Ep 098 – Paolo Vidali, Hidden Gears – Fortitude in Agency Ownership
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Featuring: Paolo Vidali, Hidden Gears
In episode 098 of Agency Bytes, I sit down with Paolo Vidali, CEO of Hidden Gears, for one of the most honest and raw conversations we’ve ever had on this podcast. This isn’t just about agency life—it’s about the real, unfiltered struggles that come with being an entrepreneur and a human being.
Paolo opens up about one of the hardest challenges he and his wife/business partner faced—her unexpected cancer diagnosis at just 35 years old. We talk about what happens when life blindsides you, when everything you’ve built suddenly takes a backseat to survival, and how you find the strength to keep going. Paolo shares what it was like to step up as a caregiver, run a business solo, navigate financial pressures, and manage his own mental health—all while figuring out how to show up for his wife, his team, and himself.
We also get into:
• The emotional weight of entrepreneurship—and why so many agency owners feel like they have to have it all together, even when their world is falling apart.
• The unexpected kindness that came from clients and colleagues when he chose to be vulnerable about his situation.
• The hardest leadership lessons he learned while scaling back, delegating, and ultimately growing the agency in a healthier, more sustainable way.
• How this experience completely reframed his approach to work, life, and success—from prioritizing health and setting boundaries to embracing a “YOLO” mentality when it comes to experiencing life fully.This conversation isn’t just about overcoming setbacks—it’s about redefining what truly matters. If you’ve ever struggled with balancing business and personal challenges, if you’ve ever felt like you had to carry everything alone, or if you need a reminder that it’s okay to step back, ask for help, and build a business that supports your life (not the other way around)—this episode is for you.
Paolo’s story is deeply personal, incredibly inspiring, and a powerful testament to resilience, leadership, and love. Give it a listen—you won’t regret it.
Key Bytes
• Life as an entrepreneur is filled with challenges.
• Vulnerability is crucial in business settings.
• Having a supportive partner can enhance business success.
• Navigating a health crisis requires clear communication.
• Delegation is essential for effective leadership.
• Prioritizing health can lead to better business outcomes.
• Traveling can provide a much-needed reset from work.
• Work-life balance is vital for a healthy team culture.
• It's important to redefine success beyond financial metrics.
• Health crises can shift priorities and perspectives on life.Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Paolo Vidale and Hidden Gears
07:30 Navigating Personal and Professional Challenges
15:41 Coping with a Life-Altering Diagnosis
22:56 Leadership Lessons from Adversity
30:48 Reframing Life Priorities and Business Goals
39:51 Building a Healthy Work Culture
Paolo Vidali is the CEO and co-owner of Hidden Gears, a distributed web design, development, and marketing agency specializing in e-commerce solutions for growing businesses across the US, with offices in New York and Honolulu. With over 17 years of experience in web development and digital marketing, he focuses on Shopify Plus development, Pay-per-click (PPC) management, SEO, and conversion optimization. A veteran digital strategist and solutions architect, Paolo has a diverse background in managing sustainability initiatives, digital marketing strategy, and omnichannel retail.
Contact Paolo on their website, Instagram, LinkedIn, or on X.
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Steve / Agency Outsight (00:02.478)
Welcome to Agency Bites, a podcast dedicated to helping creative entrepreneurs thrive. I'm Steve Guberman from Agency Outsite, where I coach agency owners to build the business of their dreams. Today, my guest is Paolo Vidale. He's the CEO and co-owner of Hidden Gears, a distributed e-commerce agency with offices in New York and Honolulu. With over 17 years of experience, Paolo specializes in Shopify plus development, PPC management, SEO, and conversion optimization, bringing a wealth of
expertise in digital strategy and omnichannel retail. I'm so grateful you're here today because I think we've got a valuable topic we're going to dig into. So thank you for joining me.
Paolo (00:42.547)
Thanks for having me, Steve. It's great to be here.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:45.262)
So I put out kind of a call to arms for people in our community of people with experience overcoming mental health challenges, personal struggles, things that may have otherwise just kind of put an end to their entrepreneur career or the agency career. you've been through some things and you said, hey, I've got some stories to tell. I wanted to be able to
bring people into like a safe half an hour of some experienced struggles that people have been through and some hope and inspiration because life as an entrepreneur is challenging. Life in America can be challenging even though whatever, we're the richest country in the world and it's still challenging, but each individual carries their own burden and their own challenge and their own struggle.
