#36: The Power Of Naivety & The Benefits To Ignorance

SAM: Hello and welcome back to another episode of the lazy entrepreneur. I’m your host Sam Priestley, and as always we’re joined by my lovely co-host, Emma Priestley.

EMMA: Hello.

SAM: Emma, I thought this subject I’ve got today would be a good podcast to follow up from the last one we did, where we interviewed you about going around to different places in London and going in without any idea of what you were doing and trying to speak to the manager and trying to sell them our gin. Because, what you were doing is you were having a great day just by being naive, and approaching these top restaurants, that, perhaps if you’re following the best practices, you would have been told was a stupid idea.

EMMA: Yeah definitely.

SAM: So that’s what I want to talk about today, the power of naivety and not knowing anything and going in and being a bit oblivious and breaking some of the rules. I thought this would be another good one to do because on Episode 34 about following the crowd, when to follow the crowd and when to do your own thing, I said something along the lines of, you should learn the rules first before you can break them. Or, you should learn the rules so you can break them.

EMMA: Did you?

SAM: Yeah, well that is too simplistic. Because it is true, it is worth learning some of the rules so you can break them. But how do you draw the line of when you’ve learnt enough of the rules? It’s not like you went in there with no idea of the price you’re going to sell it.

EMMA: No.

SAM: It wasn’t like you went in there and you asked the waitress if you could sell her the gin. You weren’t completely naive. You kind of learned the rules, you knew the questions to ask. You went in knowing who their distributors were and you knew the common problems that they might have. But you just didn’t really know the best practices or what the appropriate way is to approach the owner of a posh restaurant.

EMMA: Yeah.

SAM: So I think this is kind of where we want to talk about, like how do you draw the line in between doing loads of research and learning what the rules are and just going for it and being naive and diving straight in. Because it’s very easy to take that learning of the rules too far. In Episode 54 I said learn the rules before you can break them but you can definitely get what’s called analysis paralysis by spending all your time researching and learning the rules and just never actually going for it.

EMMA: Yeah because the more rules you learn, the more it puts you off making the first move.

SAM: Yeah because the more you get told there’s a certain way of doing it, the more scared you get about breaking that certain way. I’ve definitely put off ideas by over researching things and I get contacted by people all the time asking about potential problems that could happen to their business which are so far down the line or so niche that I’m like how do they even know these problems exist in the first place? They just looked into it way too much. A lot of the early podcasts we did, I spoke a lot about just getting started. Just going for it. That ties in with this. But I want to take it a little bit further and talk about it. It’s not just about getting started, there is a benefit to not knowing everything. There is a benefit to being naive. Let’s talk about the benefits of being ignorant and being naive. So I think the main one is that you don’t fall into the trap of thinking there’s only one way of doing things, because to be an entrepreneur you’ve got to be a risk-taker and creative. And trying things that other people haven’t done. And if you just follow the rules, if you learn too much about something you’re going to end up thinking that’s the only way to do it. Whereas if you go in not knowing rules and then breaking them accidentally, you might then accidentally stumble across a better way of doing things.

EMMA: But also there’s reasons behind, for example, having to be creative. So creative with budget, creative with time, doing things a bit differently because ultimately you’re not setting up a huge great big corporate company with lots of staff, lots of investment and lots of time. You’re a startup, you’re trying to do things quickly and therefore you need to be creative.

SAM: Exactly you’re not going to beat those people at their own game. You’re gonna beat a big corporate company with lots of money and lots of employees doing exactly what they do in the exact same way. You’ll lose because they’re the best in the world at that because they’ve spent forever becoming the best in the world. You’ve got to become very good at doing something different or something they can’t do.

EMMA: Yeah.

SAM: And that’s it, you might stumble across a unique approach that works. That works better. So that’s the main reason, the main benefit. But then the most obvious benefit is you just get started quicker. You don’t have to research anything, you can start tomorrow.

EMMA: Yeah start making some money or start putting your ideas into the real world.

SAM: Yes it doesn’t matter how many people you focus group and say, oh do you think you might want to buy this in six months time when it’s ready? The best way to know is going to be stick it in their face and ask if they want to buy it.

EMMA: Yeah I mean a good example of that is the first batch of our gin. We could then test the market to see if customers liked the gin and if they didn’t we could then potentially change the branding, change the recipe. We weren’t locked into selling hundreds of thousands of bottles in the first month.

