The Climb - Cross Roads & Defining Moments

Larry Autrey is the CEO & Managing Partner of Whitley Penn. He has more than 30 years of tax, advisory and business valuation experience focused on public and private clients. His areas of practice include mergers and acquisitions, manufacturing, distribution, profit enhancement, professional services, business valuations, and estate planning.In this episode, we discuss:- How AI and Blockchain are changing the Accounting industry- How future accountants can remain valuable in this new future- the impact of PE on firm valuationsLinks:Whitley PennLarry on LinkedInTopics:(00:00:00) - Intro(00:01:24) - Thoughts on the state of the world(00:18:07) - Inquiry into the influence of early life experiences on career choices.(00:36:35) - Growth rates and defining moments in the firm's history.(00:42:02) - Strategies for dealing with an aging population within the firm and sustainability.(00:44:16) - Private Equity and valuations(00:48:00) - The future of the accounting profession.(00:50:45) - The impact of blockchain and AI on the industry(00:57:44) - The mindset of younger generations regarding career progression and firm loyalty

George has nearly 17 years of hands-on experience in the parking realm, focusing on managing the parking operations of class-A office garage facilities and comparable top-tier parking operations across the continental United States. He prides himself on deep domain knowledge of the event parking space and providing a comprehensive suite of services both software and hardware to support his ever-growing clientele therein. In order to consistently exceed customer expectations in the event-parking space, ParkHub provides logistics and occupancy management services, as well as cutting-edge insights into parking operations for management.We discuss:- Hot topics in 2024- George's upbringing- Building ParkHub- The future of TechnologyLinks:ParkHubGeorge on LinkedInTopics:(00:02:00) - Immigration, Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and inflation(00:08:07) - George's upbringing(00:11:40) - The Parking industry(00:16:49) - Building ParkHub(00:27:41) - Defining moments(00:33:07) - Getting comfortable with selling the company(00:34:36) - Empathy, humility and being lonely at the top(00:38:15) - The future of technology(00:41:46) - Selling the business(00:44:02) - What's next for George(00:45:15) - Advice for entrepreneurs(00:48:00) - What's something few people know about you?(00:50:00) - Fatherhood

Mike has twenty-five years of real estate and finance experience. His experience includes structuring joint ventures, acquisitions, development, accounting, and investment management; with acquisition officer responsibility for approximately $1 billion in investment across asset classes and in multiple U.S. markets.On this episode, we discuss:- Growing up with Best disease (vitelliform macular dystrophy)- The changing landscape of NIL in college sports- Mike's real estate career, thoughts on the market and entering the cannabis industry from a real estate perspecitve- Building a real estate investment platformLinks:Mike on LinkedInMorningside Capital(00:00:00) - Intro(00:03:27) - Dealing with Best disease as a child(00:20:23) - The evolving landscape of NIL(00:24:01) - Mike's career(00:41:29) - Lessons learned and setbacks(00:44:40) - The real estate opportunity in the marijuana industry(00:52:33) - Building an investment platform

Philip is a Partner in the Corporate team at Knights PLC.Experienced in a wide range of corporate transactions, Philip specializes in domestic and cross-border mergers and acquisitions and has advised on many high-value and complex corporate transactions.Philip's experience covers UK and international transactions across a wide range of sectors, including building products, house building, oil and gas, manufacturing, healthcare, sport, and technology. Philip also has strong experience in equity capital markets and private equity transactions, group reorganizations, shareholder and joint venture agreements, and general strategic corporate matters.Additionally, Philip has a strong international practice and experience, with a particular focus on the US market and supporting US and European corporates, individuals, and law firms.In this episode, Michael and Philp engage in a deeply vulnerable conversation centered around Philip discovering the truth behind his family's past.Topics:00:00:00 - Intro00:03:24 - Philp's background and career00:11:34 - How a Brit perceives the state of affairs in the USA00:17:38 - Philip's journey to discover his birth parents01:12:26 - What do you want people to know about you?Links:Michael on LinkedInPhilip on LinkedIn

Anna M. Alvarado is a business-oriented, operationally focused executive who is bilingual (fluent in Spanish) and bicultural. In her role as Managing Director and Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary of Texas Capital Bank and its parent company, Texas Capital Bancshares, Inc. (NASDAQ®: TCBI), she is responsible for supervising and coordinating all legal services for the company, serving as key legal advisor to the Board of Directors, ensuring legal compliance with all securities laws and banking regulations, serving as the lead legal advisor on all the firm's strategic initiatives and commercial and transactional matters, advising the bank on litigation risks, and serving as primary liaison with regulators.On this episode, Michael and Anna discuss:- Anna's upbringing in an immigrant family and the American Dream- Developing her sense of adventure and risk-taking- Her career with Texas Capital BankLinks:Upward BoundTexas Capital BankAnna on LinkedInTopics:(00:01:00) Introducing Anna(00:02:24) Anna's upbringing(00:17:40) Thoughts on the immigration crisis(00:23:48) College and Law School (00:38:10) Anna's early law career(00:45:51) What's something nobody knows about you?(00:53:51) Anna's career with Texas Capital Bank(00:58:20) What do you want people to know about you?

Business owner, designer, mentor, and passionate activist, Nancy Gale is an inspiring individual with a fascinating story of overcoming hardship and turning it into something beautiful.A strong force not only in the entrepreneurial world but also in shaping future generations, Nancy is the founder and creative vision behind JAMAH, an American luxury, Made in the USA bespoke handbag brand, featuring the finest customized Italian lambskin and exotic handbags, men's bags and accessories.She also founded AMBITION, a nonprofit entrepreneurial program for disadvantaged youth. Its mission is to reframe their potential and to provide students with the support, access, and resources necessary to reach their goals.Links:Nancy on LinkedInambition.orginfo@ambition.orgJamah.comTopics:(00:00:31) Introducing Nancy(00:03:39) Southfield, Michigan(00:05:43) Solving a murder, and dealing with the aftermath of loss (00:36:02) Nancy's Foundation & the non-profit world(00:54:52) Nancy's handbag business(00:59:06) What do you want people to know about you?

CT Charlton currently serves as the President of the Charlton Group.  Leaving a career in finance to officially join the Charlton team in 2011, CT was responsible for starting the industrial division which has been an area of steady growth and diversification across all business units.  Over the following 10 years, CT has held roles in Chicago and Seattle before moving to Detroit in 2020.  Under CT's leadership, the company has grown significantly expanding heavily into connected vehicles, ADAS, and autonomy.  He has put extensive effort into growing his outstanding teams in Europe and North America, enjoying record profits each year driven by thoughtful partnerships and investing back into the businesses Charlton believes in.On this episode, Michael and CT discuss: The familial dynamic between generations of Charlton leadership Teaching love and empathy within the business CT's passion for flying and how that's translated to becoming a better leader Links:The Charlton GroupCT on LinkedInMichael on LinkedInTimestamps(00:01:29) Colorado, Coach Prime, Family, the Armed Forces (00:07:19) The Founding of Charlton & growing the business(00:19:39) The Charlton family dynamic between generations(00:27:49) Pivoting during the Pandemic and over the next 20 years(00:33:00) Teaching love and empathy(00:36:59) As your company becomes more global, what excites you and what worries you?(00:40:23) CT's flying hobby(00:43:51) How does learning to be a pilot translate to your leadership at work?(00:46:37) What is your true north when you feel lost?(00:49:24) What do you want people to konw about you?

Tony Iannessa is the Founder and CEO of BIG Construction. Born in Chicago, Tony Iannessa is driven by the work ethic he inherited from his family, who immigrated from Italy in the early 1950s. Having built a foundation working in the trades, Tony's roots in construction trace back to his youth, when he spent summers as a concrete laborer and interning with an electrical contractor.On this episode, we discuss Tony's upbringing as the 2nd of four brothers and how that impacted his career today. We also spend a lot of time discussing how Tony has dealt with the hard times we face in life, specifically with his wife having to overcome breast cancer shortly after the birth of their child. We also reflect on why we get fired from jobs, the challenges of running a business and how to implement company values. Enjoy the Climb!Links:Tony on LinkedInBIG ConstructionImerman AngelsYPO

Bob Kinnan is the resident historian of the legendary King Ranch, which now covers 825,000 acres—more land than the state of Rhode Island. Over 160 years, King Ranch led some of the first cattle drives, developed the Santa Gertrudis and Santa Cruz cattle breeds, bred the finest Quarter Horses, and produced champion Thoroughbreds—all under its iconic Running W® brand.Bob dives deep into the history of the Ranch, from the beginning in 1853, when Captain Richard King purchased a creek-fed oasis in the Wild Horse Desert of South Texas, to the current day where the ranch is still owned by the 8th generation of the King family. We also discuss life in Austin back in the 50s and 60s, Bob's career, and more. Enjoy the Climb!Links:King RanchKing Ranch: A Legacy in ArtTopics:(1:56) - Bob's background, career, and family(12:20) - How Austin has changed since the '50s(16:50) - The legacy and history of the King Ranch(54:31) - The introduction of King Ranch Inc. and taking the Ranch global(1:09:05) - What were some of the challenges that the family has gone through?(1:16:00) - What does the King Ranch look like 100 years from now?(1:20:58) - Summer in the 1950s and 1960s in Austin(1:26:25) - What do you want people to know about you?

Links:Breneman CapitalThe Rise and Invest PodcastTopics:(0:14) - Drew's background and career(3:55) - What do you think inspired your entrepreneurial curiosity?(5:39) - Drew's family dynamic(7:27) - How did you qualify for your first loan?(8:50) - What was your first deal?(9:19) - What would you tell new investors looking at getting into Real Estate?(15:22) - Are there things about RE investing that don't change as you've done this over 17 years?(18:24) - How'd you end up on HGTV?(20:25) - The Keep it Simple Investing Philosophy(25:18) - What did you learn from working for a MF developer?(33:58) - What were some sacrifices you made when starting your own organization?(36:19) - How do you develop the ability to see 3-4 steps ahead in a competitive space like Real Estate?(43:19) - Where do you see home ownership vs. renting over the next decade?(50:14) - Drew's journey as a podcaster(51:40) - What's something that people don't know about you?(55:13) - What do you want people to know about you?

Ryan "Birdman" Parrott is a US Navy SEAL and joins us on the podcast to give us an inside look at the BUD/S training process, his life prior to joining up, his philanthropy work with Veterans and so much more. Enjoy the Climb!Links:Sons of the FlagAmerican ExtremeBirds Eye View ProjectRyan Birdman Parrott on InstagramSons of the Flag book by Ryan ParrotTopics:(2:13) - Ryan's background and upbringing(10:26) - What resistance did you face from family and friends during this time?(12:08) - What fire was lit inside you in the aftermath of 9/11?(16:40) - Ryan's experience at BUD/S931:37) - What are your thoughts on the nature vs. nurture aspect of being able to become a SEAL?(35:03) - Hell Week(44:51) - Is there something you learned about yourself during that time?(45:44) - Appreciation for the folks who choose to serve(46:57) - The nature of being a SEAL & traumas of the military(58:08) - Why don't we do a good job of taking care of our veterans?(1:02:45) - What can listeners do to help?(1:06:45) - What's something that no one knows about you?(1:10:47) - What do you want people to know about you?

Matt Johnson is a North Texas Business Titan. His has successful ventures across a variety of industries including automotive, entertainment, and firearms. He joins us today to discuss his approach to building businesses through customer service, how he disrupts industries, and diversifying himself as an entrepreneur. We also touch on the politically volatile nature of some of his businesses, firearm education, advising the next generation and much more. Enjoy! Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-johnson-173b7844/ Michael Moore on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/ Bob Wierema on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/ Holiday Autogroup: https://www.holidayautogroup.com/ Courtside Kitchen: https://www.courtsidekitchenfw.com/ Defender Outdoors: https://defenderoutdoors.com/ (1:18) - Why did you want to be a guest on this podcast? (4:21) - Matt's approach to building businesses through customer service (13:20) - How were you able to expand a simple auto sales business into multiple arms of revenue? (15:58) - What other business ventures are you involved in? (21:07) - How do you think about disrupting a business or an industry? (23:16) - What have the last two years been like managing the different verticals you're in given the politcally charged nature of some of them? (30:14) - What work are you doing from an education standpoint in your firearms business? (36:52) - You're based in Texas, how would you approach firearm education in a state where laws are more strict? (40:36) - How do you continue to diversify yourself as an entrepreneur? (44:50) - How do you get employees to open up to you with potentially negative feedback? (47:27) - Matt's career journey (50:47) - What advice would you give the next generation? (57:50) - What are you currently working on? (1:00:05) - What do you want people to know about you?

Lindsay Androski serves as President and CEO of Roivant Social Ventures. Shei joined Roivant Sciences as one of its earliest employees, and built and led the team responsible for the in-licensing or acquisition of more than 30 therapeutic programs, resulting in the launch and incubation of 16 subsidiary biotechs and several successful IPOs. Lindsay has likewise demonstrated a longstanding commitment to public service, including by serving on the MIT Alumni Association Board, as Chair of the MIT Annual Fund Board, on the Board of the Women Lawyers Association of LA, and on the Leadership Council of the LA Center for Law and Justice. Roivant Social Ventures has introduced a new model of corporate philanthropy, which couples industry expertise with donor dollars to make an outsized social impact. We provide seed funding and expert advice to startups attacking systemic barriers to health equity. We also launch programs with partners to increase the number of diverse senior executives in biotech and diverse primary investigators. On this episode, we discuss Roivant, Lindsay's upcoming TEDx Event in Dallas in October, the growing ESG movement, creating companies that push a societal good, mental health, and much more. We also welcome back co-host Bob Wierema after his long hiatus from the show! Enjoy. Links: Get your tickets to TEDxVickeryPlace: https://www.tedxvickeryplace.com/event Roivant Social Ventures: https://roivantsv.org/ Lindsay on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsayandroski/ Michael Moore on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/ Bob Wierema on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/ Topics: 1:47) - Welcoming back Co-host Bob Wierema (5:42) - The Alder Initiative (8:06) - Lindsay's background and career (15:48) - Lindsay's social impact fund (21:11) - Europe's influence on America when it comes to ESG (24:23) - The growing ESG movement (26:59) - Reversing the profit-only focus of Big Pharma (38:07) - How would you build a successful company that pushes societal good as well as make money? (41:38) - What are some of the major hurdles in impact investing? (45:06) - What's your take on the world right now and where we are headed? (48:30) - What's the best path philanthropic people can take to make the most impact? (54:24) - What advice do you have for young people to be successful? (59:04) - Thoughts on Mental Health (1:05:42) - What do you want people to know about you?

Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker joins us on The Climb to discuss her journey from small-town Texas to the youngest mayor of a major city in the country. We talk about equality and democracy, how social media pushes us to the fringes, solutions to bring us back to the middle, building community, and the future of Fort Worth. Enjoy The Climb! Links: Go Time in Fort Worth with Mayor Mattie Parker: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/go-time-in-fort-worth-with-mayor-mattie-parker/id1579328171 Collective Illusions by Todd Rose: https://www.amazon.com/Collective-Illusions-Conformity-Complicity-Decisions/dp/0306925680 The Hardest Job in the World by John Dickerson: https://www.amazon.com/Hardest-Job-World-American-Presidency/dp/1984854518 Topics: (1:58) - Thoughts on Equality and Democracy (6:35) - Deciding it was time to run for mayor (9:48) - Balancing a non-partisan office with a world where everything is politicized (15:33) - How do you think about increasing voter turnout? (19:07) - Solutions to bring people back to the middle (24:31) - How are you thinking about the massive growth of Fort Worth? (31:57) - Mayor Parker's background and childhood (39:06) - What is Fort Worth focused on next? (47:11) - How do we increase the feeling of community in the city? (49:50) - What advice would you give to people interested in getting into politics? (54:47) - What do you want people to know about you?

Rhett Keisler is the Co-Founder of the Texas Beer staple: Revolver Brewing. After being acquired by Molson-Coors in 2016, Rhett founded Watertight Cocktail Co. which prides itself on using 100% real ingredients in their canned cocktails. On this episode, Rhett describes the journey of building Revolver, the story behind the acquisition from Molson-Coors and his incredible new canned cocktails at Watertight. They also discuss the impact of family support in entrepreneurship, becoming business partners with your father and the story behind the Blood & Honey beer. Enjoy The Climb! Check out Watertight here: https://watertightcocktails.com/ (0:59) - Introducing Watertight Canned Cocktail Co. (2:44) - How did you come up with the concept for Watertight? (8:13) - Rhett's decision to leave the corporate world & start Revolver Brewing (16:44) - The father-son business dynamic (21:39) - Building the Revolver Brewing Brand (28:24) - Realizing how big Blood & Honey would be (35:51) - Getting acquired by Miller-Coors (45:16) - What was life like after selling the business? (51:33) - Building Watertight (1:03:01) - The impact Rhett's wife has had and her support throughout (1:08:20) - Where you can find Watertight

Prior to founding Firebrand, John served as Managing Director for Techstars, a leading startup accelerator with over 40 programs around the world. While at Techstars he ran three accelerator programs in Kansas City and invested in 30 startups. John was previously a part of five startups, including one he cofounded. Before Techstars he spent nine years at UnitedHealth Group, managing large scale projects including scaling a business from zero to $1.5 billion per year and 1,500 employees in four years. With a passion for building startup ecosystems, John has been active in the Kansas City startup community since 2012, serving on several advisory boards of community organizations. On this episode, we dive deep into John's background through his career in startups, healthcare and technology. We talk about the DotCom Bubble, his founding of Firebrand, the process of raising two separate funds and what Firebrand brings to the table for their portfolio companies. We end with talking about why it's critical to keep going, but to remember to cut yourself some slack. Enjoy The Climb! Links: Visit our Website: https://www.climb-podcast.com/our-podcast/ Connect with Michael on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/ John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnfein/ Firebrand Ventures: https://www.firebrandvc.com/ Topics: (2:34) - John's background and career (13:11) - Life in the DotCom Bubble (15:41) - The importance of family dinner & living in a time without supervision (19:53) - John's time working in the start up world, healthcare and technology (28:32) - Founding FireBrand & the explosion of Tech in the Midwest and the South (31:27) - John on raising his first two funds (39:24) - How does working in VC shape your view of early stage companies? (44:50) - Why do companies need your help? (48:18) - Advice to listeners: Cut yourself some slack, but keep going. (50:16) - What do you want listeners to know about you?