Even the people I know the most about, only know a tiny little bit. And so we don't know what other people are going through. And I really appreciate it. And I'm super grateful for you and your willingness to come and just kind of share your story and some of the things that you've been through as an agency owner and just as a human person living in the world that we live in. So thank you, first of all, for that.
Paolo (01:59.377)
Yeah, of course. Yeah. I realized that going through the process that I'm sure we'll talk about, it's really hard to feel vulnerable, especially in kind of a business setting. We always want to put our best foot forward and be very professional. And really, as an agency owner, you've got to be sort of in charge and have a path and inspire people and make sure clients know.
that you're on top of things and the more that you're facing sort of behind the scenes, the harder it is, I feel like, to talk about in general. So yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (02:31.522)
Yeah. So do you want to give kind of like a quick backstory on you and Hidden Gears and what you're up to and how you got here?
Paolo (02:42.321)
Yeah, so I'm basically a completely sort of self-taught technical agency, et cetera, professional. I started out working for a software company when I was 16. I applied for an internship that I didn't realize was a college internship. And as a high school student, somehow got it. They picked me up from school and drove me to the software company after school every day. And so I started out building servers and doing system and stuff.
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:05.208)
Wow.
Paolo (03:10.855)
basically in the run up to the dot com boom. So I'm 42, so this was like late 90s, really interesting time to be a young person, kind of DIY figuring out tech. And then, you know, went through a liberal arts education, learned a lot, but didn't end up sort of using that in my work and sort of weave through a lot of different kind of types of businesses, landed with an agency, some other software companies, et cetera. And then, yes, I started Hidden Gears.
over 12 years ago as Sidework. I was working for a digital agency running PPC programs for a lot of different clients up to the sort of Fortune 500 scale. And they didn't do any e-commerce because they're probably a little bit afraid of it. It was intimidating. There's so much detail. If a project goes sideways, it's really sideways. And I had learned the ropes of Shopify basically in 2009 when it was a one or two year old company.
working for another firm and said, hey, I kind of know how to do this stuff. We don't do it. Do you mind if I do that nights and weekends? And that ended up becoming, after a couple of years, sort of enough to say, actually, I might be able to do this. So I started the firm by myself with the intention of Scala. And I've been doing it full time for 10 years. And I ended up bringing on my now wife as a business partner, which
A lot of people are intimidated by and don't recommend, I say if it works, works. And if it doesn't, don't try it. And we ran the company together for about nine years and scaled it to about six full time and three contracts. So we're definitely intentionally small, a little bit more boutiquey. And in the early days, we did a little bit of everything, some WordPress, some Magento, some BigCommerce, some custom carts.
insulted for larger agencies, et cetera. And now we're really just a Shopify shop and really gone down a specialization path or so. yeah, work with folks around the country. And it's just been a fascinating process of really learning the back end of other people's businesses and helping people do fundraising, Series A, and doing exits and scaling to the tens of millions of dollars from starting out with just one store.
Paolo (05:34.771)
Yeah, it's been a really interesting path. I'm definitely stimulated by the everything being different all the time kind of world that we're in with the agency side where it might be the same type of problem, but it's always a different solution or a different use case or different business need. so, yeah, always troubleshooting, always figuring things out. And that is really what I enjoy about this type of work.
Steve / Agency Outsight (06:02.54)
And is your wife still on board as a partner?
Paolo (06:05.171)
We call her now more of a silent partner. So she's doing art direction on large scale builds and helping me with back a house, HR, financial planning, stuff like that, is essentially no longer client facing.
Steve / Agency Outsight (06:21.166)
Yeah. I love the intentionality of keeping it small and knowing where the lane you want to swim in and knowing, you know, these are the services we want to provide and let's just stick to that for the most part. But you also said, you know, you want to scratch the itch of like everything being, you know, trying new things every now and again. And, you know, just the world of things being different here and there. And that makes it tough to stay in that lane. Sometimes you get called to, you know, this side and that side. And a lot of times, at least my experience,
Paolo (06:38.099)
Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (06:50.574)
If you're the web guy, the web gal, the web whatever, you're the techie. so whether it's, you show me how to use a fax machine or whatever technology issue or question they have, they're calling you in as that tech person. Because they handle the website there, they know all about our technology. so it's hard to stay in the lane there.