SAM: Yeah and if people didn’t like it, we wouldn’t have lost any money because pretty much all we put in would have been recuperated by setting that first batch. Yeah the cost of failure when you dive straight into something, provided you do it smartly, isn’t that high. Similar to starting this podcast, before recording this episode, we wandered around the house for about 10 minutes trying to work out the acoustics in different rooms. So I am still trying to work out how to make this podcast sound good. This will be episode number 35 I think, plus bonus episodes. I think this will be the forty second episode I’ve recorded, and I still don’t really know I’m doing. But if I tried to work all this stuff out beforehand, I’d only be getting started now and I think that leads on to the next thing. You’re probably going to underestimate just how hard it is gonna be, whatever it is you’re starting. Robert Rodriguez in his interview on Tim Ferriss, he’s a film director he said something that really stuck with me and that was that it’s not his job to tell you how hard it’s gonna be. You’re gonna find out that yourself along the way. It’s his job just to encourage you to start and I think that like everything I’ve done has been harder than I thought it was going to be but if I knew that to begin with then I probably wouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place.

EMMA: Yeah.

SAM: This is the lazy entrepreneur. Most things I’m doing are because I think they’re gonna be easy.

EMMA: But you that optimism, you need that energy to get things off the ground. The more that you potentially research, the more that you talk to negative people around you, the less likely you are to to actually make the first move and start the business.

SAM: Well that’s it, the other word for cynical negative people are realists. That’s what they say, you know we understand the reality of life. That things are really difficult. Well not many realists have ever created anything amazing. It’s all those naive people who get going, get halfway through everything and think, well I’ve come this far already, I might as well continue.

EMMA: But there’s definitely optimism associated with being naive isn’t there?

SAM: Well I think that’s it. I’m not naive into thinking that things are gonna be really difficult and in fact are really easy. Because that’s not how it works. Things are hard. I’m naive in that I think that I can do something and it’s gonna be easier than it actually is. And that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. In fact, the most fulfilling things I’ve done are some of the hardest.

EMMA: Yeah and I think that’s something in being an entrepreneur. You love the challenges and you love the learning opportunities and that’s one of the highlights of setting up an individual business for you.

SAM: And I think then the businesses that I’m most proud of are often the ones that have been harder. So the most profitable business is a table-tennis business where we make table tennis bats and I don’t brag about that at all, I don’t tell people about it that much. I tell people about the gin because I’m more proud of it because I think it was more of an achievement to do.

EMMA: And the coffee shop.

SAM: And the coffee shop which made me no money, but I’m still very proud of it. It was really hard and by doing it I achieved something. Actually that’s another good takeaway because the coffee shop, it didn’t fail but it didn’t make any money so that might as well be a failure. And that’s the other thing about being naive and just starting something. Even if it doesn’t work out, there’s often still value in it having been done.

EMMA: Definitely.

SAM: Or if it hasn’t gone the way you’ve wanted it too, there’s been a gateway into something else .

EMMA: Yeah it could be that you’ve met some new people along the way or potential people you could work with on future projects.

SAM: I’d been thinking about you getting into your marketing work, your freelance marketing work after you quit PwC. So I remember when you were thinking about what you’re gonna do if you quit, so Emma used to work for a big accounting firm PwC in London. She worked in marketing there and I was trying to convince her to quit her job and come traveling with me for indefinitely and create her own business. I remember at the time Emma had always been into food and drink and a few other things and those were my first ideas of stuff I thought that you should do, and the one that you settled on was the freelance marketing and it’s because it was a gateway from something you understood and knew well into this new life.

EMMA: Definitely.

SAM: And so you went off and you did the freelance marketing, you did it for two years or something like that, and then eventually you then transitioned from there into doing stuff actually you’re much more passionate about. Food and drink. But if it wasn’t for the kind of naivety of having this gateway you could go into, oh I’m already good at marketing, I come from a very prestigious firm, it is going to be fairly straightforward for me to get large contracts, you probably wouldn’t have taken that move. Which even though you stopped doing that now, it has led to a totally different and much better life than what you were living before.

EMMA: Yeah.

SAM: And it probably was because I was saying you could definitely make and it was quite straightforward. And then it turned out to be a lot harder and a lot less fun than you expected.