Matt Homan is the President and GM at Dickie's Arena in Fort Worth, TX. On this episode we deep dive into Matt's career in event management and how it led to his leadership in helping create one of the most beautiful arenas in the country. We also discuss the intricacies of the public/private partnership for the arena, adapting events in light of the pandemic and the Las Vegas shooting, virtual event, the labor market and much more. Enjoy the Climb! Check out Dickies Arena: https://dickiesarena.com/ Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-homan-7386119/ Follow The Climb: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/ Michael on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/ (1:26) - Matt's background and career leading up to Dickie's & Fort Worth (27:51) - Sales is involved in EVERYTHING (32:22) - Is there still a role for Unions in our world going forward? (35:13) - What was the inflection point that led you to make the jump to Dickie's & Fort Worth? (37:24) - What was your first experiences like on the project? (44:03) - The public/private partnership for funding of Dickie's (47:37) - Adapting events in the aftermath of the Vegas shooting and Covid-19 (53:14) - What's the value proposition for Dickie's and Fort Worth? (56:21) - The business of ticket sales (1:00:58) - Do Virtual event experiences threaten the industry at all? (1:03:38) - Thoughts on ability for college athletes being able to monetize themselves (1:07:57) - The labor market (1:14:07) - What keeps you up at night when thinking about the next 5 years? (1:19:05) - What do you want people to know about you?

We've got one of the most special episodes ever recorded on this podcast. I am joined by my brother Philip and 3 of my lifelong friends, Roy, Rick and Ryan Seiders. We reflect back on our childhood growing up in Dripping Springs, our parental influences and trace our family lineages in Texas back to the early 1800's. We also talk about where the boys are today: We break down Philip's career in renewables, Rick's career at AG&M and Roy and Ryan's journey of founding Yeti Coolers. Enjoy the Climb! Follow The Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/ Check out Ørsted Energy: https://us.orsted.com/ Check out Yet: https://www.yeti.com/ (1:38) - Introductions (3:22) - The Seiders and Moore's first meeting (4:56) - The Seiders & Moore Family history in Texas during the 1800's (12:42) - Life growing up in Dripping Springs, TX (22:05) - Parental influences (35:00) - Philips's career in Renewables (38:35) - Commentary on the 20201 Texas Ice Storm (42:24) - What do renewables look like over the next 2 decades? (44:34) - Rick's career at AG&M and his future career plans (52:53) - Roy and Ryan on founding Yeti (1:10:01) - What do you want people to know about you? The Climb is produced by Johnny Peterson & Straight Up Podcasts

Michael's work life has been spent in the electronics industry where he has worked for three component manufacturers (two start-ups and one publicly traded) ranging in size from national to global, one rep firm, and one software company. On this episode we discuss Michael's unique upbringing that led him to riding a motorcycle cross-country to begin his career in Silicon Valley. Michael is described as a visionary and he delves into his technology predictions for the next decade, the Ying & Yang of technology, where the United States will stand on the world stage going forward and much more. Enjoy The Climb! The Climb on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/ Bob Wierema: www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/ Michael Moore: www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/ Michael Knight on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelknight850/ (1:38) - Michael's childhood and early influences (7:38) - The impact of divorce on a child and how it's played into Michael's marriage in adulthood (12:29) - Michael's experience going into college and moving to Silicon Valley (17:38) - “The Renaissance Man” (30:22) - TTI :The Best Little Warehouse in Texas (33:25) - What set Michael apart at TTI (37:55) - The Visionary: Michael's prediction for the next decade (56:43) - Where is TTI headed in their role of the technology of tomorrow? (1:05:00) - How will current supply chain issues affect component cost goals for TTI? (1:09:20) - Michael's thoughts on the United States role going forward (1:12:05) - What do you want people to know about you? The Climb is produced by Johnny Peterson & Straight Up Podcasts

Jim & Ashley Walsh are the Father-Daughter duo behind Kimo Sabe Mezcal. Jim is also the founder of Hawaiian Vintage Chocolate, and Ashley is the founder of Inner State, a Psilocybin-based wellness company. On this episode, we discuss Jim's entrepreneurial parenting style, their move to Hawaii for a "1950's-style" family experience, starting the first chocolate company on the islands and eventually into the success of Kimo Sabe Mezcal and Ashley's journey of founding her own company. Enjoy the Climb! The Climb on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/ Bob Wierema: www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/ Michael Moore: www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/ Kimo Sabe: https://kimosabemezcal.com/ www.Instagram.com/kimosabemezcal (1:46) - Spirituality, Purpose, Drive, Determination & Family (11:56) - Jim & Ashley on parenting (15:56) - “Gen-z” will learn more from technology than from their parents (22:52) - The Foundations of Hawaiian Vintage Chocolate (31:38) - How the business exploded in growth (36:35) - Bridging Chocolate and Mezcal (38:39) - Why is Tequila more well-known than Mezcal? (42:09) - The Father-Daughter and Co-Founder Dynamic (49:10) - Ashley's resolve and self-assurance (53:05) - Why Ashley left the entertainment business (1:01:38) - The future for Kimo Sabe & Inner State (1:06:36) - What do you say to folks who doubt the benefits of Psilocybin or folks who criticize the moves you've made in Mexico? (1:13:35) - What do you want the other to know about you?

Katie Spotz is an endurance athlete, charitable ambassador, author and world-record holder. The list of accomplishments to her name is long, and includes five Ironman triathlons, cycling across the country, a 325-mile river swim, running 100 miles nonstop in under 20 hours, and a solo row across the Atlantic Ocean. On this episode we talk with Katie about her childhood and what drew her to endurance sports, her charity work with clean water in Africa, how she decides her next challenge, faith and more. Enjoy the Climb! Katie's Charity: https://www.h2oforlifeschools.org/katiespotz The Climb on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/ Bob Wierema: www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/ Michael Moore: www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/ (2:06) - Katie's Childhood and background (12:20) - What drew you to individual competition instead of team competition? (16:02) - Would you say that your endeavors are now a team sport with the people you've surrounded yourself with? www.KatieSpotz.com (19:25) - What inspired you to make your charitable mission geared towards clean water? (22:30) - Have you been able to see the faces of the folks your helping with this charity? (26:03) - How do you pick the numbers behind each of your challenges? (29:12) - Is it hard for you to take time to rest? (33:05) - Do you have an end goal for these challenges? (35:56) - Fight or Flight Mentality (40:54) - Is it harder to get a ‘runner's high' as you become such an incredible athlete? Is it easier to tap into it? (43:17) - Do you have an addictive personality? (44:38) - Katie's Faith (54:35) - Do you have advice for parents to get their kids into this world? (57:18) - Is there opportunity for space-based endurance sports? (59:16) - What do you want people to know about you? The Climb is produced by Johnny Peterson & Straight Up Podcasts

Mike Berry is the President of Hillwood, a Perot Company. Mike began his real estate career in North Texas in 1982 and has been involved in real estate development projects for over 38 years. On this episode, Mike tells his story of growing up in Fort Worth, his family of 4 daughters and his journey of becoming friends with Ross Perot Jr. and their journey of the introduction of Alliance, Texas. Mike details what Covid taught us as it pertains to the supply chain, the future of mobility, the crossroads of business & politics and more. Mike tells some incredible stories on this episode and we are truly grateful for him giving us his time. Enjoy the Climb! Connect with hosts Michael Moore and Bob Wierema: The Climb on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/ Bob Wierema: www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/ Michael Moore: www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/ (1:55) - Mike's Childhood and Old Fort Worth (7:36) - Raising 4 daughters and parenting (10:29) - Meeting Ross Perot at Vanderbilt (12:20) - Mike's early career (17:34) - The birth of Alliance, Texas (26:38) - The Cross Roads of Business & Politics for economic development (32:28) - Elon Musk & Private Capital driving growth (35:28) - The future of mobility and innovation “The Silicon Valley of Mobility” - Episode title (41:15) - The impact of the shutdowns exposing inefficiencies in our mobility and supply chains (45:37) - Texas snowstorm exposing power inefficiencies (48:36) - Tom Loose and his project for Texas link (Texas 2036) (50:08) - The Short-term memory of Americans (55:43) - Ross Perot Sr. Stories (1:02:01) - Mike's next 10 years (1:05:20) - What do you want people to know about Mike Berry? The Climb is produced by Straight Up Podcasts

Hugo Del Pozzo is the managing director of Bravo Equity Partners & Co-Founder of Pinea Wine. Hugo has significant cross- border operation experience and has spent his career executing strategic alliances, buyouts and assisting high-growth companies. On this episode, Hugo discusses his upbringing in Mexico City before moving to the United States and the immense cultural shift that impacted his life and business. We talk about his private equity career and his due diligence strategy and mission when acquiring companies. Hugo also talks about the importance of cultural pride, giving back, and finally we go into his passion for wine and how he started Pinea Wine. Enjoy The Climb! Connect with hosts Michael Moore and Bob Wierema: The Climb on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/ Bob Wierema: www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/ Michael Moore: www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/ Connect with Hugo Del Pozzo Hugo on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/hugod1/ Pinea Wine: www.Pinea.Wine (1:38) - Hugo's early life in Mexico and career post college (7:53) - The importance of culture in Mexico and the thought process behind that when moving to the United States (15:03) - Dealing with the devaluation of the Peso in 1994 (16:32) - Challenges coming to a US University from Mexico (18:28) - The process of building trust and a relationship with a business partner (21:11) - The SPAC Phenomenon (23:45) - What key attributes are you looking for when doing due diligence of a deal? (27:40) - Are there any deals that you're most proud of? (33:19) - Cultural Pride & the importance of giving back (36:57) - The American Dream given the state of the news (42:42) - Hugo's passion for Wine: Pinea Visit www.Pinea.wine to learn more! (50:41) - It's not who you know, it's who knows you: What do you want people to know about you? The Climb is produced by Straight Up Podcasts

Karen Gutekanst is the Executive Managing Director of Clune Construction, and has been with the firm for 28 years. Clune is $1.4 Billion General Contractor based in Chicago. On this episode, Karen discusses her upbringing in downtown Chicago as the daughter of two police officers. She tells some phenomenal stories of her father working in the Organized Crime Unit, growing up with a working mom, her career path to Clune and more. We deep dive into the perspectives on policing in the 1960's and how it relates to today's environment, her views on college as a professional who didn't attend college, her philosophy on women in the workforce and some great parenting stories. Enjoy The Climb! Connect with hosts Michael Moore and Bob Wierema: The Climb on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/ Bob Wierema: www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/ Michael Moore: www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/ Connect with Karen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-gutekanst-1499427/ Clune Construction: https://www.clunegc.com/ (1:27) - Karen's upbringing in downtown Chicago (6:05) - The future of historical neighborhoods (9:35) - Growing up with both parents as Chicago PD officers (15:33) - Karen's mother joining the force the year Karen was born (18:33) - Karen's father working in Organized Crime in Chicago (24:51) - Becoming a Grandmother (27:22) - How do you view the changing landscape of the pressure police are now under with everyone having a camera in their hand at all times? (33:48) - Karen's career path leading up to Clune (41:54) - The Characteristics of Leadership & Mike Clune's generosity (47:28) - Karen's personal Philosophy (51:38) - Women in the workforce & Other 51 (55:42) - What do you envision for the future of Other 51? (58:01) - The changing perspective around the need for going to college (1:05:53) - Parenting stories (1:09:28) - It's not about who you know, it's who knows you: What do you want people to know about you? The Climb: Cross Roads & Defining Moments is produced by Straight Up Podcasts

Betsy Price is the 44th Mayor of Fort Worth, TX, the 13th largest city in the United States. She is also the longest-serving Mayor in the history of Fort Worth. On this episode, we discuss Betsy's early life and her journey into the political world. We also talk about the impact of social media on politics, the future of Fort Worth & the DFW Metroplex and much more. Enjoy The Climb! (1:37) - Mayor Price's early life as the youngest of 4 (4:34) - What led you to want to pursue a career in politics? (7:30) - How running a political campaign has changed over the past two decades (9:58) - Voter turnout issues in local elections vs. national tickets (14:29) - The impact of social media on politics (20:40) - Cycling through “scenic” French country-side (22:59) - The maturation of Mayor Price's personal relationships as she decided to run for mayor (26:25) - What else was holding you back from running initially? (28:00) - What drives your passion for service? (28:45) - Are your children involved in politics? (30:17) - The relationship between the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth and the influence of legacy business-families on the direction of Fort Worth (35:12) - What are some of the biggest challenge you've faced as Mayor? (37:58) - Bob's experience on the tension in Chicago (40:46) - The future of Fort Worth and DFW Metroplex through attracting the best talent (43:55) - Balancing the growth of Fort Worth without losing control (46:24) - How Fort Worth was able to reverse a pension financing disaster (51:36) - The issue of retaining TCU Graduate talent in Fort Worth (54:28) - What do you want people to know about Betsy Price? (56:36) - What advice would you give to people who want to be of service in local government? The Climb is produced by Straight Up Podcasts

Enjoy our first series of highlights from The Climb! The first episode in this installment features some of our favorite clips from our conversations with Keaton Turner, Michael Davidson, Katrina Ghazarian and Luke Reed.

Shiek Shah is the Founder and CEO of Akili Inc. On this episode, we discuss Shiek growing up in Kenya, the culture shock of moving to America, learning what to do and not to do in starting a company, enjoying life through travel, mountain climbing and more. We also talk about the importance of culture and how it's the catalyst for keeping great talent. Enjoy The Climb! Connect with hosts Michael Moore and Bob Wierema The Climb on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/ Bob Wierema: www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/ Michael Moore: www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/ Connect with Shiek Shah Akili Inc.: www.akili.com/what-we-do/ Shiek Shah: www.linkedin.com/in/shiek-shah-373735/ (1:48) - Introduction & the meaning behind the name of Akili (3:00) - Growing up in Kenya & the decision to go to America for university and to work (7:52) - Shiek's Childhood and his family dynamic (10:55) - Shiek's first experiences in America (14:48) - What were some of the most eye-opening challenges you faced when moving to America? (17:28) - Continuing Sheik's career journey that brought him to Dallas (20:52) - Shiek meeting his business partner and sparking the idea for Akili (22:27) - Seeing Prince live (23:18) - Akili's focus on culture (28:48) - Why a good culture is the main incentive to keep great talent and maintaining a culture during massive growth (32:04) - Akili's services (34:25) - Learning how to build Akili from working at EDS (36:30) - Shiek and Andrew's dynamic and friendship (39:22) - Mountain Climbing Tales (44:59) - Perseverance (48:31) - Shiek's son & thoughts on parenting (53:03) - Giving autonomy to your employees (55:33) - What do you see for yourself over the next 5 years? (56:55) - Shiek's thoughts on the state of the country given the events of the past year (1:02:47) - What do you want people to know about you?

