As CEO and Co-Founder of Lullabot , Matt Westgate talks about starting a company from scratch, teaching himself what he needed to know about business, leading with authenticity, and encouraging his company to talk openly about mental health. Every few weeks as part of The Heartbeat, I ask one question to a founder, CEO, or business owner I respect about their biggest leadership lesson learned. This week, I interview Matt Westgate, CEO and Co-Founder of Lullabot. Have you been enjoying these Heartbeat episodes, lately? If so, it’d mean the world to me if you wrote us a review in iTunes. The more reviews we have, the more we’re able to share all our lessons from leaders. Thank you! CLAIRE: Hi everyone. I’m Claire Lew and I’m the CEO of Know Your Team: software that helps leaders avoid becoming a bad boss. I am completely thrilled to have someone on The Heartbeat today who I’ve known for awhile, I’ve really admired for a while. And it’s a real honor to welcome Matt Westgate on the show. Matt is the CEO and Co-Founder of Lullabot. They are a completely remote company that has been doing amazing Drupal design, development, and strategy for the past, I want to say more than 10 years. And they’re an extremely established firm that has clients, everyone from Martha Stewart to Georgia.gov to MSNBC to IBM. And I’ve respected Matt a lot because admits the really difficult, I think, industry of building a sustainable digital agency, he’s managed to do it with an entirely remote company and the ethos, Matt, that you really have around thinking intentionally about how you treat your employees, creating the best work environment. I always learn a lot when I talk to you. And so, I’m really excited to have you on here today. There’s a ton of questions I’ve got around everything from remote work to building a company that you likely didn’t know was going to turn into what it is today. But before we even get into all of that, I do want to start with this one question that I ask every single person who I have on the podcast. And Matt does not know this question, everyone. So, coming to you completely live. The question is, what is one thing, or it could be several things, that you wish you would have learned earlier as a leader? MATT: Oh, man. Yeah, I can see why you would ask that question. Just one thing. One thing that I wish I would have learned earlier. CLAIRE: It can be several too. We got time. We can get into it. MATT: When you start a company, you may not necessarily intend to start a company. Sometimes, it just happens through the opportunities. My story is I was participating in the Drupal community. There were maybe 30 developers, not the 3000 or 30,000 developers that there are today. And I was just doing what I love to do, which was to write code with really cool group of people. And the phone kept ringing, people wanting to do paid work and stuff. And so, I sort of begrudgingly started a company and I did that because I wanted to hire my friends and build software together. And when I first started out, there’s that transition of like, I’m doing the thing that I love right now, but then the business needs a voice, the business needs structure. And so, there’s that reluctance of like, “Okay, now I got to go kind of be the company.” And when I became the company, I felt like my job was to protect people. And I feel like, in hindsight, I may have done that to a fault. And what I mean by that is someone came in, “Oh, you’re a developer now.” Now my job as the company is to take care of everything else for you. And I went through this transition of realizing that and taking care of everything for everyone. I may have limited their ability to do their best work because it’s kind of like working without context. If you don’t know what the business needs, if y