Every great CEO walks the factory floor If you're not getting your hands dirty, don't be surprised when things fall apart I learned this while making $10.50/hour at Home Depot Every 90 days, the district manager would show up with a white glove. Checking storage racks. Shifting pallets of cement. Testing if our inventory was accurate The week before his visit? Pure chaos. We'd scramble to groom, organize, and price everything correctly That's when it hit me: The only reason we kept standards was because someone checked Fast forward to AppSumo at $40M Every Monday, I blocked 30 minutes. Non-negotiable My digital factory floor inspection: - Open 5 random support tickets - Test the products we were launching (actually buy and use them) - Review ad performance line by line - Find ONE thing working and ONE thing broken per department - Slack both observations immediately The team thought I had eyes everywhere Here's what they didn't know: I was terrified of becoming one of those CEOs who loses touch The uncomfortable truth about scaling: $1M: You're still in the weeds. Walking the floor IS your job $10M: You've hired leaders. Easy to think "they've got it." Wrong. This is when those 30 minutes matter most $100M: Your job shifts. Now you ensure your leaders walk THEIR factory floors. You walk together quarterly, showing them the standard you expect "But my time is worth $10,000/hour. Why would I do support tickets?" Because that one angry customer email will teach you more about your business than 10 board meetings Because your team's standards become YOUR standards when you're not watching Because excellence is a habit, not a memo One year, I caught a stripe bug blocking legitimate customers from purchasing during my Monday “walk”. It incorrectly flagged them as fraud. Had been happening for weeks Cost of my 30 minutes: $5,000 (at my “hourly” rate) Cost of not catching it: $180,000 in lost sales But the real cost? A team that thought nobody was watching The pattern is clear: When the cat's away, the mice will play. So be the cat that never fully leaves. Your $100M business isn't built in boardrooms. It's built in the details everyone else thinks are beneath them See you on the factory floor 🤝