Connect with Michael Moore and Bob WieremaThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with Katrina GhazarianGameday HR: https://gamedayhr.com/Katrina's Podcast: https://rss.com/podcasts/hrsucks/[00:00:00] Katrina Ghazarian: Look at 2020, how much time did everybody spend defending their labels, defending labels that they don't even firmly believe. Not everybody's all the way Democrat and not everybody's all the way Republican. One of the greatest examples I heard, I think it was Andy Frisella who said it on his podcast, but he talks about 9/11, and he was like, “do you think they cared if it was Republicans or Democrats, when they flew those planes into the World Trade Center? No, they were going after Americans”. No one else around the world cares about these labels that we here in the United States want to defend all the time. And so, that really sticks with me how people are so quick to carry these labels with them and they'll go to the ground dying, defending these labels, they'll end family relationships and friendships trying to defend these labels that aren't real, they're all lies. They're not real things, so I want to create content that really helps people navigate through that identity and showing them we're very complicated creatures, you know?We're complex. And even then, who we are now, we're not the same person in a year from now, we evolve. We change; who I was last year, pre-pandemic, I'm a completely different person now. Michael Moore: Today on The Climb, Bob and I are joined by Katrina Ghazarian, and you don't have to go too much further than her landing page on LinkedIn to understand that she does shit that matters. She is voted the funniest in fifth grade, Forbes' top social media influencer of 2020, a Gen Next member, CEO of Game Day HR, and so much more. Katrina, we're excited to have you today and welcome. Katrina Ghazarian: Thanks. [00:02:00] Gosh, I am such a bad ass. Bob Wierema: I was going to say, you sound pretty important.Katrina Ghazarian: You're not supposed to read the voted funniest in fifth grade part as my bio – that's just a joke that I have on LinkedIn!Michael Moore: Maybe let's start there. Your sense of humor developed early. Why were you so funny in fifth grade? Katrina Ghazarian: Well, chubby people have to be funny. You can't be chubby and lame, it's against the law. So, I learned at a very young age, if I was little huskier than the rest of the kids, I was going to have to at least make people laugh so they didn't call me fat girl names and it totally worked. Michael Moore: You know, I might've had a little experience in that too. Katrina Ghazarian: Were you chubby? Were you a chubby kid? Michael Moore: I'm still chubby, but I was funny, and I had a pretty good right hook too. So, if I couldn't make them laugh, then I got tired of it, it was go time.Katrina Ghazarian: Oh yeah, same here. I was definitely beating up like the boys. Michael Moore: Okay. So funny in fifth grade, give us the background, give us the “you”. Katrina Ghazarian: Why would fifth grade even have these superlatives? We're way too young to have something like that. But for some reason, our trendy – I don't know who she was – teacher decided to put these titles in there and there were others; ‘friendliest' and ‘best dressed', which sure as hell wasn't me. Most athletic, which wasn't really me either. And so, I weighed all the options and I thought ‘funniest' was the one I could actually go for.And so, I started lobbying all the kids to vote for me. And it worked. I ended up winning and they put a picture of me in the yearbook wearing a Santa hat, and I'm going like this  [00:04:00] in the picture, it's very flattering. So, I think I always enjoyed making people laugh. It was something that was very special to me.There were tons of other things that I did in class or outside of class to be very disruptive and get in trouble, but at the end of the day people were laughing at me and that's all I really cared for. You struggle with your identity a lot when you're a young adult and you're in your twenties, and you have all of these influences telling you who you're supposed to be and how you're supposed to act. I really entered the corporate world very quickly. I was 18. I got a job at Washington Mutual. So, I was in retail banking at a pretty young age, and I would say all the things that were on my mind and coming out of my mouth, and management would tell me, “you're can't say those things”.Bob Wierema: You can't talk like that.Katrina Ghazarian: I was like very perverted; someone said “balls” and I'd giggle. I was that person – the words like ‘percolate', how do you not laugh at that word? Or ‘moist', come on, come on. So, I think I started to go into a box at that point of trying to be what everyone said I was supposed to be. And so, I tried to be more proper and professional. And then I was just depressed trying to be something that I wasn't; I always felt ashamed because I would say something that I felt was like funny or was even the truth.And so, I ended up gaining a ton of weight because I was so depressed about how I was [00:06:00] supposed to act. I was out of school at that point, so I was 18 or 19 years old. I go to the doctor and I had been there a couple of months before and he was like, “do you know how much you weighed in the last time you were here?”And I said, “yeah, like 145lbs”, and he said, “do you know how much you weigh now?” And I'm like, “150lbs, 155lbs, and he was like, “you weigh 170lbs”. So, I had put on 25 pounds in a very short period of time and that was very unnatural for me. I worked out, I went to the gym throughout high school… And so I ended up getting back on track, and then it started to identify, why am I so unhappy?Why do I just want to lay around and eat? And it really started to come out that people were just telling me who I was supposed to be and I ultimately was not happy being that person. It also wasn't really getting me anywhere. And so, I was supposed to get a promotion and I didn't. And so, I realized, why am I being everything you're telling me to be and it's not really getting me anywhere? And that was the start of the rebellion I would say. I was in banking for quite some time. The financial crisis hit in 2008, and so half of the branches where I was working were closed down. I ended up doing an internship for the Detroit Pistons and couldn't find a job for 10 months, which is an extremely long period of time when you've been working since you were 14. And so, I started to find odd and end jobs here and there. Ultimately, I landed a recruiting job, and then I was also coaching high school girls' basketball. I think that really [00:08:00] activated a huge part of me that had been pushed down or hidden up until that point, that teaching side of me, the part where you have to get this group of people – and that in my case was teenage girls – to buy into my philosophy. And that was extremely difficult coming in as a new coach, and this was a very affluent private school. There were definitely some challenges on getting them to buy in. The first season that I was there they struggled to get people to try out, and so it's essentially, you kept everybody that tried out on the team. But the second season I had to make cuts, and we ended up winning the league championship that year. So, I knew I was onto something. I knew I had turned a part of me on that was getting people to listen and getting people to buy in. I think one of those things was that my insides were very similar to how I was externalizing things. And so, I wasn't the type of person that was going to tell you what to do and not do it myself. And I believe that's how I earned the respect of those teenage girls at that time.When they were running, I was running with them. It was actually my way of cheating – it was my way of staying in shape without having to work out later. And so, when they were playing and they were running, I would run with them. I was their teammate during practice, when we were conditioning, but then, I obviously would step off the court and coach them from there. But my point was, they saw two different sides of me. They saw this authoritarian side, but they also saw this human side where I am an example to you and I wouldn't tell you to do it if I wasn't going to do it myself. At some point, I had gotten a position as a recruiter, a third-party recruiter, and I used those same skills of matching talent to companies; what kind [00:10:00] of person was going to succeed in this type of company? What characteristics are they going to have? What philosophies and core values are they going to embody? And so, one of my clients ended up poking me. They really loved what I had done for them as a third party, they didn't want to pay that markup anymore. I sure as heck didn't want my company to get all that markup either. And so, they made me an offer. I went to go work for them and they had a whole portfolio of businesses. And so, I was simultaneously doing HR and recruiting for the entire portfolio, which covered about 400 employees.My daughter was two years old at the time and I was a single mom and I really started to go into an unhappy place again. My mom was a workaholic – still is today, almost 60 years old –I didn't really spend any time with her as a child. There really wasn't nurturing. She was not going to any of my games. She wasn't playing games with me on the weekends. There was no intimacy in our relationship. And so, I think working all those hours and only having time to pick up my daughter, take her home, feed her, bathe her, and put her to bed – something was missing. I was not happy in that situation. And so, I had asked my employer, “can I leave earlier and then put her to sleep? And then I can jump back on after that?” She was going to sleep at eight o'clock. And they told me no, it wasn't something that they were open to.And so, I gave a 30 day resignation without having any backup plans. I just decided I was going to go independent. At that point, I learned enough about HR and recruiting that I could probably pick up a handful of clients and just do it on the side. So, about a week into, or a week left of my resignation, I [00:12:00] pitched them my services, and I let them know “you could still keep me, technically, but it's going to be as a contractor and I'm not coming to the office.” And they, they took it. So, I actually walked out on my last day of work, making 30% more than my salary was. But this wasn't an ‘it just happened' situation, I was delivering. I delivered all the time. I was employed with them from – or even when I was the third party, I provided great work. I worked hard for them. I treated their companies like they were my companies. And so, they realized that it wasn't worth losing me over. And that's really the start of Gameday HR from there. That was 2016. Bob Wierema: All right. I got to go way back here. So, I want to go back to the identity piece because you talked about that, and I think that's something that would be interesting to understand – and how you worked through that, because we've had this conversation on this podcast before with others about the world we're living in. And then you were talking about even coaching these high school girls, and it's a time where a lot of people are trying to find out who they are, so talk a little bit about how you worked through that. And then also if it was an influence on you at the time, or how you maybe see that influence of social media on that identity as well.Katrina Ghazarian: I feel like one of the hardest things in life for young women is to find what their identity is. I think that a lot of young girls and women are focused on being somebody else. And at some point – you're not ever going to be them. The maturation of me going through it – it's not linear,; you get there and then you get pulled back and you go to the side [00:14:00] and then you get there again. And I think that's the misconception about self-development altogether. “Oh, I've overcome this forever and I'm never going to have this problem again”, that's just not reality. These external pieces are constantly trying to penetrate everything that you've learned.And so, for girls, I felt like they were always so focused on being something that they weren't. If they liked Harry Potter, they didn't want to talk about it. They didn't want to admit it. If they didn't like boys, if they didn't want to party, if they didn't like certain kinds of people, they didn't like fashion… I just saw so many of them doing things that I knew was not them. That just wasn't them. And it was doing things to fit in. Mike, you and I are parents of daughters, it goes all the way back to when girls are being pressured to have sex. Even though they don't want to, but they do it because they're being pressured, and they want to appear a certain way.And so, one of my missions in life is to have those conversations and how do I influence girls and young women to be who they are and to be intentional about their life decisions? It is hard to be a single parent, but you have Kylie Jenner and the Kardashians who are single moms and it's their little doll. Why aren't they showing all the other stuff? Why aren't they showing the part where your daughter has to go with their dad and you're alone? And you don't know [00:16:00] what is going on with them over there?They don't show that part. They don't show the time where you have to decide to be in this relationship that you don't want to be in, or not see your child every day. They don't talk about those things. And so, what happens is it's like a domino effect. So, then girls are not careful about protecting themselves when they are having these relations with men or boys, and then, because they think, “well, if I get pregnant, it's okay. I can handle it”. No bitch. You can't, it's fucking hard – and don't get me wrong. I was 25. I wasn't that young, but still, had I had a choice to wait and find my life partner and have a child, I definitely would have done that. And so, going back to identity it's because you're confused.You have all these people telling you this is how women are supposed to be; sexy, and fragile, and quiet, and delicate, and love heels. Why? Why would I want my feet to be uncomfortable? Have you seen women's feet after? I wear heels all the time. I have beautiful feet without like calluses and bunions and stuff. And I don't know, maybe my legs don't appear to be that long when I go out. Who likes wearing them? So it's just things like that. Bob Wierema: Careful. Michael might give you an answer that might be a little weird there. Michael Moore: We'll come back to that in a minute. Katrina Ghazarian: So identity for me is being intentional with your decisions, having a decision-making filter – a system of does this align with who I want to be and who I am today. And I don't think that we do that enough. We're consumers and we buy shit, that we don't need – that we don't even like. Do you know how [00:18:00] much a pair of sweatpants are right now? Like $65. Michael Moore: For sweatpants? Good Lord.Katrina Ghazarian: For sweatpants. You go on Instagram and you're just bombarded with sponsored ads of $6,500 sweatsuits. I literally posted a PSA on Instagram. I'm like, “can you all please stop buying sweatsuits so we can bring the price down back to $7 where they were before?” But this is what it is. This is trend, it's a trend. And so now it's trendy to pay $100 for a hoodie and some sweatpants that costs $3 to me. But we don't think about those things. We don't actually look at things and say, “do I actually like that Louis Vuitton?” Their shit is ugly, okay. Their monogram is all over. Do people actually like the LV everywhere? I just don't understand things like that. And I get that there are some people who do, but let's face it. It's not a beautiful bag. It has letters all over it.I don't really see the point, but everybody's getting it. The Gucci belts – well, I would get it maybe because [inaudible]. But otherwise, why would a Chelsea Kramer get a belt with two Gs on it? Two big ones too, that everyone has, by the way, everyone has it.So, we were just so unintentional, we were so disconnected with who we are and I believe that identity, especially moving forward, I think in the pandemic people really had to sit with themselves, and face [00:20:00] themselves; face their marriages, face their children, who they [inaudible], who they are as parents, who they are as employees and business owners…The hope is that people come out of this with a better understanding of what is important to them in life. Michael Moore: That sort of brand mania, I think that just ties back to the peer pressure piece that you talked about and that every time you turn around – whether it's Instagram, the news, anything – you're just bombarded with this information.And then it catches on and this herd mentality of “I've got to have that because if I don't then I'm different”. That's what you're talking about, right? Katrina Ghazarian: Yeah. Haters will say I can't afford it. And that's why I say those things. I assure you that is not the case. I can afford it. I've paid thousands of dollars for a purse that I liked that I picked what color the material with the inside was going to look like, how big it was going to be. I do pay for a luxury purse, but it's a purse I was very intentional with building myself essentially and having a high-end designer make it.So, it's not that I can't afford it. I'm not saying that I can't afford it. But what I'm saying is that if you don't like it, why are you trying to fit in? Why are we trying so hard to be like everybody else? You'll never be happy. I just feel like you'll never truly be happy trying to emulate everybody else's life. Michael Moore: Yeah. I think if you go back to the fifth-grade comment, one thing that I've noticed is funny people are smart. You can't be funny if you're not smart, you've got to know where the punchline comes, how to read the room, when to deliver it, when enough is enough and you need to move [00:22:00] on.So, just looking at your approach to what you post, your conversational style, you've been influenced by that. Talk about how that whole maturation from fifth grade through struggles in high school – probably one of the hardest things. Cause I've done it too. Starting with five-year-old girls and trying to teach them how to play soccer all the way up to the level of them deciding if they're going to go to select or not, or go play for high school or whatever; by far the hardest thing I've ever done, but probably one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.How has that played into the core values of today and your mission with Gameday HR and what you're trying to do? Katrina Ghazarian: When people think I'm funny, I'm actually just telling the truth in most cases. I'm not talking, I'm not telling jokes like “two guys walk into a bar”. That's not the part of me that's funny. I think people find me funny because I just say things that as they're happening. Or I call things out as they're happening, or I turn the mirror on people – that was the whole basis of LinkedIn.My headline is that everybody's headline was like conscious leader and investor and advisor and Forbes and this and that, and I'm like, why do I still not know what you do? I'm reading it, but I still don't know what you do. What do you do? That's what LinkedIn is actually for. I saw some that's like, “good dude”. First of all, good people wouldn't put that. I think for me, it was making fun of everybody else, because everybody was so busy and putting every single accolade that they've ever had there. [00:24:00] And so I thought, I was voted funniest in fifth grade. I just want to see if that matters. I started putting that and then I had CEO of a company with employees. Because you see all these people diluting CEO and it's like, you're self-employed, there's a difference. CEO is when you have employees that have to get up in the morning to do work.So, it was more just making fun of people and putting the mirror back on them. I'm sure it made people feel uncomfortable reading it, because they were probably looking at their own things and thinking, “wow, she's making fun of me”. But to me it was just not taking myself seriously. When you talk to me – and you have talked to me in person, well not in person but on other calls Mike, the way I type on LinkedIn is the same way I talk in person even to the slang. Instead of ‘this', sometimes I say ‘dis'; instead of ‘that', sometimes I say ‘dat'.And so, I literally type the way I talk. So, people have like this full experience of my voice and the way I say things in these professional posts. And so, for me, it was really being myself. I can tell when people are having someone else curate their content, because it all sounds the same. It's the same format. It's “drop a heart if you agree”, and it's like a quote card. “If you work, you will get paid”, and then there's 7,000 likes. That is profound. And so, for me, I don't want to do that. That's not who I am.