EMMA: It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because really for me going into freelance marketing was to change my life.

SAM: And if you hadn’t have had that option, would you have ever had the confidence to leave a corporate job?

EMMA: No way. Neo I don’t think so and I think the other thing about that is that the people around me at the time before I met you wouldn’t have been supportive of me effectively quitting my corporate job and becoming a freelancer or creating a startup. I wouldn’t have had that network.

SAM: Yeah I think that’s kind of what I’m trying to say, is that their vision for you was probably quite close to reality of what freelance marketing was. That it wasn’t a career ladder like it it probably wouldn’t go that far, it’d be quite hard work to get clients. You’d have to deal with a lot of the hassle that you don’t have to deal with, you go from a very stable income that you were giving up all these things for this thing that probably wasn’t worth that much, but actually that step you took isn’t where you ended up. That is the first step which then led to you making gin or actually doing something you’re much more passionate about and it’s much different.

EMMA: Yeah definitely.

SAM: They’re thinking to themselves, they’re realists, they’re right but that’s because I didn’t see the full picture. Like that first one could have failed completely. You could have spent six months working on it, but it failed but then moved on to something else completely different. It would have worked, but that doesn’t mean the first thing wasn’t worth doing. Because it was a stepping stone out of the thing you were currently in.

EMMA: Yeah so what are some of the examples from your businesses of you in the advantages of being naive?

SAM: Good question I actually had written some down but I deleted them all so let me undo that.

EMMA: We just talked about you deleting everything and you’re like, I don’t delete things.

SAM: Oh I’ve got a few. Writing a book. l wrote the expert in a year table tennis book, I was very naive about that. I didn’t think it would be particularly hard. It was really difficult. We went to see a publisher who who told us it wasn’t worth doing and.

EMMA: What the idea wasn’t worth doing.

SAM: The idea was okay but he just told us it was, oh we hadn’t hadn’t done the ABCD you’re meant to do when publishing a book, and all your title is in the passive voice, that’s bad. I didn’t really know what the passive voice was at the time, I still don’t really know. A bunch of other things like who’s your target market? What about this, what about that? We didn’t really have that many answers. He said I don’t think you should continue in this book as it is, maybe write a different book or spend a lot more time changing this book and then you should publish it and we kind of went away from that meeting a bit downtrodden. Because we kind of did a first draft, which took us ages. We spent months and months on this. We kind of walked away and thought what should we do now? Should we spend another six months trying to change it into the book that this expert has told us it should be? Or should we just carry on what we’re doing and do it anyway? And we did speak to a few different publishers about it, but eventually decided we would publish it ourself because we knew we had an audience already who was interested in the subject which was this year playing table tennis and how you learned skills and things like that, who we knew would buy it and we had done a lot more by self-publishing. So that was a bit naive and we launched it and you know, it’s got very good feedback.

EMMA: It’s very personal, it’s written very much from the heart and from the ups and downs of the year.

SAM: Yeah it’s a very niche, weird book but people liked it. It’s got good reviews.

EMMA: How many have you sold?

SAM: Good question. I think about 5,000.

EMMA: So that’s pretty good.

SAM: Yeah well we average about three pound 50, whereas I think if you go down to publishers, you earn about 50 P. So that is something where we were a bit naive. Going in and then we wrote the book and then we were a bit naive about where to go from there. I mean books aren’t a great way to make money because you only earn about three pound 50 from each person and nowadays, when your targets as markets are so small, that’s not really great.

EMMA: No but I think there is something in a book that shows that you are professional to people who don’t know anything about this topic.

SAM: Yeah now we can say that for a year or two years, we’ve been the best selling table tennis book that there is. Not a big market but we are.

EMMA: Which then helps to sell more bats.

SAM: And helps add on quite a bit to our credentials. It has loads of good things about it. I mean starting the blog, that’s a little bit naive, starting the table tennis business was a bit naive.

EMMA: So what was naive about starting the blog?

SAM: I mean that’s probably a less naive one because I didn’t think it was gonna make any money but yeah. Naively optimistic to think that there’s any value to what I have to say. I think that’s like, well most people well you don’t know to write, you studied computer science.

EMMA: You don’t know what you’re talking about.

