Luke Roush is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Sovereign's Capital. John worked for Luke for 4 years. If John ever says anything smart, there's a 40% chance he's just quoting Luke without giving him credit. Luke loves nothing more than brainstorming how to make a business tick.Apologies for the sound quality, we had a little snafu.

It's beef season. We have figured out how to not have Daniel on every client, and which roles we play with each client. Then we have a fun conversation about how we spend money, how much we save for the future, and when to take money out of the company. This is a very real peak behind the curtain, and we're slightly awkward. Build in public.

Business is great. But that means Daniel doesn't have time to do strategic stuff. John is pulling back on client hours to figure out how to do outbound sales. We plan out an onsite (or is it offsite?). Finally, we review our OKRs.

Steve is the founder of a well established creative agency called fifteen4. Daniel used to work there! We asked Steve about how you do planning (especially with subcontractors) when you have lumpy sales cycles, and no predictable sales process. But he ended up giving us some free consulting on branding, positioning, and strategy for the target customers we want.

The sales strategy worked! Great leads are pouring in, and we're closing new business. We talk about our strategy on sales calls, and disqualifying ourselves quickly from the wrong kinds of leads. Also we are sleepy.

We want to find a long term partner, and we want your help. Then things come completely off the rails and we stop talking about business. John rants about healthcare "markets", we discuss Kendrick vs. J. Cole beef, and recommend tv shows.

We are looking for 2 big, gnarly, interesting projects to sink our teeth into over the next 6 months. And we want your help finding them. We also recap all of the smart little things we've learned from retrospectives in the last couple months.

We have an opportunity to do something big, difficult, and pretty different from our other clients. John went on the Over Engineered podcast to talk about whether sprints and estimates matter. We review our OKRs.

Daniel and John are out on the speaker circuit. John wants to give more developer talks. We want to mentor more programmers, because that has been an amazing source of clients. And we might convince our friend to become a Laravel dev.

Joel Clermont joins us for a discussion about our pricing model. Like us, he has tried a lot of models, and walked away from most of them. He gives us feedback on our latest idea.

Papercuts progress. Daniel spent some time with the dutch. Getting busy and landing business. John give talks, Daniel gives talks. Retro-driven company.

Thunk is building a SaaS app. We talk about the plan, where the idea came from, and how it'll work. We also brainstorm ideas for the future.

We review our 2023 goals, and set better goals for 2024.

Allison is a former colleague of John's, and we're thrilled to have her on the panel of mentors. She has been a developer, product manager, and executive. She has a lot of good perspective on how developers can think more like PMs, and why that matters. We talk processes, metrics, building teams, living with legacy code, and a lot more.

Also: is programming art or science? John finds reading painful. Daniel finds small to-dos painful. Why are we paying so many Quickbooks fees? The 2024 budget.

We reflect on a problem with a client. Then we discuss the importance of learning new patterns, adopting new tools, and sticking to conventions.

After a scheduling snafu, we needed to use our recording slot to have our weekly check-in with Jacob. This is our regular roundup of clients, plus some pleasantries and goofs.

Daniel is jetlagged after returning from Sydney, where he launched Verbs at Laracon AU.We talk about the launch, talk about John's Kickstarter for Colossi, and do a quick catchup on our OKRs.

You can buy John's game on Kickstarter right now! Daniel's new event sourcing package Verbs is nearly complete, and John loves it. Join us as we spend 40 minutes gassing each other up.

We do some bits. We talk about good practices while pair programming. Then we wonder if product development processes primarily exist to compensate for trust issues. High trust environments are the only ones we want to work in.