[00:26:00] I'm not a blanket generalist. I'm very specific with each person. When I have a conversation, I have a genuine curiosity. And so, it was important for me in my voice that it came out that way, because that's who I am as a person. Bob Wierema: I'm laughing because I'm remembering. So, I have a coach that I worked with and he was actually on the podcast.He's always like, “you just, you gotta be who you are”. And that was a big thing for me. So actually, we have something in common. So, when I was in my mid-twenties, I went through a time. So, I'm 195 pounds. I was a hefty 256 I was going through a pretty interesting time, but it was all around this identity thing.And he's like, “ I'm 36 years old and you know what? I like to wear my hat backwards”. I have a Carhartt hat I like to wear all the time, and I get on these calls and he's like, “I swear a lot. It's just who I am”. And it's like, “oh, people feel that there's genuineness to that. And just be that. You get in with your clients, you're like, “okay, I gotta make sure I'm aware of this”. And he's like, “they'll love you for who you are if they really want to work with you”. And that really stuck with me. I think it's really important because it helps you to love your work more too.Katrina Ghazarian: You enjoy it more. I'm wearing a Nike jacket. Sometimes I'll get dressed up if, if I feel like it, but sometimes I won't, this is just who I am. I always joke around because for my headshot I got my makeup done and my hair was all nice. And so, I always feel bad when people use my headshot for promo, because then they'll come on this video and I feel like they got swindled. I don't really look like that in person everybody, that's just a picture. So even that makes me feel a little uncomfortable because I don't want people to think that I'm something that I'm not. That's why Instagram is kind [00:28:00] of hard for me.I've found my way now on Instagram with cutting up video. And that's basically these types of conversations and shorter clips, but when I was trying to do it and it's the filtered pictures and trying to stage my life. That just wasn't me. I hated it. I did not feel comfortable.It just wasn't me and I would cringe when I would go back and look at it and I would delete it, I would start taking all these things off. And so, it took me some time to figure out what I was going to post and what was going to make me comfortable. Essentially it was these types of conversations because this is when I feel most myself, when we're having these unstructured off the cuff conversations. This is when you get real Katrina. You have great hair by the way. Michael Moore: Thank you. Bob Wierema: Okay, listen, this is my COVID hair. If you look here, I got a little mullet going in the back, right now.Katrina Ghazarian: I'm curious. I'm curious to how the growth phase was probably wretched to get to a point where it looked really good.Bob Wierema: No, I'm there right now. I want to get to the point where I don't have to put product on, but If I quit product right now, it's out like this. Michael Moore: He'd have your helmet Bob Wierema: So now I want it down here. I keep on telling my fiancé I want to look like Bradley Cooper in that movie that he was in with – what's her name? Lady Gaga. Michael Moore: A Star is Born.Bob Wierema: I'm like, “that's what I'm going for”. And she's like, “all right, if you can make that work, he's not a bad looking man. Katrina Ghazarian: Not at all. You just gotta lower your tenor a little bit. He was real deep in that movie.Michael Moore: Smoking a pack of cigarettes in the morning and in the afternoon. Bob Wierema: That'll be a good one to get started. I'm keeping it around. Hopefully. I was going to ask, you mentioned before we jumped on – you'd love to talk about your core values and beliefs. I would love to hear about some of that and how that guides you and even how you read whether it's life or even in your work too.Katrina Ghazarian: It's very similar. I think people think  you have these set of values for work, and then another set for family, and another set for yourself. It's all the same. All the values are the same for me across the board, the same values for my company are the same values for me in my life.The first one's family. And that is also for my company. If somebody has a sick family member or something with their kids, go take care of your family. Do that first. And then we can address work things. Community is a big one. What are we giving back to the community? What are we doing? How are we contributing? Another one is growth. Are we learning something every day? Are we pushing our boundaries to grow? Are we making ourselves feel uncomfortable from time to time? Honesty – really important – that I think is probably the biggest one across the board. And even in our branding, it's telling the truth, having the real conversations, talking about the hard things. Love is really important for us. So, we know if we're giving opinions or we have to make decisions, it's usually “what would a loving person do?” It all goes hand in hand. And the truth is love, but also where is this coming from? Are you going to say, “oh, your jacket is stupid”? No, because that's not really from a place of love.Now, if somebody asks you, “do you like my jacket?” Then you can give your opinion of, “I don't know, I wouldn't wear it”. [00:32:00] So, what do I have so far? I have honesty, community, growth, love, family, and joy. So, if you're not happy, you have to do something about it. If you're not finding joy in what you're doing and who you're talking to, who you are, we need to make some changes.Michael Moore: When we first got introduced through Gen Next and then got on a call and got to know each other a little bit, I think it's very intentional the way that you go about doing things. And that's what stood out to me is that you're right with the garbage and the self-promotion and the making yourself look different than you really are on these mediums that we now communicate our value proposition or whatever, yours just flipped it all upside down. I was like, this is so raw and intentional and direct. Even though it's got a phone tagline, the mission and the purpose isn't funny. It's very intentional. And so, I can tell that you spend a lot of time – and you've been molded by life experiences – to come up with these six or seven core values that they really seem to define your purpose.Katrina Ghazarian: Absolutely. With our team, our internal staff, there's this misconception that HR can't be friends with anybody. It's an isolated siloed department. I personally just would not be happy in a position like that. I am so curious about everything and everyone that, if you told me I wasn't allowed to ask you what you were up to this weekend or how your kids were, or what your favorite sports team is, or what do you think about a certain political issue or social issue, I just wouldn't be happy. I would be exceptionally stifled in an environment like [00:34:00] that. And so, when people found out I going into HR, they were like, “why?” Because my personality does not fit this mold of HR that the industry has created over the last couple of decades.And at first, I felt intimidated. Am I making a mistake? But then I saw an opportunity. And that was even my journey through Gen Next. I am a little different than a lot of the members in Gen Next. And so, at first you feel discouraged and then you have this epiphany of there is opportunity here to influence people, to give them a different perspective. So, you lean in, you can't run away and that's my filter system. If it scares me, I'm going in, and for HR, for me, for my own team, we have these sessions that sometimes involve tears. Last week I gave them some homework. Sometimes it's just me regurgitating what I read, and I feel like, “you know what, my team could benefit from this”. And so, I, for 2021, committed to the team that would help them if they were committed to reach certain 2021 goals, whether it was health, family, financially, professionally, community, whatever that looks like. I had them write out these statements of things that they wanted or needed – that they wanted to have, or that they feel they needed to have. And so, some examples will be to make more money, or buy a house, or lose weight, or get pregnant, whatever that looks like. And then I have them switch it to ‘I am' statements. And so, you switch “I want to buy a house”. You switched it to, “I am a homeowner”. And then you create this filter of decision-making of what would a homeowner do in this situation? Or if you know it's [00:36:00] health and what would a healthy person do?And so, I had them do this exercise we come to our staff meetings Thursday mornings and they read these things off to me. And of course, I'm so present that I'm peeling away certain things and kind of navigating through it with them. And I'm pretty sure everybody cried. And I think even myself, I feel their pain. One of them was “I want to be financially independent”, from her husband. And I asked her, “where does that come from? What does that mean? How do you define that?” And it's like, “well, my mom always told me that I have to have my own money,” and it was because her dad left her mom with nothing, essentially.So, she was doing these like little things, like hiding money from her husband. Not really telling him how much she was making, and he found out because they had to apply for a home equity loan, or home improvement loan. It was just like, “I understand why you did that”.And I'm like, “girl, does that seem like a man who's going to leave you with nothing? He wasn't even phased by this. He loves you so much that he was like, ‘whatever makes you comfortable, you do it'. He didn't even like pause at the fact you've been lying to him all this time. Does that sound like a man that's going to leave you with nothing? Why make him pay a price for a crime he hasn't committed”. And so, we did this mirror shadow work of, “he's not your dad, your mom feels this way because she has this fear that she went through it and she thinks you're going to go through it”.We did this whole thing in front of the entire team. Everybody's naked and vulnerable, doing this together, but the text [00:38:00] messages that I got afterward, in the group, it made it all worth it. It made it worth it because we're all that much closer to one another. And now we have this like radical transparency to where maybe another team member is going to feel comfortable going to that team member, having these conversations, they don't feel alone anymore . So, for me when does HR do something like that in any other organization?It doesn't happen. But I'll tell you this, my entire team ride or die, they would go to the ground with me if they had to. And I would do for them also, that's more important. I would do it for them. And so that's the kind of organization or world of workplaces I really want to see.Bob Wierema: Thinking about that moment when you're having those type of conversations, how does that work with new people that are coming into the organization and sit in that table? Are they like, “what the fuck is going on here?” How do you prep them for that? Or do you not?Katrina Ghazarian: You go through the interviewing process; you're asking certain questions. The thing about core values is they're not just things you put on the wall in a pretty canvas, right? You actually have to integrate them into your organization. Number one, they have to be a part of your recruiting process. So, you're questioning each candidate. You have to have questions that find out do they have, or prioritize, this core value or not? Then the next step is you have to measure them against core values. So, a part of the performance review should be, how much are they displaying these core values? How often are they living these?And so, you can set up something very basic to where, always, sometimes, never. I think I got that from Traction, that Traction book. And it's very simple. If your core value is accountability, which is taking ownership of everything [00:40:00] you do, does Bob always do that? Does he sometimes do it or does he never take accountability? And then once you have this data, now you have to make some decisions. If this is a never thing, then we're going to have a problem. You're not going to be happy, I can almost guess that you're not happy with the organization if you get never.That's when we have to have conversations of, "Bob, it's time for you to move on, bro. Let's go find you another job where you don't have to take accountability”. The thing about core values is there's so many people that talk about how important it is to have them, but they don't really tell you how to use them, how to build them out, how to integrate them, how to measure against them, and how to really live them day to day.If you can't recite the core values of your organization by heart, they're not strong enough. Michael Moore: So looking in at the world in today's lens and a female CEO, a thought leader having to have worked your ass off to get to where you are and there's probably – whether it's political, external, or corporate – some inclusion initiatives that should have just been natural a long time ago, but now there is uber focus on chief people officer and, making the workplace more holistic. How do you see that? Is it real? Is it working? What do we need to do? Katrina Ghazarian: So, inclusion, definitely buzzword. Diversity and inclusion, it's funny, I see these positions and it's ‘director of diversity inclusion'. I'm like, “what do they do all day?What does that mean?” There's no certification for it. I don't know what that means exactly, except maybe a marketing employee. I'm not sure, but inclusion. It's not just racial [00:42:00] and gender. It's actually socioeconomic as well. And it's how do you have these frequent touch points with everybody from top to bottom in your organization?And so, your initiatives have to benefit every single person. And so, I'm starting to see some tools that are launching to help with this. There's a platform called June – J-O-O N. So organizations have gym membership reimbursements, I don't know, whatever perks a company could have. What they do is they have companies just set up a budget, a dollar amount a month per employee, and the employee can pick whatever they want. So, it could be Peloton app. It could be vitamins, it could be childcare, but they get reimbursed for whatever they want, because what they recognized was not everybody goes to the gym and so not everyone is able to access it.And it could be that they can't go to the gym because they don't have childcare. They don't have someone to watch the kids or all of these different external sources that are keeping you from doing the things that you want to do. And so, they figured out a way to make sure that every employee has access to this benefit.So those are tools that I feel are a lot more intentional in diversity and inclusion. These tools are a platform to where you remove any type of unconscious biases, and everybody has access to it and everybody could use it. So that's a big one that I really promoted. I would say I should go set up like a referral partner.So something like that, I think in recruiting practices, it's important to make sure [00:44:00] you are keeping data of how many applicants are coming through, what is the demographic of all of these applicants that are coming through, and making sure you have a healthy amount of those people moving on in to the interview process and the different scopes, people of color, gender, whatever that looks like. And some of that you won't even know until they get into an in-person interview. Sometimes you can't tell by names where they're coming from. So, one of the things that we do as an organization is, we do equal pay analysis. And so, we go into organizations, we create these pay ranges for all of the positions that they have and the various senior levels that those positions may have. Then we audit the entire roster, and we start plotting dots of where everybody is landing. And so, if we see there's a discrepancy, so if one engineer is getting paid, $80,000 a year and another is getting paid $65,000 a year, we're going to find out why is there a discrepancy here?And to be fair with most organizations, the discrepancy is unintentional. They're not going and saying, “hey, you're a woman, so I'm going to pay you less”. What's happening is when you ask them why there's a discrepancy, they'll say, “this is what she asked for”. And so, organizations number one have to take a more proactive approach of understanding what the pay range for this position is, regardless of what they're going to be comfortable being paid or not. This is what the functions of the position is or are, and this is what the pay range is.And so, if she's asking for less, but the minimum for this position is more, you need to give her that offer. Then just stay out of situations like that. So, in most [00:46:00] cases it's unintentional, but what I would like to see is all of these organizations that use their voice and their platform to speak out against these inequities.Why are they not doing these analyses in house? I think that that's a good place to start is are we even an equal pay employer? Start from there and then start moving on to the next project. So, the next milestone is being a more inclusive and diverse organization, but they're not really doing the bare minimum at this point. Bob Wierema: I was going to say, what would you guess with some of those organizations? I guess it would be completely out of line. Katrina Ghazarian: Yes. Not only from within the same position, but even from entry-level to C suite. The wealth gap is going to be tremendous. And so all of this should be banded. Ideally you want all of these salaries to be banded by a certain range width.And so, for example, from an entry-level to mid-level, maybe that looks like a 30% pay range, and it should be 30%, 30%, 30% more to the next 30% more, but what's happening is we'll see 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%, and then a C-suite is 250% more. And so that's why we're the wealth. That's where the wealth gap really starts to take-off. Because now you have someone making 250% more than the person that reports to them. And so then when you look at it as, “so now this person is going to leave the organization” do you think somebody who's getting paid 250% less than them is going to be prepared to take over that role?Probably not. And so, they go and start recruiting from outside to bring people in. So now we don't have any upward movement in the organization. Michael Moore: So, for the highly compensated though, because that's what [00:48:00] they've earned or gotten used to, or they're just part of that norm that's been created over generations, they're not going to take a step back. So, do you have more levels in between junior into that, to work them up to that level? Or are you saying rework the entire compensation strategy inside the organization?Katrina Ghazarian: Well, you can take two approaches with it. I think that number one, it depends on what's the stock package going to look like?So, I do think that C-suites are highly compensated. Individuals should have probably a lot more stock option or shares. And so, I feel like they should be making a lot of their money through that because what they're doing is highly dependent on how the entire company performs. So, I do think a lot, or most of, their page should come from that, which we do see in some organizations. Their salaries, $300,000, but their stock options are getting them over a million dollars or their distribution. So, I do think that part is okay, but I do want to see a reset in the wealth distribution. And that could even mean fine, if you want to keep this person at $300,000, that's fine, but let's bring everybody up then too. Why not pay some $70,000 then for someone that's entry level, but they have experience and they're performing really well? Why not get them there? So, I'm not saying that we have to cut salary from the top, but what I'm saying is we can distribute more throughout the rest of the rings and the company can sacrifice a little more capital or a little more margin to make that happen and positive that in the long run, it's going to be a lot more effective for them and a lot more efficient because when you look at the data of disengagement, [00:50:00] 59% of employees are disengaged globally.And so, if, and that could be for a multitude of reasons, it could be that they're not happy at the company, or it could be they're having financial issues personally and they're distracted, or they have to take on a side hustle because they're not making enough money. Well, imagine if we can eliminate and squash some of that stress for them is we're going to now pay them a livable wage, a wage that they can feel comfortable in.And now we increase engagement say by 20% on a $5 million company, you've now increased your revenue by 20% just by paying them a little bit more. Michael Moore: Focusing in on your day-to-day job with Gameday HR, is that part of the consulting that you're bringing to your clients?Tell us about your value proposition, how you get in there and help. How does this work? Katrina Ghazarian: Each organization's a little different. It really depends on where they are in terms of evolution and life cycle of the company. If they're a startup or just hitting the ground running, getting the infrastructure built out, this is the core values, making sure they have core values, putting that into a recruiting system, documenting all of that, helping them recruit for key management positions. And then when it gets to a certain point, it could be six months or a year in, we're going