Paolo (06:58.565)
yeah.
Paolo (07:07.091)
Yeah. Yeah, and also because I started my career in IT, I actually did know how to, you know, reboot the VoIP systems and migrate the email and got pulled into that a little bit in the beginning and really had to set some hard boundaries and pretend like I knew less than I did. Cause I was like, actually I know what's going. No, I don't. I don't know what's going on with your systems. I'm sorry.
Steve / Agency Outsight (07:28.814)
So talk about some of the things that you've, when you and I previously spoke, you brought me into some of the challenges that you and your wife have faced as partners in life, but also partners in business. And I think that presents a whole other set of complexities. I love seeing the husband and wife team crushing it. I coach a number of agencies that are husband and wife team or partnership teams.
And I just love the hell out of it. I think when it works, like you said, it's absolutely beautiful. And when it doesn't work, good, leave the partnership at home and do the business separately. What are some of the things that you've faced that have been like major struggles in your life?
Paolo (08:10.983)
Yeah, for sure. you know, part of why the company has been, I mean, a large part of why the company has been successful is because I've had a partner who I can just, you know, like, you're never going to trust anyone else, any other business partner more than you would your spouse. So having someone who you just know always has your back, who always is there to help, who through thick or thin, you know, going to figure it out. It's really...
It's really an amazing connection. But we always used to joke about like, we should still have good documentation. We still should delegate things because what if one of us gets hit by a bus or that kind of thing? we should have life insurance policies because what if I couldn't do this and you had to carry on? It's both of our only incomes. When we made that leap, it was a big leap. Yeah, basically out of nowhere a little more than two years ago,
my wife who was 35 and perfectly good health, running half marathons, et cetera, learned that she had colorectal cancer, which is a very low symptom cancer. It's also one that historically has not been found in younger people, say under the age of 50. It's typically associated with people who have very poor dietary or other health complications and just was really out of the blue.
And that sort of forced a bit of, you know, obviously a personal crisis to figure out how, where is this at? What do we have to do? What are our options? Where can we go? And, you know, everything that goes along with getting a really serious diagnosis. was a lot of ambiguity in the beginning too, because even though technology in medicine has advanced, you know, exponentially over even the last 20, 30 years, imaging technology is not that.
focused. So we had doctors saying, we think it's this bad. And another doctor saying, no, no, no, it's not that bad. We can do this surgery or we can do this approach. And other people saying, well, from my read of this x-ray or this MRI or this CAT scan or this, whatever, we think it's actually this. And so we also had to deal with a sort of conflicting information, like who do we trust, even if you're getting a opinion or a third opinion or whatever.
Paolo (10:36.721)
And then also being in a geographically isolated place, know, those flying to different places to get different opinions and so forth. so, you know, at a certain point we decided the best care would be going to MD Anderson in Houston, which is an amazing facility. I do highly recommend it. It is truly world class and they had a very different approach to treating cancer. Our first meeting with oncologists,
And call just like my goal is to figure out how to not give you chemo. And I was like, whoa, like this is, this is different. This is not how other people think. And it was a radical approach to like, what can we do to minimize, you know, the damage to your body as we're trying to do, get rid of something that is damaging your body. And I think that was also really important to us because a lot of, you know, long-term outcomes,
in this arena don't talk about the sort of side effects that you can have for rest of your life from doing major surgery, from doing radiation, from doing chemo, all those things that really affect the body and a lot of patients who have you know these types of diseases are going to be older and say well I have 10 years left or I have 20 years left, not I have more than half my life left like can I actually deal with this so
Steve / Agency Outsight (12:00.846)
Sure.
Paolo (12:03.571)
There was a lot of heavy conversations going on, obviously. And then it's a question of like, now that we've built this business together, this life together, all this has to go on hold. Like the only priority in her life has to be getting treatment, figuring out how to do that and going through that very intense process. And then I have to take all of that responsibility and figure out what to do with it and how to do that.
How do you communicate this to clients? How do we communicate this to employees? How do we even tell friends and family? Interesting thing I found is like actually telling someone that either your partner or if it was yourself, you you have cancer is like a really intense thing because you're kind of bringing them down. And even though in theory, like they will be people who support you in the, in the telling of that news, you actually sort of have to support them.
because they're starting to get scared and they're like, no, what's going to happen? You're like, no, it's going to be okay. So you end up comforting people in the position where you actually need the comfort yourself or as a caregiver or as a patient. And it's kind of a weird kind of inversion, at least for a little while. And so we were kind of strategizing like, what is the emotional impact even in her day of like having to do that, that labor of telling people. So.
