Learn From Professionals
An experiment in learning from people who knew things we didn't.
Before BOB, there was DAEL.
DAEL was a lead generation business.
The name was LEAD spelled backwards.
And because we spent a considerable amount of our lives calling people, we had a tagline:
No hassle, we DIAL.
DAEL. Dial.
Yes, I was very pleased with myself đź¤
But one of the things I cared about while building DAEL had very little to do with dialing.
I wanted my team to learn.
Not only from training materials, scripts, managers or whatever knowledge happened to exist inside the company.
I wanted them to learn from people.
People who had built careers in completely different areas.
People who had made mistakes we hadn't made yet.
People who had stories, experiences and perspectives that couldn't really be reduced to a slide deck.
So we started something called:
DAEL Learns From Professionals.
The premise was remarkably simple.
Invite someone interesting into the room.
Ask them about their journey.
Ask what it took to get where they were.
Ask about the obstacles.
Ask what they had learned.
And listen.
Our first guru was also one of my own mentors.
I'd already learned enormously from conversations with him, and I remember being excited that my team would now have access to some of those conversations too.
That mattered to me.
Knowledge didn't need to stop with the person who happened to receive it first.
If someone had taught me something useful, why wouldn't I want other people to have the opportunity to learn from them too?
I found this again while building BOB.
And I smiled.
DAEL Learns From Professionals wasn't BOB.
It belonged to another company, another period of my life, and was created for its own reasons.
I don't want to rewrite my history into a perfectly convenient origin story.
But I recognise the instinct.
Find someone who knows something.
Ask them about it.
Put curious people in the room.
See what happens.
Apparently, that part of me has been here for quite a while.
Archive note:Â DAEL Learns From Professionals, originally created during my time building DAEL.