to start collecting data.We're going to do climate surveys. We're going to see how happy is everybody? What do they like? What do they don't like, where can we help elevate certain areas of the organization? So, we're just consistently building a system where we know what's going on. We're not surprised by anything. We're not trying to guess like what employees want.We actually have the data to show that this is what they need, and we're going to build initiatives around that. Bigger more established organizations. We're definitely focusing more on equal pay and we're focusing on strategy. So [00:52:00] in a lot of cases, our clients have an HR professional and they just don't have enough experience. They know how to do handbooks and paperwork and all of that stuff, but they don't really understand numbers and data. And so that's where we come in. We're going to really come and elevate the entire department. And we're going to help them collect the data that they need in order to build initiatives around that.LinkedIn says you should have a virtual happy hour and you should send them all kinds of stuff. I don't know about you guys, but I do not want to be on Zoom any more than I am already. And so as much as I like my coworkers or the staff members and things like that, I am drained from sitting in this chair and looking in that camera all day long.And so, if you ask them first if they actually want to do this, you'd probably find out they don't really care to do it. And maybe it's better that you send them a door dash so they can have dinner with their family instead. And so that's where we're really positioning ourselves is what does the data say? How do we find the data? What does it say? And how do we build initiatives that are more intentional with this organization and increase employee engagement. That's really the metric we're looking at is how do we increase employee engagement? And we have to benchmark it first. So, we do the climate survey. We benchmark the data. We find out where the areas of weaknesses are. We present the data to the entire organization. It's at town hall. We said, “these are the results of the climate survey. We heard you, you have spoken. And now we want to take action on it”. And even some little things like that of just addressing that you have these areas that you need improvement increases engagement immediately.Because now there's hope, now they're like, “you know what? I think I'm going to stick it [00:54:00] out even more because now I have people paying attention to what I'm doing”. And now we have an opportunity to maybe turn this around. So, it's just really what we do. We're high level. We go in, we find the data, we mine it, and we put initiatives around it. And at some point, we hope the HR team can level up. And we don't want our clients to be dependent on us forever. At some point we would like to come off of the client, and then maybe I've been asked to be on the advisory board moving forward. So, they pay me whatever amount to go to quarterly meetings or something like that, and it's great. I love what I do because I get to see all these different ideas, different companies, different CEOs and CFOs and COOs. It's a great place to be. I learned from them. I won't admit it, but I learn from them.Bob Wierema: That's great. What's next for your firm as you look to move forward? Katrina Ghazarian: So, I'm pretty set that I'm going to step down as CEO in 2022. The end of 2022. So at that point, we'll probably see, do we want to sell, do we want to replace me? And I move over as chairman? Or what it is that the team wants to do.So, in that time we are filming a whole catalog of courses. So, everything that I'm telling you that we do for organizations is now going to be in course form to where an HR professional can take the course and know exactly what we do step-by-step with their own organization. So, we saw that this was going to be a better way to move the needle. Instead of asking clients, “let us do all this for you”, I figured the bigger opportunity is how do we teach already established HR departments how to do it? And so they're, [00:56:00] gonna have access to the course. We have a closed Facebook group right now; it's called HR MVPs. And so, HR professionals are in it and we're constantly posting articles, job opportunities, any issues, when HR has a problem with an employee that isn't so black and white in terms of what the solution is. Who do they go to? You're not going to go to the CEO, that person's too emotionally involved. They don't really know what to do. You have to find other HR professionals who have had similar experiences. So, we wanted to create this community where people can say, “this is what we did. We didn't get sued or we didn't get fined, or we did, so don't do it this way”.And so just creating this community of HR professionals who want to do better, they want to create happier organizations. So, courses are coming up. I believe our first one is already launching in February. I already filmed it and it's in post-production. So, I'm taking a hiatus from the podcast actually in February. So, I'm gonna wrap season one and I'm really going to focus March, April, May on building out these courses. And so those will go to market June, July. And then from there, we have our culture quiz that we launched. It's a 12-question quiz that organizations can fill out and we have the formula in there and it spits out their grade. What their culture grade is. And then it gets put into a funnel of emails to where we're trying to close them on an audit, help them out with their culture.Michael Moore: Is that culture grade derived from the core values that you help them establish on the front end? Or how does the algorithm work? Just spit out the score. Katrina Ghazarian: The first question is do all of your employees know your core values? One of my core values is freedom. And so being a CEO, [00:58:00] which is probably the biggest misconception that people have, there's not too much freedom. And being the CEO, you are answering to clients, partners, investors, employees.So, I always laugh when I see the “become your own boss” and “you don't have to answer to anyone”. I feel like that's not true. We answer to everyone. All the time. And so, I'm a very creative person. Writing is something I really enjoy, and creating content as you have seen is something I really enjoy. The CEO role is not freedom for me, even though I love it and I've enjoyed it. It's not sustainable. It's not a sustainable position for my happiness. I like to be creative. I don't really necessarily want to worry about our profit margins and things like that. And so, I'm in the middle of writing a sitcom and a documentary that I've already talked to several production companies about and they have a high interest in it.So, I think 2022. I'm really going to go all in on trying to enter the motion picture industry. I think as a mom to a daughter, there's not a lot of things on TV that is depicted as a reality that I would really want my kids to watch. The way women are being portrayed, it's either they're gossip-loving fashionistas or they're rape victims. We're not seeing a lot of anything in the middle of the spectrum, like women who are ambitious, or aggressive, or having to wear all these [01:00:00] hats all the time. I just really think it's important. A message that is really important for me is to be yourself and here at your own life and find your own identity.One day I was complaining about it. I just don't like the Kardashians. I'm Armenian. And I don't like them. I just think like they don't do a service. It's a disservice to girls, in my opinion, everywhere, that you're setting these standards of what they're supposed to look like, and they don't really look like that. And I think that really bothers me because I worry for my daughter. I worry that she's going to think she has to wear these things and do these things to her face to be considered beautiful. And so, Mike feel free to chime in if you feel the same or if you have the same concerns. So, I was complaining about it and then someone was like, “why don't you just do something?” And I was like, “okay. Maybe I could”. And so, I started talking to senior VPs and production companies and I have one executive summary that is, “I don't like salad”. And it's really just pushing back on what women are supposed to be. Women are supposed to eat, clean, and be small and fragile and proper and soft. And it's like, no! We could be all of it. Sometimes I'm aggressive. Sometimes I am dainty. Sometimes I'm super assertive and sometimes I get bullied. We're not all one thing. None of us are. Look at 2020, how much time did everybody spend defending their labels? Defending labels that they don't even firmly believe.Not everybody is all the way Democrat and not everybody's all the way Republican. Not everybody's a hundred percent, but you're so defensive about [01:02:00] Democratic and Republicans and one of the greatest examples I heard, I think it was Andy Frisella who said it on his podcast, but he talks about 9/11 and he was like, “do you think they cared if it was Republicans or Democrats when they flew those planes into the World Trade Center? No, they were going after Americans”. No one else around the world cares about these labels that we here in the United States want to defend all the time. And so, that really sits with me of how people are so quick to carry these labels with them and they'll go to the ground dying, defending these labels they'll end family relationships and friendships trying to defend these labels that are not real, they're all lies. They're not real things. So, I want to create content that really helps people navigate through that identity and showing them, you're not any one way.We're all very complicated creatures, we're complex. And even then who we are now, we're not the same person in a year from now, we evolve, we change. Who I was last year, pre-pandemic? I'm a completely different person now. And so, what am I defending? Am I really going to spend so much time defending labels that I'm not even really going to identify with in a year?So that's really what the content is for me. That's the project. After being the CEO. Michael Moore: Back to your comment. With two daughters, my wife and I spend so much time just focusing in on our family core values and really just saying, “did you have a good day today?” Why, and if there were struggles or somebody upset them or a friend group wasn't nice, we don't focus so much [01:04:00] on that.It was, “what role did you play in that? If you were you, and you were a good person, then don't worry about the outcome or what they thought of that. Just continue to be you, they're either going to come back, but that's probably not somebody you need to associate yourself with”. It's very simplistic, but it's gotta be reinforced all the time, because to your point, they're constantly changing and they're constantly evolving into who they're ultimately going to become, but they can get sidetracked so easily. Katrina Ghazarian: Yeah. And it's interesting because – I would love your opinion on it – when you've put in so much work to dig in and unravel yourself and untangle yourself from all these beliefs that you thought you were or wanted, or these traits, for a long time, I thought that I couldn't love the way that normal people love. And so, this is probably a little personal, but I was neglected as a child, like criminally. These days, especially with millennials and gen Z, my parents would be in jail. My basic physical needs were not being met. And so, when you have that experience, you're in survival mode all the time. And so, you don't really have the time to feel, you just do you, find your next meal or, you're scanning the place to make sure predators aren't around, or you just don't really have time to sit in it, you're constantly on the move.And so, I always believed that I just was missing like an emotional STEM, I didn't have something there; somebody could say something to me and I could be completely unaffected by it or, I was in relationships and I just didn't love them the way [01:06:00] that they loved me or at least what appeared to be love at the time. And so, I always believed in this thing, that something was wrong with me. And then I really had to do the work of figuring out that actually, the love that I have for myself is so grand that the problem is I'm not willing to accept anybody else's love with conditions. I wasn't willing to allow someone to tell me who to be or what I can do for them to love me because I had generated so much love for myself and my daughter.I didn't need it. I was already full and that was a huge break. It was a very emotional breakthrough for me because all these years I felt like something's wrong. Something's wrong with me? But, no, they had done things that crossed my safety threshold and made me feel unsafe. And so, I go into survival mode. And when I'm in survival mode, I have very little to give you because I feel like I have to protect. And so, doing all that work or doing that work, I feel like now it's very easy for me to see and re-look at people and say, “oh, there's a discrepancy there”. They say it's this thing, but their actions are not saying that thing. So, it's very easy for me to see it, which is sometimes bad because if it's a friend's boyfriend or something, and I'm like, “that's gonna be a tough one”. Bob Wierema: Is that my place to say something or not? Right? Katrina Ghazarian: Yeah. So, I think just doing that work is so important for everybody to find out who are you?Who are you now? And who do you want to be? And how do we close that gap? And a hundred percent of the [01:08:00] time closing that gap is not allowing anybody else to tell you who you're supposed to be. Bob Wierema: How would you tell people to start that kind of journey? Because I think there's a lot there. I'm a firm believer in that, falling in love with yourself before anything else, where would you tell people to start?Katrina Ghazarian: High level, even just reading a book that really focuses on that, like Byron Katie's book Loving What Is, it's an easy place to start off; you're angry, your mom neglected you and now you're angry because you think she doesn't love you. And so, the work flips that around and makes you see things differently. It helps you navigate through these lies. Not necessarily, she didn't necessarily not love you. We don't know if that's absolutely true. It's just that she was going through some other things. And so, it starts to humanize these people that have hurt you or that you feel have hurt you.And then you realize you're just in it by yourself. They don't care. They're going on with their day. They're not affected by your thoughts or your triggers or anything like that. So, I think that's a good place to start. Byron Katie's book, or even if you want to go more simple Don Miguel Ruiz, his books like the Four Agreements, Mastery of Self, Mastery of Love, or any book that is really focused on inward understanding or peeling away these lies that you keep telling yourself. So, one of the Four Agreements is being impeccable with your word. I would say that's the hardest for anybody. And this isn't an integrity thing. This is just, are you being honest with yourself? And are you being honest with the people around you 100% of the time? And [01:10:00] so this includes, if Mike asked me, “we're going to be moving this weekend. Do you think you can come help?” And if my initial reaction is, “I don't really want to do that”, if I were impeccable with my word, I would say “do you think you could find someone else to help you?” Because then I'm going to go help him, and now I'm going to be resentful. And there are people who would gladly help, who have no problem packing up furniture and carrying it around. And so that's what I think, starting there of recognizing where you're not being honest with yourself is a great place to start. Michael Moore: I like that being impeccable with your word, I think words matter and I'd be curious to get your perception on this.As you were going through this, the self-reflection and work. What role did realizing you are the mother to your daughter play in that? Because for me it was like, they're dialed into every word that I'm saying when I'm around them. And I need to be very conscious with that because they're little sponges and that ultimately is going to affect their viewpoint, their maturation, the way they interact with others, the way they see me interact with their mom.It's all very intentional because I'm trying to set a good example. So, talk about that personally, with you and your daughter. Katrina Ghazarian: I do co-parent with her dad. And so, one of the things is when him and I are having a disagreement I really pressure him to speak to me in a respectful manner and especially in front of her, because I explained to him little girls look for their dad when they grow up, and would you want her to look for somebody who's disrespectful? No. And then another thing for me on my end is the relationships that I'm in. Am I in a [01:12:00] relationship with someone that I would approve my daughter to be in? And so, my daughter is so dialed in to me, being her mom. I've been in a relationship before, and if at some point they got aggressive in some way, whether it's they yelled or they just called me a name or whatever, she was done with them. She wanted nothing. She was fine, she'll be nice, but she was done. You lose her in that instance. And in a way I'm proud because I taught her, this is not okay. But at the same time, I'm like these guys, she's going to be a beast when she gets bigger. Because she's abnormally tall for her age. And so, I'm proud, but at the same time, I'm very cognizant of how do I speak? How am I letting men speak to me? And how am I letting them treat me and how do I let them treat her?And even with her dad, it was she wanted a blue bike and he told her she had to get a pink one. So, things like that where I tell him, “hold on a second. She doesn't like pink. She prefers blue because mommy's favorite color is blue also”. So, when you tell her it's wrong, it almost creates a distress with me because now she thinks, “well, Mommy's wrong for liking that color too”. And then you create these lies around her. And so, it's really important. I'm super honest with her. I tell her the things that I don't want to shelter her from, from the truth. She has questions about homosexuality. If she has questions about racism, if she has questions about sex, not necessarily action because she's too little to understand it, but more so dating and she sees like these teeny bopper shows and they're [01:14:00] kissing and what does that mean? I'm very intentional with explaining things to her because if I don't, she's going to make assumptions and God knows where she's going to get those conclusions from. And I think that we do our kids a disservice, like my parents did. They never talked to me about stuff. They never talked to me about my period, even.I thought I pooped my pants when I started my period, because I didn't know what was going on. I was like, “wow, I really did a bad job wiping my ass last time,” and no one told me. When you start, it's not actually red. It's a different color. No one tells you, why didn't anybody tell me those things? And so, I'm sitting – I was at a commercial audition, I remember – with my dad and I was mortified. I didn't want to do the audition because I'm like, “Dad, I think I pooped my pants. Like something's going on?” My dad didn't know. He's like, “ what are you talking about?” And so I feel like we do a disservice to them when we don't talk to them about things that they're really going to be exposed to by other people and that it does include drugs, and sex, and toxic friendships, and weight gain, and puberty, and hair; you have to have these conversations with them because they're going to be left to their own thoughts and they're teenagers and kids.I know what I was thinking when I was younger. I would rather have someone held my hand and walk me through like how to make decisions, like not to have sex at a young age, and this is why you shouldn't, and they won't like you more if you do, and if you're not comfortable, don't do it. But if you are comfortable, here's how you protect yourself. And you know what I mean? Parents need to be the ones to expose them to this type of real life. Michael Moore: Of all the [01:16:00] hundreds of presentations in boardrooms and stressful negotiations that I've been in throughout my career, I've never been more nervous than when my wife said, “when you get home from work today, we're sitting down with your oldest daughter and having the discussion.” And I mean, it was the worst buildup. I'm sure my heart rate was 170 plus the whole day, I was sweating, it was one of the best experiences of my life because – and my wife coached me through this – we were just completely honest and turned into it and had the conversation and it set a tone that she can talk to us about anything. And as long as she comes and talks to us, and we hear it from her, whether you made a bad grade or you made a bad choice or whatever the situation is, you're not going to get in trouble if you just come talk to us.And it's pushed its way down to our younger daughter. She feels the same way. And so, it's just this open, honest environment that they