You know, for some clients, we kept it kind of vague and we said, you know, she's having some health issues. She has to step back for a while. Some people guessed, some people we had this sort of death of a relationship with over the years we told, and they were truly, you know, wonderful, sent us care packages and shared their stories. And that's also partly why I wanted to share our story today is that, you know, you don't know until you talk to people, like what people have been through and
you know, there's, there's clients or close friends and people were like, yeah, this, that's exactly what my aunt had, or that's what my husband had, or that's, you know, I've known someone who's been through that and I know what you're going, you know, and you just start opening those conversations and it's really human and it's really, feels very vulnerable at first, but then you're also going to get support from places that you had really had no idea that, you know, some of the most empathetic people were the people are like, I didn't even know.
Paolo (14:31.751)
you we have a business relationship, like you don't have to be this nice to me or go out of your way to really check in about her health every time we had a call, you know, weekly standing call and making sure everything was as good as it could be and so forth. So I will say that through that sort of darkness and chaos, there definitely saw the good in people, you know. But there was also this kind of feeling I had in the back of my brain where it's like, if anyone really gives me crap about this, like,
they're done. you you have this, yeah, you have this, this thing is like, this is, this is it. Like nothing can stand in the way of this important thing because it was, you know, truly life threatening thing. And like, if anyone says like, why isn't my report ready yet? Or blah, blah, blah. Like I did feel like, you know, just the amount of cortisol, whatever stress pumping through my body that I was definitely on a
Steve / Agency Outsight (15:03.404)
You were kind of loaded and waiting for somebody to... Yeah.
Paolo (15:30.299)
more edgy position in terms of like, have to really be tempered. have to really be measured. And, also like, this is going to be a sort of ethical line in the sand, depending on how people respond to it.
Steve / Agency Outsight (15:41.646)
So you get this diagnosis, you realize, I need to now run the business solo, be fully supportive of my partner, communicate to clients, did you guys put a plan in place? Did you step back and let your team run things for a while? Like tactically, how did you, what were your kind of next steps for unloading this?
Paolo (16:03.612)
Yeah.
So at the time, we actually only had one full-time employee. So we had a developer who had left right before that. And we were like, we're going to rehire, et cetera. And then it was all upside down. So we ended up scaling up with, I think, three contractors. And then ultimately, in the long term, we've hired multiple people to take over her roles. was lead project manager, lead designer, et cetera.
But yeah, at that time, it was a mix. We actually essentially not fired per se, but we let certain clients go that we had retainers with. We're like, there's only so many accounts we can service right now. And some of them were higher touch. Some of them were kind of lower touch. And it was like, if there's something that's going to be really high touch and need a lot of
tending and lot of ongoing communication and stuff like that. Like, I don't know that we can actually pull that off, you know, even with scaling with some contracting and some similar stuff. And so actually, I'm happy to report that now those folks that we essentially had to let go did find other people work with for, you know, a year or two and actually now are working with us again. So it sort of it worked out. Yeah, because it wasn't.
Steve / Agency Outsight (17:25.25)
Wow, okay, so they came back after the dust settled a little bit.
Paolo (17:30.343)
It wasn't personal. It was just like, we just, you know, to be honest, that's all we can do. And we've always tried to run the agency with a sense of transparency and being like, hey, you know, if there's something dev related where we find a way to do it and it, you know, saves you money and we don't need the entire project budget, we'll give that back, right? Or we'll tell you when something is way more complicated than you think and we need...
a lot more, we're gonna just kind of call it as we see it. And so we had that sort of approach too, where it was like, this is what's going on and this is our capacity and this is what we can do, or we need to reduce the hours, which is everyone's always trying to get more hours and higher budgets and they're like, can we phase this out? Maybe we can tackle this in six months or here's some referrals to other agencies that we're friends with and work with.
freelancers and so forth and took some amount of a hit financially from that but in the end we're able to at least keep things running to what we felt was the degree of service that we wanted to provide which is being a little higher touch very communicative but it was like hey I can't make that call because I have to be in a doctor's appointment for her type
That's just the breaks. didn't feel, I no longer felt guilt. think I was sort of absolved of some of the guilt of like always feeling like I need to do everything all the time for everyone, which is good and bad. And just saying like, this is it. No, I can't. This is my availability this week. Like take it or leave it. Sorry. And, I think that did create a little bit more of emotional distance between, you know, my, me and the business where it's like, well, I have to delegate more. have to step back more. I have to think about this in a different way.
