we, you know, we feel like when our clients, when we win, so obviously when our clients, when we win also, you know, Vici wins as a whole, because our clients are doing well, they're getting bigger, you know, they're sending referrals. So, you know, that looking at, you know, both ends of that dual purpose is a great way to see the service industry. Paul, Thank you so much for your time and your work in building a movement around what remote work makes possible. I do want to highlight some ways to continue to follow you and stay in touch with you. As we discussed earlier, Paul is the host of the Remote Speaking podcast. So you can find him, I would imagine, at remotespeaking.com. Can You can find us on Instagram at remotely speaking podcast. Perfect, and then you're on LinkedIn, as many of us are, just look up Paul Hawkins, and then you've got a Sidekicks handle, A-R-S underscore Sidekicks. If you wanna follow Sidekicks, get a little intel on what they do, and maybe jump in and see how they can help you with some remote work strategy, and maybe even some help with some remote workers. And then he's also on purpose, underscore driven, underscore Paul. Great follow, doing hard things, showing you what's possible in life. Real good, inspiring stuff. Great follow. Yeah. And thanks to our listeners for listening to the Vici Code. And I look forward to joining you guys again next time as we continue to explore the journey of purpose-driven leaders. Out. Thanks for tuning in to the Vici Code, where the underdogs rise and the numbers finally make sense. If today's story hit home, share it. And remember, faith fuels