Connect with Michael Moore and Bob WieremaThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with Raleigh GreenRaleigh Green: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raleighgreenv/Emerald Consulting: https://www.emerald-cp.com/[00:00:00] Raleigh Green: If I was telling anybody, you got to start with yourself, you got to start with being real, and being honest, and you have to be happy. And you've got to have a smile on your face because nobody wants to deal with a dick. You've got to humble yourself because a lot of the times for you to build relationships, you have to get through a gatekeeper. And sometimes the gatekeeper is the toughest person to get through to get to the person that you want to really impress, or you want to do business with. I watched my father go into offices for five or six years and would walk in, sometimes with a meeting scheduled, sometimes without a meeting scheduled and would say, “I'm here to talk to the office manager. I want to do your office supplies”. And they'd be like, “Raleigh, we already told you we're using staples and we don't want to use you. We're totally happy”. And he's like, “if anything comes up, just let me know. I'll come back next week”. And they were like, “no, no, no, don't come back next week,” and he never took no for an answer. And that was something that he really taught me early on is you can't take no, there is no such thing as no when you're selling yourself or selling a product – if you have the desire to talk to somebody or to meet somebody, then you have to become very creative in the way that you get to that person.And a lot of times it was just persistence and not giving in to the word ‘no'.Michael Moore: Welcome to The Climb Crossroads and Defining Moments. Today, we're joined by Raleigh Green, [00:02:00] founder and managing member of Emerald Consulting. Happy to have you here today.Raleigh Green: Happy to be here. Thank you. Michael Moore: So, before we dive in in – because I've just got a lot of questions and Bob does too, with what we do for a living and our backgrounds, what you do we find incredibly interesting. Just tell us a little about you; where are you from, where you've been, where you're headed? Raleigh Green: Yeah, so born and raised here in Fort Worth, Texas. Bob Wierema: Great. I'm outnumbered again by design.Raleigh Green: Born and raised here in Fort Worth. Went to Arlington Heights High School, went to the University of Texas on a track scholarship and came back to Fort Worth after four years of fun down at Texas, and actually finished my degree at TCU and then got married early on and thought I was mature and had the world by the balls and was ready to go conquer everything that was in front of me and after about 10 years, realized quickly that you don't have anything figured out and you're not mature and you better start figuring it out pretty quick. So, lived here in Fort Worth with my wife at the time, and ended up, unfortunately, getting a divorce. I have a beautiful boy from that marriage – he'll be nine in February. I moved after my divorce to Dallas and lived in Dallas for seven years. During that process, I put myself through business school and SMU and decided that it was time for a major change in every aspect of my life. And I met my current wife, my beautiful [00:04:00] bride as of July this year, in Dallas and moved her back to Fort Worth, which was a shocker for her, but she's a trooper and she's getting to love the community and love our neighborhood. We're both entrepreneurs by trade; she just launched a business herself in March of 2020, she actually launched it two weeks before COVID hit and was in the process of starting her fundraising campaign, which was a very rough ride. And I had started Emerald Consulting a few years back, but really started picking things back up full-time with it. I would say in early 2018. So that's kind of where we are today. Michael Moore: On the theme of your wife – because Bob, Chris Powers, who we've had on the podcast and introduced us to Johnny, she was actually on his podcast. So, you sat in this room before – tell us a little bit more about the business and what she's got going on, because it's really neat. Raleigh Green: So, her name is Meagan. Megan Green. And she started a company called The Dowery. It's an online platform that connects local artisans from all over the country to grooms and brides that she created a wedding registry for.So, she was also in a previous marriage and during her experience of registering for things, she found that things were very limited on what she could register for, and everybody went to the same big box retailers. And so, everyone for that year's home looked the same. They all had the same Pottery Barn or the same Bed, Bath, and Beyond or whatever it was. And she found [00:06:00] a hole in the market and said, “man, there's a ton of local artisans all over the country in the United States that only sell through their local retailers. And that's really their only channel. And these people aren't good businesspeople. They're artists by nature, and so, they don't have the skillsets to push their products out onto some platform, a different platform than their local retailer”. So, she started doing a lot of research and we worked on her business plan for months on end. And we decided that now is the best time to dive in and try to tackle this 10,000-pound gorilla that's out there, and the business has been great. You can find her on www.dowery.com and it is not only a wedding registry gift site, but it's also just a standard platform that you can buy anything on. So yeah, it's been a rough year for fundraising for her business and for my business. But I feel like we finished the year pretty strong and she was actually able to raise a little over a quarter of a million dollars from friends and family, and we'll continue to raise capital this coming year. Bob Wierema: Well, I will definitely be sending this over to my fiancé here. We're hopefully getting married here in May.Raleigh Green: There we go, congratulations. Bob Wierema: Yeah, we were supposed to get married last May and had the push and if she sticks around for another five months, this two-and-a-half-year engagement, we're going to get this deal done. I'll send it to her for sure. It's funny you say like that because I've talked to her and she's like, “yeah, well there's only like Crate and Barrel and West Elm and all the other ones” and whatever's kind of in style then is what everybody else [00:08:00] has. So that's exciting. I'll definitely send that over to her. That's great. Raleigh Green: It's a really cool concept and most guys aren't into it. We usually don't care what our wives pick and choose for what pottery we're using, or what ceramics are going in our house, and being a part of this company and an investor in Meagan and The Dowery, I've gotten to really dive into the details of each artist. She is very particular on what artists she allows to be on the site, because she doesn't want it to be a [inaudible] website by any means. She really wants it to be very clean and have really high-end products that are gonna look good in people's homes.Bob Wierema: Maybe you can start blog on the side for guys like me to read as you're going through this. Because like I tried the, “hey, I don't care what plate we get, if you like them,” well apparently that's not a good answer. I'm like, “can we eat off of it? Then that's good by me”. Michael Moore: Does it go in the dishwasher? Raleigh Green: As long as I can throw it in the dishwasher, I'm happy. Michael Moore: So, I got married over 17 years ago and I remember the same thing. Like, “you're going to come with me to XYZ store and we're going to register,” and I'm like, “sweetie, I love you. But just go do it. I don't care,” but she's like, “you're coming”. “Yes ma'am”. So, I think the sales lady can see my enthusiasm, and she gives me this gun that you go click on everything and it's supposed to be exciting for the guy. Well, I went bezerk with this thing. I think I registered for every single thing they had in the store, miraculously, the next time she went to a store, I wasn't invited. So, there you go.  [00:10:00] Bob Wierema: Michael, I wanted to ask him one more question. Going back a little bit, because Raleigh you'd mentioned – and first of all, Michael, we got to get his wife on podcasts – so that'll be a good takeaway. Raleigh, you mentioned going to school at SMU, and then you said, “hey, it's time for me to make a major change”. Some shift there. Is there something specifically that, in the light of this podcast, defining moments, The Climb, is there something there that spoke to you and said, “I just need to make this change?”What got you to that point?Raleigh Green: Great question. So, if you back up to right out of college, I went to work for a hedge fund in Dallas. Originally started off as the runner, grabbing mail and getting coffee and getting laundry for different portfolio managers, and the CEO was a good family friend of ours.I earned my stripes and put in the time and told him that early on that I wanted to be on the trading desk, and after about six months of running errands, I got promoted to junior trader and was on the energy portfolio team. It was a lot of fun. It was a fun experience. It was fast paced. I got a nice salary. Our bonuses were amazing, and business was booming at that time. Then in 2008, I got laid off with a bunch of other traders at our firm, along with the rest of the financial community so it seemed at the time. Luckily my father owned his own business here in Fort Worth, Texas called [00:12:00] Greenwood Office Outfitters, which was a local office supply company, I think about it like Dunder Mifflin. It was the Dunder Mifflin of Fort Worth. Had a great experience there, came in as a sales associate for my father, really got to learn the family business inside-out from him and started climbing that family business ladder and earning the respect of the employees that have been there 20 to 25 years. I grew my book of business, eventually became Vice President of sales and was hoping that one day the reigns would be turned over to me to run the company and grow the company as I saw fit. However, my dad had a business partner that was a 50% owner in the business and my father actually went through a divorce himself, and my mom owned 25% of the business, and my dad owned 25% of the business. And as we all know, divorces are extremely expensive. And so, the dreams of taking over some of the shares of that company started dwindling away and it wasn't for, I would say a couple of different mentors that I had, that had kept pushing the idea of going to business school and getting back into finance somehow.So, a couple years after my dad's divorce, I actually went through a divorce, as I had said previously and picked up and moved all my stuff to Dallas and  wanted a fresh start, looked at a bunch of different business schools in Texas, and went back to the hedge fund manager, that was a major mentor of mine [00:14:00] and asked him, “ should I go here or should I go here?” And he said, “do you plan on doing business in Texas?” And I said, “yes”. And he said, “do you plan on doing business in Dallas, Fort Worth?” And I said, “yes”. And he goes, “well, then there's no other option. You're gonna have to go to SMU”. The alumni network is huge. And it's very accommodating to everyone that graduates from the college business.I went that route and while I was in business school, I was studying corporate finance and my focus was on energy, and I thought that I was going to come out of the MBA program raising capital from a private equity group, and starting my own EMP company with a couple of other business school mates. But God had an obviously different plan and during that process He opened a couple of doors that I never thought would open. Didn't even think about these doors opening. An old family friend of mine in Fort Worth, who's in his mid-fifties and is buying a distressed molecular testing healthcare company in Memphis, Tennessee, and we started talking on a weekly basis about the opportunity at hand. And he said that he was going to pursue the acquisition. And I told him that I wanted to be a part of the  process and a part of the company. And so, during my second year of business school, I started working in the healthcare industry and started a distribution company that was distributing molecular tests for his [00:16:00] company, and got to a point where him and his partners decided, “hey, you and your team are really doing a lot of business, you're creating a lot of new revenue streams, and we'd like to actually have you on board”. So, I came on as Director of hospital development and started pouring my life into this healthcare company that we grew from six employees all the way to around 80 at the time. It's not that today, but it was a fun ride.During that process, I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about perseverance. I've learned a lot about integrity and doing business with people that have integrity and the importance of that. A lot of life lessons; I can tell you the last probably 15 years of my life has been a climb. You always say you take three steps forward and two steps back, and as long as you get that extra step in, you're moving in the right direction. Business school was unbelievable for me. I never really enjoyed school as a child. It was one of those things that every year you would go to go into a class, and it was the same classes: history, English, math… and you were learning new things, but it wasn't something that I wanted to learn and early on in my life, I had an entrepreneurial spirit starting at 10 years old with two of my buddies, Collins and Walton Ward in our [00:18:00] local neighborhood. We, like any children in a neighborhood during the summertime, would get bored and we would get into mischief and we would come up with different things to create.And one of the things that we created, like every other child in America does, is a lemonade stand. But I came up with the idea of where we should put the lemonade stand, and you always hear location, location, location. Well, we started putting our lemonade stand in between the first Island and the second Island of River Crest Country Club golf course. And so, the golfers had to drive by our lemonade stand and we were at a two-way stop there. So, we had cars stopping and we had a golf carts stopping, and we knew that most of the men carried large bills and we didn't come prepared with change. So, most of the time they go, “oh, just keep the $20,” or, “oh, [inaudible] keep the hundred.So, we would walk out of there with a hundred, 150 bucks a day and we moved it around, it was great. My mom would pile up all of our tables, and our chairs, and everything into her Ford Explorer and drive us there every day and drop us off. And then we got to a point where we were actually on one of the members' pieces of property and we would hide our chairs and our table behind their bushes. Michael Moore: Bob, a couple of years ago when I really started doing a lot of research and thinking through how we bring what we do for the private equity world to the family office world, I began the rabbit holes of networking and figuring that out and called up an old friend I hadn't talked to in a while – another guy [00:20:00] we probably need to get on the podcast, Ryan Center – and he's in the consultative world with Riveron. And so, he understands our model and the way we go about thinking and asking questions and ultimately creating value.And he said, “well, do you know Raleigh Green?” And I was like, “man, that name sure sounds familiar”. And I went on LinkedIn, I'm looking at it right now. I think it's an all-time record. We have 392 mutual connections but didn't know each other. I'm like, “how is that possible?” And so, we initially got on the phone and started having lunch and so many commonalities. I'm really excited to dive into what you've created, but in looking on here, it's Raleigh Green the Fifth; I want to talk more about that family dynamic and the ultimate sale of Greenwood [inaudible], finish that part of the story. Because it's pretty fascinating.Raleigh Green: So, the Greenwood story ended in 2017.I had already started to part ways and had already started my healthcare distribution company and was kind of doing both jobs at the same time. I told my dad, “ I got to go pursue this. You're in the process of selling your business and with the new owners coming in place, they're not going to want me around” and, without having ownership, it just wasn't something that I really had passion for anymore.And so, my dad who taught me everything – he taught me everything about life, about being a good man, about respect, always trying to do the right thing because we only have one name, and your name is everything. And [00:22:00] if you hit different nicks on your name, they stay with you forever. And any of you guys from Fort Worth understand that Fort Worth is a very, very small community, and they love to talk about things that happened 25 years ago or whatever. And I grew up in this community and ran with a fun, wild group of guys, and we didn't do anything bad, we just had a lot of fun and we got into mischief and our parents were all working their tails off – and I would say weren't always around to give the discipline that we needed.And so, Fort Worth. It is the greatest small town in America, but even my wife knows today, you can't sneeze in Fort Worth without somebody knowing it. So, my dad early on in my life said, “look, you guys can keep going down this road or you can change your ways right now”. And he knew that running was an outlet for me.He was a big runner; ran at TCU in the 70s and was a big-time marathoner all through the 80s. And he really helped channel my energy to focus on running, and he poured his life into helping me be the best I could. And I was one of the top runners in the state. I was one of the top runners in the nation in cross-country and high school. I got a scholarship to University of Texas and all of those things I owe to my dad, because that was the hard work that he put in on top of the hard work of building a business and doing the daily grind with two other siblings that I [00:24:00] had, and a wife, and everything else. So, to rewind just a little bit back to  being at Greenwood and Hen(?) teaching me about sales, it always started with cultivating relationships. You want to treat each and every client like you treated the girl that you wanted to date, and it was a slow process, and you don't want to just rush into something and tell them everything that they want to hear upfront. You want to slowly build up a rapport with them.If anybody listening to this podcast knows my dad, they know that he did a great job hitting the streets every day of Dallas Fort Worth, building his business through building relationships. Greenwood never used any marketing tool, which when I came into the business, I was like, “we've got to start with billboards, and we got to get a website. We've got to get a Facebook page, we got to get all this stuff,” and they were all like, “whoa, what is this kid doing? And pump the brakes.” It was a fun ride working with my dad, and we were a great team. My dad built an amazing company with Bob Wood. Unfortunately, today that company is not what it used to be. Luckily for Bob and my dad, they got out at the right time. But I learned a lot of life lessons there, and after the sale of his business, I've tried to take those lessons with me into the healthcare world and then into my daily practice with everyone that I meet; relationships are my favorite thing.I would say for me, creating new relationships is [00:26:00] my favorite thing to do on this earth. I love adventure and I love meeting new people and I love connecting with people. And that's really what has given me the success that I've had today with Emerald and creating what I've created through the relationships that I've built. You brought up family offices; family offices are some of the toughest groups to get into, and they don't advertise, and they don't have Google pages. And if they do, it's very rare and it's still going to be very tough for you to get a meeting with the right groups and the right people that are making the decisions at those family offices.And luckily, I was able to – through the office supply world, and also through the hedge fund that I worked for – establish good relationships with people that like all of us have climbed the ladder and have gone on to do different things. And some of them have created so much wealth for themselves that they've been blessed to be able to start family offices and I've gotten to be along for the ride of that and to see people grow their businesses and also be a part of just continuing the friendship that we had when they didn't have those things. Michael Moore: Thank you, Mike, for sharing. Bob Wierema: First of all, thank you for sharing that. I love what you talked about with your dad. I'm very similar to you and we can talk about that more at a later date, but the impact he had on my life, it's similar, sounds like you had. One of the things I was going to ask [00:28:00] is about how you talk about cultivating these relationships and how you do that. Maybe expand upon how you just think about that world and maybe some advice for some of our younger listeners. Everybody hears that relationships are important, and how do you start that when you're coming into the business world? Where you're making a career change and before it wasn't as important, and now you're like, “hey, I got to cultivate these relationships”. How would you think to tell people, “here's how I started and did that to get these fantastic relationships” that are really, it sounds like, the lifeblood of your business? Raleigh Green: That's a great question. I would go back to, if I was telling anybody, you got to start with yourself, you got to start with being real and being honest, and you have to be happy. And you've got to have a smile on your face because nobody wants to deal with a dick. You've got to humble yourself because a lot of the times, for you to build relationships, you have to get through a gatekeeper. And sometimes the gatekeeper is the toughest person to get through, to get to the person that you want to really impress, or you want to do business with.I watched my father go into offices for five or six years and he would walk in sometimes with a meeting scheduled, sometimes without a meeting scheduled and would say, “I'm here to talk to the office manager. I want to do your office supplies”. And they'd be like, “Raleigh. We already told you. We're using Staples and we don't want to use you. We're totally happy”. And he's like, “ if anything comes up, just let me know. I'll come back next week”. And they were like, “no, no, no, don't [00:30:00] come back next week”. But he never took no for an answer. And that was something that he really taught me early on is you can't take no, there is no such thing as no when you're selling yourself or selling a product or trying, if you have the desire to