Steve / Agency Outsight (19:21.23)
Mm-hmm.
Paolo (19:21.329)
And ultimately, I think that led to some more maturity on my part and some more depth of like, OK, this is moving from being a doer to being a leader, which was always kind of a Venn diagram of we're doing some production work and doing this and that and really making a starker contrast for that.
Steve / Agency Outsight (19:43.864)
So fast forward two years since she was diagnosed, what are, as a leader, what are some of the takeaways that you have from this experience or things that you, I guess, did or do regularly just to kind of take care of yourself, communication styles or things that you've integrated into your leadership profile as an owner?
Paolo (20:08.157)
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I've definitely learned how to put a good face on things and how to create a situation where we can still try to stay positive, try to inspire people, and then not be so emotionally transparent that they know everything is going on or know our every worry. I think that's another thing I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve a little bit.
people know if I'm upset or whatever, and being like, OK, this is part of that, and here's how I have to be and show up, because I don't want everyone on the team stressed out about it. And her treatment was successful. The chance of remission at this point is extremely low. It's not an ongoing worry, which is really, really lucky in terms of catching things earlier and having really good care.
And the sort of silver lining, I think, is that it did really force us to delegate and hire multiple people to replace her essentially and have me get out of dev because by trade, I'm a marketing developer and I was doing a lot of code at that point, a lot of management of clients at that point and saying, yeah, there's good people everywhere. We just got to find them, get them and really make sure that we are not the ones who are
are necessarily doing the work, we'll still jump in if we need to, but that really did, I think, accelerate that change. And then the weird part about that, of course, is that then the business grew. So like we went from intentionally retracting the business by probably 20 % to then sort of getting it back to where it was or the trajectory we would have been on had we not intentionally kind of pulled back to then growing 30 % because we actually got out of the weeds ourselves.
And so that's been interesting. Like, that's, you know, the theory in practice. Like, you listen to all the podcasts and you talk with all the consultants and you're like, if you only did this, you know, things would be different. And that actually ended up sort of happening in a roundabout way.
Steve / Agency Outsight (22:20.75)
Yeah, and you were forced into what you're, you know, what me and other coaches are telling owners to do is if you step back and if you focus on top level stuff and if you stay in the vision spot and get out of the tactical spot, you'll be able to grow or stay in your lane or get rid of, you know, super high touch clients. All these things that you had to do in order to be a good caretaker helped you, you know, kind of drop down right size the agency or level up and then it gave you, gave you a runway to grow it into, you know, something bigger and
hopefully healthier, I would imagine at this point. Healthy, and I use that term across the board, not just fiscally, like all the other things, right?
Paolo (22:52.52)
Yeah.
Paolo (22:56.306)
Sure.
For sure. Yeah, and that's actually honestly part of the, what I would associate with a leadership piece now is because of her, you know, kind of sudden diagnosis. I went to the doctor, I found out I had sort of catastrophically high cholesterol. And I was like, I don't want to coronary when I'm 50, right? Like that was the trajectory. And I also don't necessarily want to be on pharmaceuticals for rest of my life. You know, like what can I do? And that caused me to really like, you know.
Steve / Agency Outsight (23:16.846)
Mm-hmm.
Paolo (23:28.547)
eat healthy, make prioritized sleep, often in entrepreneurship is the first thing that's thrown away, right? And then really like exercise. And I found it was like doing these hour long runs or, you know, sessions at the gym or what have you. was like, all of a sudden I was like, I'm getting this mental clarity to see the big picture. And these ideas are popping in my head.
or this project that was bugging me, I sort of work it out by the end of the run and was like, actually, maybe we could take that approach. Actually, maybe I should tell someone, you know, and I'm taking notes on my phone. I'll try not to fall off the treadmill. And that actually really had a sort of major impact on my mental health as well as like, first of all, I have way too much stress to be keeping that in and running that out, working that out, getting that out felt good on a sort of physiological level, but also that sort of cleared my mind to sort of do that sort of.