SAM: You don’t know you’re talking about yeah, and those are all valid points but you know learning to write was one of the reasons I did the blog and I’ve got a lot better at. Actually yesterday so my dad is a retired neuroscientist and he’s writing a children’s book at the moment or a coffee-table book and he’s taken photos of the brain over his 30-year career and he’s got all captions for it and he took it to a publisher and they said, these captions no one can understand, you need to need to translate them into something that’s legible. So he went and spoke to a few friends and all his friends recommended me to help edit that for him. That’s a turnaround from the point where no one would recommend me for anything to do with writing to actually being able to understand something quite complex and turn into something legible.

EMMA: What a compliment. Are you going to do it?

SAM: Yeah I said you can send me anything and I’ll have a look.

EMMA: That’s great.

SAM: Something else naive, I think outside the business was the way we go travelling where we just kind of plonk ourselves down, buy a one-way ticket to a random country, book one night or two nights in the hostel when we arrive and then just work it out from there. Well I included that, so I wrote a blog post in 2017 because on the subject in terms of naivety and choosing ignorance, traveling was something I talked about, how I purposely don’t look up all the safety stuff about a country because it’ll terrify me. And I don’t want to be, do you remember when we went to Rio and we were absolutely terrified and we got there about like 9 p.m.

EMMA: Yeah.

SAM: And we got to the hostel and everyone from the hostel was going out to just have some drinks and just sit by the beach. And so you’re terrified. I remember thinking, is it safe for us to walk out the hostel and go to a shop around the corner then after being there three weeks, we were like, that was ridiculous to be so scared. Because everyone built it up as such a terrifying place.

EMMA: We thought we’re gonna get mugged and eople would tell stories about how everything gets stolen off you including your flip-flops.

SAM: But we didn’t get any of that.

EMMA: It was quite naive of us to go travelling in the first place and to think that we were gonna have a better life.

SAM: That’s true, and why would you think this is going to be a better life.

EMMA: Yeah there was definitely a grass is greener and kind of rose-tinted view of what our day-to-day life was going to be travelling compared to working in London.

SAM: Yeah and moving here yeah after we got a bit bored of travelling and we chose Tunbridge Wells and to live in a house and be adults and all that kind of thing. I mean everything has been great but nothing, no amount of research could have prepared me for what it was and say not doing that much research wouldn’t have made that much benefit. There’s a quote that someone told us, was it a week ago or something that it’s either fun or funny. Even stuff that goes wrong will then produce the stories we’ll tell for another 20, 30 years. The silly, the disasters make the best stories. The favorite episodes you like hearing on this podcast are where I tell a story about some ridiculous idea that we tried to do that just was never gonna work. And was just stupid.

EMMA: Well there are many of those.

SAM: If everything was very serious and made sense. The other thing I’ve been thinking about when it comes to naive optimism is how long everything takes.

EMMA: Yeah can you remember how agitated you where when I was trying to launch the gin?

SAM: Yeah well we started working on it in September and I wanted it out by Christmas. How ridiculous is that? Design a recipe, get all the logistics in place, do the branding, get a brand name and launch our own gin.

EMMA: And if you go back and read some of Sam’s monthly reports from that time you’ll see how passive aggressive he was getting. Even in his blog post about how long it was taking.

SAM: Oh yeah I was getting really annoyed at how long it was taking. And then we launched in June or something, but then if we go further back, we look at the episode we did on starting a coffee shop where I went from nothing to opening doors in six months and by that time I was getting really agitated it was taking so long as well, getting really annoyed. And I think about how something like that I would now go into and think it would take us a year and a half to launch.

EMMA: With the coffee shop?

SAM: Yeah, I thought if I am going to start a coffee shop it will take about a year.

EMMA: And what about the gin?

SAM: A year and a half. Yeah you got to book in like nine months to get it started, or the table tennis business, when we started selling table tennis bats, we launched our first product in six months from the idea to it being on sale. Now we’re trying to release our third generation and I’ve been working on that for about a year and a half and it’s still not ready to launch.

EMMA: And that’s okay.

SAM: But is that okay? That’s the thing, because is it that being naively optimistic about time means that I’m always frustrated it’s taking long? But it is still quicker then it should be. Have you heard of Parkinson’s Law?

EMMA: No.