talk to somebody or to meet somebody, then you have to become very creative in the way that you get to that person. And a lot of times it's just persistence and not giving into the word “no”. So many people today, especially this next generation – it's scary because they love doing everything online. They love Zoom. They love the whole COVID situation of, “hey, we're going to work from our office and our sweatpants and our t-shirts,” and sure. That's great. We love all that too, but we also miss – or I can say for me, I miss the personal one-on-one interaction, the face to face, having meetings in these family offices, having meetings with my mentors, having meetings with individual investors. The face-to-face through a screen doesn't do the justice that being in person and being able to sit in somebody's office looking around and going, “man, these guys created this. This is awesome”. You don't have the same respect for that person. One thing that I've had to teach myself over the last, I would say four or five years is to really respect what these people have created and how hard they have worked, and how their teams have worked to be able to get them into a place where they are now calling the shots and they can tell you, “no, I'm not interested in [00:32:00] that deal, and this is why”, or “hey, we're going to review that deal, but we'll get back to you”. And you have to have respect for the time that they are going to take to review that deal. Because a lot of the times when I'm dealing with clients of mine who are raising capital and I'm outsourcing investors, the clients are on a different timeline than the investors.They want their capital commitments very quickly. And sometimes the best investors take their time, and they slow play you for a reason, and they want to see who else comes to the table before they come to the table. And for me, I have to respect that window of time that they need, but I also in the process have to be careful with how I do follow up calls, how I approach follow up emails, et cetera.It's an art that I believe you learn through trial and error. Bob Wierema: I've learned as you talk, you can't always want it to be on your timeline, but you gotta remember at the end of the day, it's not about you, it's about your client or your prospective client. You got to make it about them or whoever that person is, whether it's someone in your network, if you're focused on you, that just you might have a couple of wins here and there, but that's not a good long-term play. Michael Moore: We've got a saying in our office that it's all about timing and priorities and neither one of them are yours. Raleigh Green: That's a great saying. Michael Moore: I appreciated the comments with your dad. I remember when I was graduating from college and my dad said, “okay, now what are you going to do?” And I said, “I don't have a clue, but if I can find something where I get to meet new people all the time and create relationships with them, I think I'll be pretty happy”. [00:34:00] And so I think we share that, I think that's probably me, even though we've gone to lunch once and met over the phone a couple of times and some Zoom calls because of COVID, I feel like I've known you for a long time. I think we both share that passion. So, focusing in on Emerald Consulting, because I do want to talk about that.Talk about that platform and how it works. Raleigh Green: So, it started off helping out a buddy of mine who created a hedge fund right out of business school. And he was a roommate of mine in Dallas for a couple of years and one of my best friends on the planet to this day. He's one of those – he's a genius.He went to MIT for undergrad, did investment banking. Right out of undergrad, went to Stanford Business School, learned his trade from one of the best quantitative hedge fund managers in the world and had that entrepreneurial spirit to go start something. And he identified very quickly that he needed help with raising capital. And he was like, “Raleigh, I haven't been in Texas for 14 years, a long time” and I had a bunch of relationships. And so, we sat down, and we started hammering out little spreadsheets of who we were going to call and, Emerald really started there. And we had some success and that was early on, that was before business school.So, I was actually just working as an independent consultant that didn't have Emerald as the company name. And that was back in late 2012 and fast forward to where I was with the healthcare company in Fort Worth. A friend of mine called me and said, “hey, a [00:36:00] very well-known oil and gas company is looking to raise $150 million and they're looking for family office money, and I've talked to them and they said that they would happily pay a success fee”. So, I met with a couple of the guys from the company and within three weeks I actually had $165 million committed from two different family offices, one in Dallas and one in Fort Worth.And it was one of those aha moments for me, because one of my mentors, who I play tennis with all the time – I remember telling Matt Johnson that I didn't really know what I wanted to do after I left the healthcare business and he said, “man, you should continue to raise capital”. And he goes, “you do a great job”.He was like, “you know everybody, you gotta be confident in your ability to continue to go down that path. And I think you've really got something here”. So, I followed his advice as I usually do, and it's been great, I've now to date raised a little over $247 million. I've gotten to work with companies in the commercial real estate industry. I've gotten to sit down with the CEO of Thor Equities, who is now a very good friend of Meagan and mine, and have helped participate in a couple of his commercial real estate acquisitions and have also had a lot of fun in the energy space being here in Fort Worth, raising different funds for different projects that these guys were working on.And I would say to date, [00:38:00] we really focus on healthcare, energy, and real estate. And I can say real estate now because we've had success with two different closings and I'm now in the process of getting my real estate license, which is a total beat down. And I never knew that there was this much information involved in getting a real estate license.So, kudos to all you guys that have your real estate license and keep it up. Michael Moore: I got my real estate license in my sophomore year in college because summer rolled around and my parents said, “well, what classes have you signed up for?” I was like, “ what do you mean? I'm not going to summer school. You take the summers off”. “No, you don't”. And they said, “you're doing something”. And I said,” well, my mom was a residential real estate person and I stopped working out. How hard could that be?” And I think it took me three times to pass the test. It was tough. It was absolutely tough.Raleigh Green: It's a lot tougher than we than what I expected. That's for sure. Bob Wierema: One of the things I was gonna maybe go down Raleigh was that as you get potential opportunities in, how do you think about those deals? Because obviously your reputation is a little bit at risk. You gotta be able to bring good thoughtful opportunities to your investor. You don't just want to throw a bunch of stuff at them that mates make and hope it sticks. How do you think through that and how do you evaluate some of those opportunities on your end before you bring it to those folks?Raleigh Green: That's great question. My reputation in this business is everything, Emerald Consulting is not a licensed broker dealer, and we don't want to be, what we are is a registered finder.We've got two jobs. In my left hand, I have to go source deals [00:40:00] that I think are legitimate, and I have to do a lot of analysis and background checks on who these entrepreneurs are, who the companies are, and to see if it's a good fit for the investor pool that I have the relationships with. And then, in my right hand, I have to go make sure that I'm not sending a real estate deal to a family office that only invests in energy and healthcare. That process is a lot of fun and it's a lot of work and the best part about our job is the investors that we bring these deals to our astute investors  and they understand that I am not providing advice on any of the deals that I bring to them and they don't want me to give them any advice. They either have teams that are going to evaluate it, or they're going to evaluate it themselves. And they are confident that they have the background and have had extra historic success in analyzing each one of these deals that comes across their table. And these guys look at hundreds of deals sometimes a month, I'm one of hundreds of different groups that send deals to these family offices and individual investors.What I try to do is really cherry pick the best possible, not always the best possible return or the best possible idea, but the best possible management team. And I learned that from a couple of [00:42:00] astute investors that I really have a lot of respect for, and I've sat in meetings with them and they said, “we don't invest in ideas. There are a million good ideas. What we do is we invest in the management team and we want to make sure that they have what it takes to get this company to the next level”. Some family offices look at pre-revenue companies from a venture standpoint, some don't, some told me, “don't even bring those deals our way”. And I would say, “my team and I are very particular in making sure that our database is up to date with each family office and each investor, what their risk tolerance is and what avenues of investment they're looking for so that we're not bringing them the wrong stuff”. Michael Moore: If you go back to that word ‘reputation.'Bob and I take that very seriously too. There are a lot of peers and competitors in our space calling on the same potential clients that we are, and then once you bring them over as a client, your role is still very much involved, but we also have teams that then interact the day to day financing and management of risk.So, all of a sudden, you're relying on what they're saying to carry on that reputation and make sure that that's not damaged. So, I think if you think back to the maturation of everything you've talked about today on this podcast and getting to where you are today, I got to think that when you're sending potential deals to these family offices, they don't need you to explain it because your reputation is that this is something we need to look at. Raleigh Green: A hundred percent. Most of the time they know that if I'm not just sending them every deal that comes across our desk, that we are very particular in [00:44:00] what we send them and that they are going to want to look at it. Even if it's something that is way outside of their realm, as far as what they invest in, if it is something that we don't have in our database, a lot of times they'll still look at it. Right now, if you take solar and wind energy, those are like the two hottest things that are flying across every family office desk right now, and there's so many opportunities that a lot of times the family offices have to hit pause and they have to say, “wait a minute, what do we actually know about wind? What do we know about solar and which deal is the best deal?” One of my investors who I love to death, he's here in Fort Worth and has been just another amazing mentor of mine, he told me a couple of weeks ago, “Raleigh, I've seen 10 solar deals. And I don't know what's a good solar deal and what's not, and I've got plenty of experience investing in energy. So we're hitting the pause button and it's pencils down, but we're going to take our time to do some research and really figure this out before we pull the trigger on anything”. It's interesting,  if you read today in the Wall Street Journal and online, if you Google ‘family offices' and look at news, family offices over the last five, six years have been the latest, greatest thing because individuals that have created wealth for themselves now understand that they don't need to pay all these fees to money managers.They don't need to pay the fees to private equity companies. They don't need to pay the fees to hedge funds. They don't [00:46:00] need to pay fees at all. What they need to do is, and if they're wealthy enough, they can go hire their own teams that specialize in all of that and create it themselves. And you walk into a lot of these larger family offices and I always say family offices should be considered a family office if you're managing over $300 million, if you're under $300 million and you have a family office that's a lot of overhead that you actually don't need. And if you're managing over $300 million, you can afford to give a piece of the pie to your CIO and  have a well robust staff that can analyze each of these deals, can analyze your stock portfolio. When you walk into some of these offices, you're just blown away by how amazing they are and what everybody's doing in these offices. You've got different portfolio managers in certain managing these individuals' capital , and a great example is Tailwind Advisors here in Fort Worth. You've got a group of individuals down there that are extremely smart and they're extremely well-rounded and what they each oversee for Tailwind. You've got a real estate arm, you've got an energy arm, you've got a finance equity arm and so on. And when I talk to some of those different investors down there, it's amazing to see how their minds work and how they all ask different questions on a different, individual deal. We learn a lot that way about how to present certain deals to these groups. [00:48:00] Michael Moore: When you started taking that advisory role that we find ourselves into maybe a heightened level, and I know you've talked about with me your passion for travel and seeing this great big world that we live in. In looking at the news coverage last night bleeding into today and in Georgia and what that could mean for the U.S. Senate, what are you seeing on the forefront now in regard to tax laws and estate planning and where that could be headed?Raleigh Green: To be a hundred percent honest, I haven't really dived into it too much. I can speak from what I know and what I've been told over the last eight months during COVID. What I saw was a lot of family offices were protecting themselves and they were getting ready for a change of the guards, whether they wanted it or not.And whether the election turned out in favor of their candidate or not, 2021, they've already put 2020 behind them. 2021 they're geared up and ready to go. And I think we're gonna find out a lot with these two Senate seats. And if the Republicans hold the Senate, I think we're going to see a lot of additional capital flow into the market.However, I've been saying for the last 10 years that the market is due for a correction and I've been wrong. And I had business school buddies of mine in 2014 and 2015 saying they were pulling out their 401ks. They were going straight to cash. And I hope that they're still not there. And I remember in 2008 when [00:50:00] the, or 2007, when the stock market was at 12,000, the hedge fund manager that I worked for said that I would never see it break 12,000 again, and that it was monumental. And so, who knows; today's politics, it's a scary world that we live in and I've never seen our country this divided. And I think that that's a serious problem. There's a lot of people that don't know what they're talking about and they're supporting different people just because it's cool. And what they're not understanding is the ripple effect that it's going to have on generations to come. And the issues that we see today, there are definite issues that need to be addressed. This whole Black Lives Matter is something that hits home with me because I'm not racist by any means. I grew up running track with every race there is, and I showered with every race, and I loved everybody that I ran with and it really breaks my heart that there are people out there that have hatred still, hatred and racism is just uncalled for, and it's not something that I would ever stand with. I understand why these black communities are coming together, and I stand with them. However, I don't 100% support the Black Lives Matter movement. I do believe that racism needs to be ended and we are in a generation that still flies the Confederate Flag from time to time. I think that those people that are flying those flags are just ridiculous because they don't understand history. [00:52:00] The Confederates lost, it's over. No flags should ever be flown and it's a sign of immaturity, and it's a sign of people that are just ignorant and it's something that – I really think God is pulling everyone together in this country and He's putting an end to a lot of things that our government has shunned away from, and I think it's wrong that our government hasn't removed flags from different state flags, removing the Confederate Flag from these different state flags that should've been done years ago.I understand that there's a bunch of people saying, “well, you're just erasing history” and nobody's erasing history. The history was erased when the Confederates lost, and the flag needs to be erased and burned. We need to stand up as a community and stand up for each individual that's out there that needs our help. It's a wild world, it's a sick world that we live in, and we live in the greatest country in the world, and we abuse each other on a daily basis. It's just not necessary, and it needs to end. Michael Moore: Maybe a way to look at it is, in that example, it wouldn't be erasing history. It would be creating history by correcting something that should have been corrected a long time ago. I hear you on that.Raleigh Green: I didn't mean to go down that rabbit hole. Sorry guys. But that is definitely something that has been popped up recently. I just watched the 30 for 30 on the first NASCAR, or not first NASCAR, but the current NASCAR black [00:54:00] driver, and they found a noose in his garage at Talladega after the government said, “hey, no, no more state flags. We got to take out the Confederate Flag off all state flags,” and NASCAR came out and said, “we're not flying the Confederate Flag anymore”. And you're just going, “who are these people?” These are the most ignorant people there are. And it's an issue of generational stupidity and it's our job to get into these schools and to get with these parents in these next generations coming up and to say that is not right. And we've got to put an end to it. And today I'm sorry, but I feel like our schools have just become too weak and nothing's socially acceptable anymore.I think that they need to bring back the paddle because even when I was in high school, you did something wrong, you would get paddled. And those are things that we've lost sight of. America has gotten weak  and I hate to say it, everybody wants to be glorious and glamorous on, TikTok, and Snapchat, and Facebook, and Instagram, and they don't want to deal with today's issues, and they want to portray themselves as perfect. And they're really just running away from themselves and running away from the issues at hand that we all need to be addressing as humans. Michael Moore: No, we're glad you brought it up. Thinking back Bob, to when we were coming up with this idea, a big passion of this is getting thought provoking people that give a shit on this podcast to tell us what they think, because the message needs to get out.Doing nothing is worse than the alternative. [00:56:00] You don't have to look back far in any great time in any nation or empire or culture or history to realize that this is what breaks it down. So, no, we appreciate you bringing that up. Bob and I have had a lot of talks; living in Chicago right now is tough.Bob Wierema: We had Chris Lee on the podcast. Hearing his story, growing up being African-American and some of the stuff he's gone through, Harvard and Columbia educated and some of the stories you shared, to your point, the amount of ignorant people out there in what he shared was just, – you couldn't even imagine being in his shoes or that that would even happen, but it still has and did to him. And that's crazy. Raleigh Green: Yeah, it's really sad. Some of my best friends today are African Americans that I ran track with, that I went to high school with and I love those guys. I love everybody, it's something that my parents instilled in me at an early age was that it doesn't matter what color you are, everybody's a human and it was something that I feel has been starting to get addressed within the churches of America. Today, I go to a great church in Fort Worth, Christ Chapel. Cody McQueen is an amazing pastor and he's had to address the issues as well in front of the congregation and has gotten emotional talking about it. Because it's real. It's so easily just pushed aside. And it's [00:58:00] the movement that we saw a couple of years ago with women's rights and the abuse that they were tired of taking within the office place, and at the time I remember pushing it aside and laughing about it and you look back on it, and it's not something that needs to be laughed about. It needs to be something that's addressed because it's an issue. Michael Moore: That's good stuff. So, we got one more for you, Raleigh. There's the saying it's not what you know, it's who you know, and then we flipped it around and say, it's not who you know, it's who knows you.So, in thinking about the medium of this podcast and our listeners, and just all the passion that you share today about growing up with such an amazing dad and  maybe not getting marriage right the first time, but certainly nailing it the second and a wonderful kid along the way; what do you want people to know about you?Raleigh Green: Wow. That is a loaded question, man. I just want people to know that I'm a very loving human that just wants the best for everybody. And I'm a total adventurer. I love to travel and see the world. And if I see you out there, or if you see me out there running or playing tennis or traveling, don't be a stranger, always say hi. My door is open to everyone and I hope that this podcast shed some light on any dark time that you might be having, or gives you confidence in your ability to pursue your dreams and to go door knocking because [01:00:00] in the saying, it's not what you know, it's who you know, you got to go knock on a lot of doors to meet some people. Michael Moore: Great answer. Raleigh. We've really appreciated you coming on. This has been a phenomenal conversation. We thank you so much and we'll be sure to reach out to Meagan, get her on here as well.Raleigh Green: I appreciate it guys.  Bob Wierema: And thank you, Raleigh. It's been awesome. Raleigh Green: Absolutely. Thank you so much.Michael Moore: Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of The Climb. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider subscribing. And if you know someone who you would think would enjoy the podcast, feel free to share this with them. Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode. 