Okay, if I need to come to work and have this hyper focus and really not think about everything that's going on, also, you know, it's easy to get caught up in all the details and not have the time for that bigger picture stuff because as soon as I step away, like it's back to crisis mode, reaction mode, you know, all of that. So.
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:41.422)
Yeah, I love that that's a major takeaway for you that, you focusing on, you know, body, mind, spirit, you know, all these things that are, you know, important to you and balancing it back out gave you greater clarity so that you can be almost more laser focused on solutions. Again, that's your job, but let's say your developer starts doing these things, you know, the clarity that they would get or, you know, anybody can benefit from focus, you know, learning to focus and.
Paolo (24:57.747)
For sure.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:10.51)
You know, I have a very personal meditative practice that I've had for many years now. And a lot of people think, well, how do you turn your brain off for meditation? Like, that's not the point of it. The point is to gain clarity and focus, which is running as meditative. for the, you know, for a lot of people, the gym is their meditation and you don't need to just sit full lotus on a cushion. There's a lot of different ways to learn to quiet and focus the mind. And I mean, the way you explain it is exactly the kind of
takeaways from that kind of a practice and habit. So I love that. What about the reframing for you and your partner as far as priorities of life and before we hit the record button, like I've got to revisit a five year goal and vision and how has this experience impacted your perspectives?
Paolo (25:44.423)
Yeah.
Paolo (25:54.119)
Yeah.
Paolo (26:01.797)
sure. Well, say after, you know, treatment was successful and there was, you know, a good amount of healing and the body heals slowly that we definitely went into a bit of what we started calling the YOLO phase, which is just like, Hey, you want to take a trip? You ever wanted to see that thing? is there that, you know, band playing that you always really liked and it's in Seattle, but you know, like, you know, we're just going to do it. We're just going to absolutely do it because you know, life is too short. I think that's
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:26.072)
Mm-hmm.
Paolo (26:29.587)
down little bit, but that was definitely part of it. mean, refactoring priorities was absolutely part of it. As young small business owners who are self-taught, running an agency in what I now call the sort of DTC boom of 2018, 2019, I mean, we know what it's like to work 100 hour a week, an eight hour a week, a 60 hour a week.
And at a certain point, realized, is that actually worth it? Delegation or not, even if the team was doing it or whatever, we had to hire 10 people to do it. Is that really what we want out of this? And I think that there is a lot of stigma about lifestyle businesses. I used to get this going at developer conferences a lot, where I would say, you have a service business, not a SaaS business.
you don't have a product business. That's not a real business. you have a lifestyle business. And there's a lot of contention in certain circles about like, what's a real business. I think Danny Meyer said business is a problem. And that was a big unlock for me. was like, we're at value. We have to solve other people's problems and faster and sort of better than they could if they were assembling their own team. Right. And but what are the problems we're going to solve? And like, to what extent do we want to do that? And
You know, yeah, there's, there's people I knew who started agencies and they're like, year one, I want to make a million dollars revenue. like, okay. You know, like there's people who come out and they have a vision to do something and that's great. But like our vision was always to like do good work for good people and what scale that is, you know, like the business could retract and I would be okay with it at this point. And saying like, you know, if it means I work 35 instead of.
65 hours a week or 50, know, whatever it is, like that's, that can be okay. And that doesn't mean that we're a failure or we're not on track or not good enough or whatever. think that along with, you know, just doing anything, but certainly in entrepreneurship, certainly in tech, certainly in the amount of people are self-taught in tech, there's, there's a, distinct, you know, imposter syndrome that people have. And I think it takes.
Paolo (28:54.361)
years, if not a decade to get over it. Where now I look back and I'm like, wow, we did a lot of stuff. For a lot of people, it's kind of impressive. But even in my head, now I'm going, are we doing the best job we can? Is there more stuff to learn? Could I have done this? And I think it's easy to be self-critical. then when you have that sort peanut galley of people that are saying, you have a lifestyle, this is not real business.