SAM: I can’t believe I haven’t talked about Parkinson’s law before, it’s one of my favorite little sayings. The law is that the work expands to fill the time available for completion, so no matter how long you give yourself to do work it’s always gonna take that long.

EMMA: Yeah.

SAM: If I give myself three hours to write a blog post, I’ll take three hours to write a blog post. If I give myself nine hours to write a blog post, I’ll take nine hours to write a blog post. And the difference between the 3 hour and the 9 hour is not going to be that much.

EMMA: Yeah, well I guess I’ve learned that in business is the kind of 80/20 rule that there’s only so much you can do and then all the extra stuff on top, the 20% doesn’t really add anything, but you tend to spend quite a lot of time on it.

SAM: I think there’s more to it than that, but maybe that is it. Maybe that is it yeah I think it right I probably is it. So today we got an unexpected deadline of basically we need to have some advert content done by the end of the day. Now this would normally take us two weeks or more of approving the copy and making sure the images were okay.

EMMA: Taking the photos.

SAM: And we managed to get it done in a day and it was great because we had a time demand and the job took that amount of time because it couldn’t not take that amount of time.

EMMA: Yeah I think if we’d added another two weeks, we wouldn’t have had something that was that different.

SAM: I need a bit more of that naive optimism oh how long stuff is gonna take and that frustration when it isn’t as quick as I want it to be. Now there’s something about being unreasonable that actually gets you some results.

EMMA: Yes, definitely.

SAM: And that can be unreasonable. They talk about people like Steve Jobs, this idea of a reality distortion field around them, where they ask for impossible tasks and people just get it done even though it’s impossible, because they just expect it and then people somehow make it happen. And I think I need to get a bit more of that in what we’re doing these days. I used to have that in that I thought everything would be easy and then I worked on it and it turned out it wasn’t easy but I still managed to do it anyway, even if it took longer than expected. Now, I think everything’s going to be quite hard and I plan out that it is going to be quite hard and my expectations have hit and I’m still annoyed because stuff takes longer than I expect, even though I’ve given myself three times a time limit that I would have done seven or eight years ago.

EMMA: So you’re saying your optimism and your naivety has gone down the older you get?

SAM: I think so yeah. Yeah definitely less naive, more fearful, more lazy. I’m not more lazy. I’m exactly the same lazy that I was. I’m probably less lazy than I used to be. I just now have an appreciation of how hard things are whereas before, I dive into challenges because I didn’t think they’d be that difficult.

EMMA: Yeah I think good example of that is driving.

SAM: Yeah yeah that’s another one I talked about in that blog post from two years ago now. When I first started driving, when you first start driving at 17 you had all the confidence in the world. Never worried about breaking down or anything like that and then after University, moved to London and went travelling, so had a six year period without driving and then when we moved here, we got a car and we were both a bit worried about driving and still are to some extent I’m still a bit more timid than I used to be. You think about things, you get anxious. You say what happens if I break down on the way, I’m gonna be late for this, what happens if my phone runs out of signal when I’m halfway there? What happens when the sat stops working, blah blah blah blah blah. What happens when someone hits me and I’m late for this talk I’m giving or whatever it is. You just think of all this stuff where there’s not really much value in thinking about it.

EMMA: So do you think you should be more optimistic and positive. Do you think you’re going the wrong way?

SAM: Yeah well.

EMMA: Or do you think there’s benefit to being slightly less naive and optimistic? Because you’re a bit more of a realist.

SAM: The benefit is everything a safer, more stable, more comfortable, but I am starting to think comfort is overrated. I need a bit more funny in my life.

EMMA: Yeah I mean that could summarize why are we going travelling again.

SAM: Yeah because we’re planning on going travelling again in July, complete change of life again.

EMMA: We’ve got very comfortable.

SAM: Let’s get back to grotty flats with cockroaches.

EMMA: Meeting new people, new challenges, and being more creative. Pushing us out of our comfort zone.

SAM: And with our businesses, you know a podcast is a very safe business.

EMMA: It is very stable.

SAM: It is just me chatting to you.

EMMA: Yes whereas some of those businesses that you listed out in your new year’s podcast about the kind four or five businesses you wanted to do in 2019, a lot of those were very risky.