majority of businesses in this country, small businesses are super small and they're family based or have family ties. that's life. That's the life people want. So that was definitely another thing is saying like, where do we want this to go? I think in some ways it definitely made us grateful also that we were
self-employed, even though it is scary to have something major like this. mean, at the end of the day, in the state that we live in, like technically speaking, if you work for a company with less than 50 employees, you could be fired for having a major illness, like for having cancer. Now, know, ethically speaking, is that happening? I don't know, but you're like, on the table. Or they could say, if we worked for, you know, if she worked for an employer, less than 50 people here,
They could have said, well, you can take unpaid leave to move to Houston for three months to do treatment, but we're not going to pay. And just realizing system can be pretty bad if you don't have an empathetic or progressive employer, or if the rules are such in the place that you are that actually your benefits could be cut off for the other person, et cetera. So in that sense, we had more freedom and we had insurance that would pay for out-of-state treatment.
but on the same token, there's a lot that's not covered. Okay, so you think about max deductibles and this and that and the other, I mean, there was tens of thousands of dollars of things that we had to pay for out of pocket at the end of the day. And to not go into medical debt, you sort of have to work for yourself or be a highly paid information worker for someone else. Like it's crazy. The system is not set up for major care without major repercussions financially. And so I was like, I got a,
Paolo (31:17.639)
build some more websites, I got to do some more stuff. And I could have that levered up whole to be like, you know, this year, you know, everything is kind of going to healthcare, but we can make that happen without being crushed by it. But for a lot of people, it would be a super bad situation. And so, you know, that's, that's just one of those things where we're, sort of fortunate that in that sense, we had that flexibility, we had the ability to set our schedule, we had that ability to
really try to hustle and pay some bills and that kind of thing.
Steve / Agency Outsight (31:50.23)
Interesting perspective and you know both like a I love the the YOLO face of life like because you don't know when it's gone So shit live it up you may as well But also like because we are at the helm and we get to kind of dictate the direction this thing goes Verse I have a job and my salary is capped like you you can open up the floodgates of how much ever revenue you want Verse my salary is what it is and we're just gonna pay down this debt for the rest of our lives kind of nonsense
Paolo (31:57.585)
done.
Paolo (32:10.024)
Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (32:19.686)
so super interesting. any, so she's doing great, in remission, regular checks, I'm sure scans, et cetera. Awesome.
Paolo (32:31.313)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they have a lot of really interesting technology now. There's like nano DNA tests for like micro cancers. So there's all kinds of stuff in terms of once you get into the more monitoring cycle of making sure that even if something might start to crop up that you know about it right away, have had really good care. And yeah, you know, there are long term side effects. one really talks about the stresses of the body and
you know, you're taking surgery, you're taking pieces of the body away, of course, there's going to be repercussion. feel like there's a general consensus with cancer. You know, if you're lucky enough and you get cured that that's it, and then you just go home and like doodoo, like the rest of your life is normal, but it isn't. Tigna Nataro, the comedian who sort of initially went viral for her comedy set, standup set about cancer. Let's talk about that. Also recently about like, she's like, yeah, I'm on five different.
medications for the rest of my life and I'm experiencing this and this and this and like, people think it's like, you're cured. That's amazing. That's awesome. And yeah. And, you know, did that, has that affected, you know, how much she's involved in the business to a certain degree? Yeah. You know, and also what she wants to do and refactoring, obviously her sort of goals and priorities in terms of career and everything else. Yeah. There's a, there's a lot, there's a lot that happens after. And I think that's sort of where the medical system ends is like,
Steve / Agency Outsight (33:35.47)
Mm-hmm.
Paolo (33:57.863)
Michael system is really good at figuring out, you have a crisis. We're going to go in, we're going to fix it, and then it's boom, gone. It's not, at least in our experience or in our research, a lot of survivor support groups for young people who are in the same phase of life. Also, I had to really learn about caregiving. And something you and I chatted about a little bit before is like,
really being a caregiver is so underappreciated and I felt a good amount of guilt from it even after I went through it because I've certainly had friends and family have gone through their cancer journeys or major medical journeys and I never really knew what to do to like try to support them other than like be generally sympathetic and kind of check in and I think it's something you sort of learn by doing or by being really close. Someone's going through a process and being like, yeah.
the amount of sleepless nights, the amount of stress, the amount of just fight or flight, panic mode, things that have to happen. It's understated, like what goes into that in terms of caregiving. so I'm much more aware of that, much more, you know.
Steve / Agency Outsight (35:13.646)
I even think it's draining to just summon up consistent compassion. Maybe Monday you're like, I'm all in, I'll bring you soup, Tuesday, okay, Wednesday, it's like, Jesus, you know what I mean? It can weigh on you, and so you've gotta summon that regularly to be like patience and compassion and all of that. Yeah.