SAM: I mean in some ways doing a podcast you got to be a little naive, you could say the market is saturated, there’s too many podcasts out there. At the same time there’s not really any downside to doing a podcast. Whereas these other ones, there is the downside if it doesn’t really work out. This is the other thing, as long as you’re not spending lots of money and going into loads of debt, what is the downside to spending a lot of time and energy and passion on a business? There isn’t really one. You’re learning things, I believe that work is good for you, and if you’re working on something you’re interested and passionate about, it’s very healthy even if it doesn’t work out. The problem is if you end up in a position where you’ve got loads of responsibilities both financially and to other people. Promises that you can’t or don’t feel ethical to get out of that, you just can’t deliver that you’ve overextended yourself. That’s where the problems come, but as long as you keep that on your side, I think go for it. Take wild optimistic swipes at ideas and projects that are ridiculous.

EMMA: So on that, do you have any tips or tricks to you make people a bit more optimistic and bit more naive in their business decisions?

SAM: Ha ha! I think a lot of it is down to just getting started. Hear it from me that doing loads of extra research isn’t gonna benefit you that much at all. There is a certain amount that’s worth doing, as I said in the last podcast, which is worth listening. No, two podcasts ago, the one about following the crowd or taking your own way. You do need to do some research, you do need to know a bit. I’m not saying go in with your eyes completely closed, but I’m saying that there are diminishing returns from research and learning the rules and then there is a point where knowing too much is actually bad to you, will hinder you.

EMMA: And then what about surrounding yourself with people that are optimistic and will encourage you when potentially things fail by being naive.

SAM: Yeah definitely. If you can surround yourself with people who encourage you and motivate you and are optimistic, as well as people who are wise and can help you out and can then see if you’re going too far, if you’re entering that phase where it becomes unhealthy or you’re overextending yourself in terms of financially or in terms of your responsibilities.

EMMA: Or your health.

SAM: Yeah that’s important. I think there is you know you know when people moved to London or to Silicon Valley at 20 or 21 and live in a flat share with 17 other people, have no money and eat noodles, there is value to that, just being around other like-minded people.

EMMA: Yes.

SAM: Getting out of where you are, that hunger, but having nothing means you’ve also got nothing to lose which there is some nobility, there is some benefit to that. If you can, do it. I mean, you don’t need to. If you’re in a place where there is anyone who is like you, I’m not saying leave your family and move somewhere else, but if that’s something you could do then why not? Why not go hunt out other people thinking the same way, go hang out in the working co-working spaces or in the Google cafes where other people are starting their own things up.

EMMA: I mean that’s again one of the key reasons that we are going traveling as well again so that we can meet more like-minded people on a day to day basis. Rather than be the unusual people in Tunbridge Wells that are working for ourselves, working at home, working on lots of different businesses.

SAM: Yeah, so there’s a fair few entrepreneurs in Tunbridge Wells, but there aren’t many digital entrepreneurs. Which is something we’d love to have more.

EMMA: Teah we’d like to socialize with, we’d like to swap ideas with.

SAM: Well on that note, so hopefully this will be a little call to action for us and also for anyone listening. There is power naivety, there is a load of benefits from ignorance basically. You know don’t fall into the trap of thinking there is only one way of doing things. You might stumble across a unique approach that works, a creative way of doing, something that hopefully stands out from the competition of everyone else doing the same thing. You can also get started much faster if you’re naive and you just dive straight in and you’re going to get going. Then as you get going, you’re going to realize just how hard it is, but that’s okay. You want to learn that when you’re already halfway through and you’re not going to quit, rather then before you started and decided never to start in the first place. And finally, even if what you’re doing doesn’t work out, it’s probably still worthwhile and you’re going to learn a lot from it. And it gets you started on a road to doing things a little bit different, doing it a bit creatively. Doing things entrepreneurially. Nowon that note, thanks for listening. Sorry it’s been a few episodes, a week and a half since the last episode. I’ve been quite ill and haven’t really been able to do anything.

EMMA: And it’s also been your 30th birthday.

SAM: And it’s been my 30th birthday which was awesome, and we launched our new gin so if you fancy.

EMMA: You’ve done quite a lot in a week and a half.

SAM: Quite a lot in a week and a half, I think I clocked up 69 hours of ill time in the last week that I would have been doing something productive, but hopefully we’re back on track now. We’ll aim to keep doing two episodes a week, and thanks for your support. If you got any feedback, email me at hello@sampriestley.com