Paolo (35:28.434)
Yeah.
Paolo (35:34.097)
Right. There was certainly, yeah, some things about like, hey, could you just please do some of the dishes? After six months of like, yeah, I'm going to cook, I'm going to clean, I'm going to do the yard, I'm going to do this, I'm going to drive, I'm going to... At a certain point, you're like, hey, we were, we're partners, right? Can you have the energy to do this and have those conversations too? Because yeah, sometimes...
that gets hard even though you know it's like, I should just have this infinite well of ability and compassion. We're all human. We all get burnt out at some point.
Steve / Agency Outsight (36:17.272)
Yeah. So, and you mentioned burnout and kind of my last question is, what have you incorporated into life to manage from hitting burnout, both personally and professionally and some of the practices that you guys have together?
Paolo (36:34.259)
Yeah, so I would say now that we've been able to, we've been trying to travel a lot more because it's just such a phase shift. I always say as a small business owner or small digital agency owner, you're always kind of working like, right? There's no pure vacation days that I really take. Even if it's an hour in the morning or three hours or something, it's a little bit, even just like getting out of your...
normal routine, your normal place, just seeing different cultures, seeing different places, having the sun shine differently, having the food taste different, just having that context really is, at least for us, has been a big reset in terms of burnout. Really having hard and fast rules about overtime. Like I said, we have clocked each over 100 hours a week at certain points.
Steve / Agency Outsight (37:11.086)
Mm-hmm.
Paolo (37:32.327)
really think I'm proud of that. I think it's really, really bad to do on any kind of regular basis and so on. It's like, well, you know what? I've done everything I can do, you know, and I just have to wake up and start fresh tomorrow and whatever. Like, I think that there's this idea that we can plow through anything, really without rest, without eating well.
that was also a big thing we used to, you know, it's like, this is like the pizza week because we're just like every day we're working too much, right? And it catches up to you. So really prioritizing health, like, no, I, even if I have to still deploy this thing and it's buggy and I haven't figured it out, I have to stop and make dinner for like an hour. And it feels like pulling teeth in the beginning, but at the end of it, you're just, it's really makes a huge difference. So that type of thing again, and we've been also very careful.
not to lay that kind of responsibility or that sort of expectation with employees or contractors or clients or, know, just like we don't want other people doing it, even if we're going to make up the gap and try to do something to hustle, like don't we don't have a hustle culture where it's like, why aren't you doing this at 7pm? We're really trying to provide work-life balance for other people, even if we were sort of hypocritical about it in the early years, just to make sure that
Steve / Agency Outsight (38:55.031)
Mm-hmm.
Paolo (38:57.265)
you know, again, like we have a happy, healthy team as well. And, yeah, man, making those hard decisions. I think it's for us, it comes down to, you know, it's not always worth doing it for the money, right? Like there's other things in life too. And we're going to say like, yeah, maybe we will be a little smaller, a little less profitable, a little less whatever at scale than maybe we wanted to be. like at the end of the day, yeah.
Health is wealth, like the cliche, like there really is. And when you just take it for granted unless you lose it for a period of time and then you realize, man, like, you know, maybe though once a year you have the flu and you're like, I forgot what it was like to have the flu. Like, this is so terrible. Like it's being in those moments that gives you that context to appreciate and try to structure, you know, something that's healthy for the future too.
Steve / Agency Outsight (39:51.17)
Yeah, well, I'm super grateful that she's pulled through and has kind of seen the other side of where you guys are now and the perspective shifts that you guys have for yourselves, for your team, for your clients, and the culture that you're kind of pushing into your agency of it's not a hustle culture. We're not gonna encourage anybody to work 100 hours a week. It's not healthy. And the practices that you've implemented into your lives and again, into the culture of your agency, I think it's beautiful.
Paolo (39:55.694)
things.
Paolo (40:14.504)
Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (40:20.582)
I think all too often it's we as humans just kind of might need a jarring experience like yours or potentially worse in other cases in order to make the changes needed to be seen. So I'm glad that you've found those changes and have been able to implement them. And again, super grateful for you to share your journey and what you guys have been through with the listeners. So thank you very much. All right.
Paolo (40:46.483)
Sure, yeah, of course. Thanks for having me and talking it through. All right, cheers.
Steve / Agency Outsight (40:49.88)
Thanks, appreciate you being here.