Connect with Michael Moore and Bob WieremaThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with Brian FergusonBrian Ferguson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-ferguson-arena-labs/Arena Labs WebsiteBrian Ferguson: You're at a level one trauma center in Washington, DC. We're in there on a Saturday night at one o'clock in the morning. This is typically when, because of people being out of bars et cetera, you get a lot of trauma. And one time there were two people in there screaming and another person moaning. Just hearing that as I was standing there, I thought ‘it's insane what this does to the human emotion and cortisol levels.' And what's crazy is if you were to observe that and you think about this whole body of knowledge that's come out of the military in the last 15, 20 years about post-traumatic stress and about the implications of people who are in very high stressed emotional environments, either combat or otherwise, we've put a massive amount of resources into helping those people. And yet we ask these trauma nurses and ICU nurses and physicians to go home and have dinner with their families. And no one thinks twice about it because they're not deployed. So, we think about this as the environment is different. You might not be deploying overseas to Afghanistan or Iraq, but you are doing consequential, heavily emotional work that has a chronic element of stress. And when you look at the implications of chronic stress on human beings, that leads to higher levels of cortisol over time, not being able to focus, not being able to sleep. There's a second and third order, long-term impact that has. Michael Moore: Today on The Climb we are joined by Brian Ferguson, founder and CEO of Arena Labs.I'm excited about this one. I don't know Brian as well as some of our other guests, but we were introduced towards the end of last year, both being Gen Next members and got a chance to get on the phone with them for about an hour. And I don't know, 30 seconds in, I thought, dang, dang, dang. We got to get this guy on the podcast. What an interesting background. He'll talk more about Arena Labs, but I think it's an interesting time to have him on because of the passion of what Arena Labs does, and the work that it's doing for our frontline [00:02:00] workers right now, which is so important.Brian, welcome to The Climb. We're excited to have you. Brian Ferguson: Thanks fellas. I appreciate it. Bob Wierema: I can't believe he agreed to come on after talking with you for the only 30 minutes. I mean, that was some, you must have a lot of faith, right?Brian Ferguson: Yeah. We actually need it. Well, I certainly do, but we should also give a shout out to our friend Janeel Alonzo and Michael Davidson. Michael's one of your previous guests and is one of my dear friends and been a huge part of my life. And then Janeel who works with Michael is who I think set this up. So super grateful to her.Michael Moore: Yeah, Bob as they say down in Texas, ‘even the sun shines on a dog's ass every once in a while', I was on that day. My bullshit was flowing, and we had a great conversation.Brian Ferguson: Michael sound cooler in a Texas accent, by the way. If I said it, it wouldn't sound as cool. Michael Moore: We try. So, Brian, before we jump in, I got a little taste of this, but just give us the background. I mean, who is Brian? What shaped you? How have you gotten to where you are today?Brian Ferguson: This is a random way to answer that question. But I have over the course of probably the last 20 years tried to refine an annual process where I just review the last year, think about the year ahead. And then I come back to what I call my life plan, which is really just my best efforts to aggregate everything I've learned in my life in the past and where I want to go in the future. The front of that document – I don't let myself go beyond one page – but the title of that first page is ‘who am I?' And it's my best effort to get outside of a resume or  the way that we often introduce ourselves in these kinds of conversations to remind myself of who I am, but it's interesting, I'm coming to you guys from Cleveland, Ohio. before we started recording, we were talking a bit about that, but I grew up in the Midwest, which I think at this chapter of life, because I'm [00:04:00] back here, I spent the last 20 years away from the Midwest living in Cleveland, Ohio where I think a lot of the things I value in life come out of having been raised in this blue collar community outside of Cleveland, Ohio. And I was super fortunate. I had this amazing upbringing and community;  my family and I grew up with the town that I grew up in.When we moved there, there was just starting to be this push into the suburbs of Cleveland where we were, but I had this idyllic youth. Our house was right on woods and my brother and I grew up in the woods outside all the time. And then, my mom was a nurse, my dad worked in the energy business, and I just had this amazing youth in the sense of the neighbors, the community, my friends, and I was a product of a public school system. That was extraordinary. I think my mom being a nurse, I never appreciated how much that ideal of service was seeded in me from a young age and my brother and I both were always drawn to service in ways that just were natural to me. But now in retrospect, I think are more prominent.And then, beyond growing up in that town, I went to college in Ohio and then I'm pretty fortunate to bounce around. I lived in Washington DC for a while. And the first part of my life was in public service, mainly in national security. So, defense and intelligence diplomacy – that realm.And that was right after 9/11. So, I was an intern actually. I had a really crazy sequence of events. I ended up as an intern in the white house right after 9/11. And that was an insane way to see the world through the lens of ‘how do we think about the future of America after a consequential event like that?' And I stayed in that realm for quite a bit, lived in London for grad school. And then later in life, I went into the military and spent seven years in the military. And that was all part of what I consider that chapter in the national security public service arena, and in the course of that I just increasingly had this desire to build something. [00:06:00] When I do any type of psychometric or character test, I tend to register high on creativity, autonomy, and I was really ready to leave the public service life and go build. And that led me to my current chapter, which is Arena Labs. But I think in all of that, the really important elements in my life, like any of us, the things that matter: I've got a daughter who's two years old now, so I'm experiencing life through her eyes, which is beyond rich, and Lindsey, my wife – we've actually known each other since sixth grade. That's a whole another story, but that's a super powerful subtext for me of being connected back to where I came from. It just feels super grateful. I think increasingly the mission we have in healthcare of helping frontline workers to understand how to navigate stress and pressure and prevent burnout is one that has been elevated in ways we couldn't have imagined.So, it's a fun time to be building. Bob Wierema: That was a good start. You got a lot of questions for us to go down, but I got to start with my knock a little bit, just because you're in Cleveland and the last time I was there, the Cubs won the world series. That's my only knowing in Cleveland. Brian Ferguson: And I think Clevelanders have a weird respect for that just given the drought the Cubs were in at the time. Clevelanders appreciate the suffering that comes with being a perennial fan of a team that never wins. Yeah, the Indians, the 97-world series. You guys remember? I don't know if you remember the loss to the Florida Marlins was soul crushing.And so, the losing of the Cubs was a tough one, but I feel like the city respects Chicago in that way. I'll say the other weird thing. Cleveland sorta has a chip on its shoulder I think for a number of reasons, people talking about the river catching on fire in the seventies, but the Browns are in the playoffs for the first time, since 2002. So, you're 18-years-old as a Cleveland Browns fan and this is the first time the Browns have been in the playoffs and a big part of that is because we have an extraordinary young head coach in Kevin Stefanski who we found out yesterday has COVID [00:08:00] and can't coach in the playoff games.Oh man.I have vivid memories of my dad. A lot of people in Cleveland, the only disposable income they have goes to Browns tickets – t's very much a football town. My dad had season tickets growing up, but some of the losses in the late eighties deer in his binder fumble like vivid memories of just emotional trauma.Michael Moore: You know, Bob, with this being our 15th episode, one of the things we talked about is that there would be a neat culmination of all this as we get up on a year and a podcast alumni group. I think we need to get Brian and Bret Kaufman hooked up together. A lot of similarities and overlap there for sure.So, Brian, to Bob's point, you gave us so many rabbit holes to go down, first and foremost that maybe it was shaped by your mom and her background as a nurse with that service mindset. Was it the events around 9/11 and your time in DC and seeing it through that lens that led you to the Navy? Talk to us about that.Brian Ferguson: You guys may have gone through this, you're going through it, or you will, but I  suspect that all of us have this natural arc of our own evolution where we then are more curious about where we came from, and there's the people who get into genealogy and family heritage. Maybe it's because my daughter's now two and I want to be able to explain to her more.I also had loss in my family. My father passed this spring, and he was the last of my family. And so, there's this legacy element of really wanting to know that legacy or the longer story there. And so, as a result, I've been digging in on this. And I think to your question, Michael, part of it was my mom, for sure, and seeing her in the service mindset, but my brother and I were very fortunate. Our [00:10:00] grandfather, we were very close to my dad's dad, and he served in World War II as a Naval officer on the USS Dayton. And then my mom's dad, we never met, he passed before I was born, but this is crazy. I just found this out.So, I always knew growing up that he had been a fighter pilot. He had flown the P 51 Mustang. But what I didn't know is that he actually was this very rare mission set, which was long range reconnaissance. So, he would fly from Iwo Jima and escort bombers to mainland Japan. And these were eight-hour missions at sometimes negative 60 degrees in the cockpits. These guys that have three layers of long underwear on, they couldn't move when they got back because their bodies were cramping so badly. So, my grandfather had this insane, really rare mission set. And so that whole story was part of the lore of our family.But it wasn't talked about in detail. It was just that my grandpa flew planes in World War II, and then three of my uncles, my mom's brothers – my mom was one of nine – three of my uncles were in Vietnam. And two of them were, one in particular was in very heavy combat in [inaudible]. And so again, that was just a big part of the story, we were close to our families, our cousins.So, I think all of that in the aggregate was what led me there. It's funny, I was just in the spirit of going through a lot of my dad's belongings. I found a bunch of newspapers that I had saved as a kid. And I saved a whole series from, if you guys remember, the coast of a war in 1998. And I remember at high school, I think I was a senior just being fascinated by statecraft and geopolitics and decisions of consequence like this war happening in what seemed to me to be a part of the world and understand. So, all of that stuff led me to college where I was very fortunate to have some professors who kind of stoked that flame a little bit.And so, by the time I got to that internship at the white house, I was just mesmerized [00:12:00] by the complexity and magnitude of decisions that had to be made for a nation or a set of nations and that kind of environment. And then I think to maybe finish that thought, if I'm being honest, I was drawn into service. My brother went into the army and my brother had a very illustrious career in the army. And I had looked at West Point when I was in high school. And I had the foresight to recognize that military academy was not for me, but because I saw what was happening in 9/11 and then I worked in the white house and the Pentagon in that era, I had always thought that was going to [inaudible] my desire to serve, but I always felt like I was in an air conditioned building, safe while my peers and my brother were out actually deployed. And there's a powerful story about a stranger who said to me, “Brian, if that's something you want to do until you go do it, you'll be inherently dissatisfied with the rest of your life.”I would say the best advice I've gotten in my life has been from strangers and that notion of being inherently dissatisfied because I didn't get to where the nation's cloth was something I knew I couldn't live with. So, I was 28 when I was about as late as you can be to join. Bob Wierema: So was that what made that turning point to make you go join? Was it that conversation with that stranger, as you mentioned? Brian Ferguson: It was a big part of it. I had the short version intern in the white house that turned into my first job which was incredibly fortunate, but I just didn't care for politics in that intense sense. And I was really lucky to go over to the Pentagon where there's still politics, but at the end of the day, the thing I love about national security in the military is that there really is a higher order of good that people attempt to pursue, whether you agree with it or not, it's more pragmatic. And I really enjoyed that environment. And so, a lot of those people I worked around at that time became either people who were mentors for me, that I looked up to and took their advice. I think if I'm being honest, I didn't have the courage to let go of that career and take the risk of going into the military. And so that [00:14:00] stranger just being totally clear with me and telling me what I needed to hear was probably the final straw where I was coming out of grad school, I was looking at going into investment banking, and I realized that anything I go do, I'm going to continue to come back to this desire. So, yeah, that was probably the final straw. Michael Moore: So then from that moment, Brian, into being in the Navy, with your brother being in the army, how did you go about making that decision or did the Navy find you? Brian Ferguson: I actually, I was incredibly fortunate because I was working in the Pentagon, so I had access to just about all the information, advice, and resources you'd want. I was very close to joining the Marine Corps. At that point in my life, I'd seen enough where I knew I wanted to be able to deploy in – the term is used as combat arms. So, you can go into the military and maybe go work in space or in intelligence, I wanted to be able to deploy potentially in a combat environment. And so, the Marine Corps was the fastest way to do that. The Marine Corps played a massive role in the conflict over the last 20 years. And at the time you can go in very quickly that the Marine Corps is very good at getting people in quickly.The army, on the other hand, part of what I wanted to do in the military, in the army, it would have taken me a lot longer to get there. And then frankly, I've always been drawn to the . My hometown is on Lake Erie and I just loved the maritime element. And because I'd been in the Pentagon, I saw the strategic thinking of senior Navy leaders.A friend of mine always talks anecdotally about this. If  you're a commander of a ship in the Navy, you're out at sea in this little piece of real estate you're responsible for that has real strategic capability globally. So, you have to learn to think strategically. And I just saw that in Naval leaders and so culturally, I was drawn to the Navy and then the part of the military I wanted to go into, I loved the idea of doing that in a maritime environment. And so, it was,  probably a three-year Odyssey of getting there. I looked at the air force. I was kind of all over the map, but really close to joining the Marine Corps.And then [00:16:00] got lucky and got into the Navy. Michael Moore: And so, if you're willing to share, seven years is a long time. Can you tell us about some of the defining moments in the Navy and things that you were a part of and witnessed? Brian Ferguson: Yeah. It's interesting because it's funny for me to hear you say that Michael, because seven years in the context of the military is often short.You get guys and gals who will do 30 years, and that's not uncommon and some of my good friends now that I work with or people who did 25 or 30, but it was definitely, I would say unequivocally, it was the most consequential and formative period of my life. Of everything, from character to understanding myself and potential.I think I was really fortunate to serve in the special operations community. And if you think about that moment in time, post seven(?), the role that community played in the conflicts overseas in Afghanistan, Iraq, I sort of walked into this culture where I was literally standing on the shoulders of giants because that reputation that special operations has benefited from, all of these guys who preceded me had built.And so, I came in in 2008, 2009, and that reputation has really been solidified and there was this amazing community. So, I always felt really humbled and privileged. It is without a doubt in terms of character, in terms of the type of people you're proud to be around, I will never be in a richer environment that way and wanting to be better pushing oneself. But I think if you go into the military any capacity, but I found particularly the training environment I was in, I would say the first part of that is being in training. You learn that if you believe in something bigger for the right reasons, you can transcend what you're capable of, and most of us don't realize that in our lives.And so, when you're exposed to that in a raw way, when someone forces you to see, my friend uses the term, ‘what's at the bottom of your own well', it's the most powerful, liberating part of the human experience [00:18:00] that a lot of people don't push, and you don't have to do it in the military. You can do it in a whole bunch of other realms, but that for me – another friend and teammate of mine always says that when you go through that type of training, you're a completely different person and the same person all at once. And it's so true because from a character and a personality perspective, you're the same, but you've suddenly seen what you're capable of in the world. And it's hard to live any differently once you've been exposed to that.  And then from a deployment perspective, I had two deployments and both of them were relatively, I would say, low key compared to what most people know, or a lot of my buddies experienced in special operations. And the time that I came in and ended up deploying 2012, 2014, things were really calming down at that point. We were no longer in Iraq. And so, it was an interesting time where this community that had been so postured for very intense operational tempo was moving back into an almost non-war posture. But any person I meet who's thinking about the military, if that's on your mind, there's just nothing like it in terms of experiences, skillsets, and just the things you're exposed to.Bob Wierema: I was going to ask for some of our listeners, when you made that transition, and obviously it was a big decision for you to go and do that, there's folks out there thinking about doing it. How would you, if you look back, how would you educate or guide them on making that decision of, do you go or do you not go?Brian Ferguson: It's interesting because these things, if I think about myself, I don't make decisions. I wouldn't say I was a person who knew this idea of making decision from the heart. I'm probably overly analytical, tend to over intellectualize things. That one for me, because it was something I felt in my gut for so long, it was just being honest with myself. And there's this simple question of, ‘if I didn't do this, what would that mean?' And I had seen enough people who didn't [00:20:00] do it, that I knew I couldn't live the life I wanted to, without at least committing. And interestingly there's a book called The Alchemist by a guy named Paulo Coelho.I just read that at that moment in time. And it was one of those books that spoke to me, almost. I keep a running list of my favorite quotes and I've got like three or four long passages from that book that are so profound because it almost sounds cliche and trite, but in life, it comes down to follow your heart. I mean, stay true to a value system and a North star and it's not about just being a hedonist and doing what you want, but one of my favorite authors Ayn Rand too – wrote the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged – one of her quotes is, “why is it that we tell people it's bad to do what we want because there really is nothing harder, truly harder than doing what we truly want in life?”It's not the thing that is just the easy, today I feel like going out and drinking rather than fulfilling some responsibility, but like the deeper, what is my life meaning? Can I go pursue that? It's actually really hard. And so, The Alchemist for me opened up that if you don't at least pursue this journey, your heart is always going to wonder. And that was powerful for me. Bob Wierema: It's so funny because I think it goes within anything you do, right? The comfortable or easy decision would have been for you to stay and do what you were doing. Right. I think a lot of people don't follow their heart because it's more comfortable not to, it's easier not to. And I think  you made the comment earlier on, if you believe in something bigger, you can transcend what you think you're capable of, and to have that type of mindset – that's just incredible to get that because I think we miss out on a lot of opportunity in our lives if we're not thinking big, if we're not trying to push to that next level. I always say to my fiancé, I don't want to live a life of mediocrity. I can't have that. [00:22:00] That's not going to give me the fulfillment I'm looking for in life.Michael Moore: I was just going to say to that point, because I completely agree. Back to this advice that you were given by this stranger that literally changed the path of the life you were on,  growing up were told not to talk to strangers, but I think at a certain point you gained so much raw truth.I'm the guy that is going to talk to you on the airplane. You find when you don't know somebody, the advice that you get is raw and true because they have no preconceived notions of who you are or what you would want the answer to be because they know you really well. So, thank you for that insight.I think this can help us transition to the business side, the point you made on seven years not being long in the military. You're exactly right. I think being in the business world like Bob and I are, seven years – especially for the generation below us – is a lifetime in any type of industry. So, you have a lot of different jobs in seven years to ultimately get you to where you want to be. And so, before we jump into Arena Labs, if you guys are good transitioning, there were a lot of steps after the military to get you to Arena Labs in this passion mission that you're on.Can you dive into that for us?Brian Ferguson: Absolutely. I want to just quickly put a period, Bob, on your talking earlier of the notion of how do we make those hard decisions? And one of the things I've learned is that like anything, that's a muscle to be exercised, the ability to lean into something uncomfortable. I'm amazed even now. It's something I have to really be aware of when I'm resisting something, or I know something's the right move. And I think living authentically, I really believe it's the hardest thing to do in the world. To be honest with yourself and your [00:24:00] relationships. But it's a muscle to be exercised.I think it's something we think about intentionally with raising our daughter now, but in society, when you get comfortable and in particular from perception perspective, if things are good, it's really hard to leave that from an ego aspect. So, there's a whole separate discussion there, but it's been on my mind a lot lately.Michael, to your question, so when I left the military, one of the things I was really privileged with was I worked with this leader who was an extraordinary leader in special operations. And I was in Hawaii in a unit that focused mainly underwater and when you decide to leave, you tend to have a 12-month glide slope where you're no longer operational and guys who've been in for 30 years really need to use that time to figure out how am I going to acclimate to the world and the other side of this?And that's called military transition. There's an entire, fortunately, body and ecosystem of organizations that have sprung up in the last 15 years to support people who are leaving and their families. But because I had been a civilian before and had a life and came in later, I knew roughly I was going to go out and I wanted to work in the human performance, human potential space.So I used that last year to focus on building an innovation cell that was looking at how we bring emerging technology into special operations, and how do we do that particularly to amplify human performance? And in the course of that, I was in touch with a whole bunch of unlikely partners. Some of them in the private sector, some in national laboratories, DARPA. But being from Cleveland, Ohio, I was back in home in Cleveland, just visiting for the holidays. And I was put in touch with the heart surgeon, and the Cleveland Clinic heart and vascular institute has been ranked number one in the world for 26 years in a row now, when it comes to heart care. Doing anything at number one in the world for 26 years is doing something right. And even growing up in Cleveland, when the city was struggling, that was sort of the shining star. So, I reached out to this heart surgeon and I sent him an email.I went on [00:26:00] the list of 15 heart surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic. And I just got lucky. I reached out to this guy named Doug and he invited me in and so I said, “hey, here's the stuff I'm working on. I would love to know what you guys think. Interestingly, heart surgery is very similar to special operations. You have a group of eight to 12 people working in a life and death, high pressure, time constrained environment. And there's a lot of technology and that team has to come together around the mission and technology”, and I wanted to see how they were thinking about it. So, I reached out to Doug. He has me in for breakfast. We have a really fascinating conversation about teams and culture and technology. He brings me into his operating room. I watched him do a couple of heart surgeries. And on one hand I would say I was blown away by the technological advancement of the number one institution in the world in heart care. But on the other hand, I was astounded that there was no conversation at the individual or the team level about pressure, stress, burnout. How do you perform and communicate in a crisis when things go wrong? What do you do? All of these things that you could be in any part of the military, they're almost 101 and that are also very prominent and prevalent in sport and the creative arts, they just were missing.And so that really was this epiphany moment for me. There's a great opportunity here, and this is a really cool area that needs help. And that was the seed that began a sequence of events, Michael, that eventually led to founding Arena Labs. Michael Moore: So, what's it like going in cold and seeing a heart surgery like that?Brian Ferguson: I think different people have different reactions. I'm always very humble about my own background. I've never been to medical school. I'll never have to go to nursing school. I always find being in the operating room humbling number one, to just see the advancement of human beings – we can put someone to sleep for eight hours and open up their chest and do surgery on their heart or their brain or their leg. It's just, that's fascinating. Again, you realize how advanced we are as a society. And then I personally, I find heart surgery to be almost a divine [00:28:00] experience, to see the human heart beating or up close and to see someone operating on it and saving a life. It's just a very sacred thing.So, it's never lost on me whenever I have the privilege of being in the operating room. It's really powerful. Bob Wierema: Do you still go in the operating room then today?Brian Ferguson: So the way that we built the company is around that whole concept I just told you about, which was, “hey, there's this Delta that exists, what if we were to bring the tools, training, and technology that other high pressure disciplines use – whether that's from the military, from sport or the creative arts – what if we brought that body of knowledge into healthcare?”That became the basis of our company, and we call that high performance medicine. The first part of the business was a services business, where we brought people who had those backgrounds, and we would embed them alongside medical teams in the operating room. And so, we would watch surgery and then we'd interview people.And of course, we're not looking at the technical side of surgery, like, “how well are you performing here?” We're looking at what happens before, when things go wrong, what does that culture look like? What happens afterward? What are the rituals, the protocols, the team dynamics? And we would aggregate that into a set of observations that then we would use to help hospitals build what we called surgical performance programs.And so, if you're running a hospital, generally right now one of the biggest issues you're dealing with is burnout. So, people who are stressed, who are overworked, who don't understand how to navigate this really difficult career. And you're also trying to figure out – you've probably mastered the technical skill if you're a place like the Cleveland Clinic – but no one's really thought about human factors and how do you help people actually lead teams and serve on teams that are high pressure? And so surgical performance programs bring all of that knowledge and help hospitals implement it. Bob Wierema: I guess I've never thought about it like that. You're talking and my head's going, “yeah, that team has to be such a high functioning [00:30:00] team working together. There can't be  nuances between team members or someone pulling the team down because if there's a little slip up – here in my world, right? The slip up here, it's not life-changing. Yours, in that world, could be. There's a ton of pressure that comes with that.Brian Ferguson: And what's interesting, Bob is that the world I came out of, and special operations as an example, usually at a minimum you're with the same team for two years. And in that two-year 24 months cycle, roughly 18 months are spent training together, understanding. And so, when you're on night vision, there you go, you can tell someone just by their silhouette, how they walk, you get to know people in a very intimate way. What's amazing about medicine, even at a place like the Cleveland Clinic, is it's not uncommon for a surgeon to get in the room and never have met someone on his team for that day. So there's a whole separate challenge, and that's that isn't changing in medicine anytime soon. And so, the question becomes, if you're going to serve on any team, how do you control for culture so that when people show up, they may have never worked together, but they're all on the same page about what's the standard of performance? How do we cultivate trust quickly?How do we get people to understand back to this idea of transcending what you're capable of? This is why it's so important to believe in something bigger, because people then want to serve. They want to do their best to serve that mission, and a lot of times that's lost in healthcare and those are some of the things that we start to help hospitals think about.Michael Moore: You know, Brian, we talk leading up to this podcast when we're getting to know each other, and unfortunately, I have a little bit of experience in trauma centers in ICUs just with my mom and my wife's mom. And to your point, you've got situations and decisions that have to be made in a split second that either create longevity [00:32:00] or wind things up and then that, for whatever reason, always seems to happen in the middle of the night. And then you've got this super stressed out family that's just looking for answers and has been thrown into this and doesn't understand. So, the pressure on those frontline workers from the surgeon all the way down to the person just coming to buy and reading a chart is just a level of stress that most people don't understand. And so, give us some more insight into how Arena Labs works. What's the DNA and how does it deliver results? Brian Ferguson: You're keying in on  the things that we think are most important. One is if each year, Time magazine does a person of the year, you may have seen that, and last month they had the three finalists for the person of the year, one of which was frontline medical workers. And the proposed cover of that magazine was this amazing set of images of all of these frontline staff. You guys have seen I'm sure some of these pictures – because they're wearing personal protective equipment for so long, it's literally imprinting these marks on their face and they just look exhausted. It's just powerful imagery. And so, you think about that in the context of dealing with COVID and all of the emotional challenges you've heard about, of people having to say goodbye on Zoom and a nurse holding up a phone in the room. It's super intense stuff. And you think about, as you're bringing up Michael, the ICU or trauma, and when our team was observing, we were at a level one trauma center in Washington, DC, but we were in there on a Saturday night at one o'clock in the morning. And this is typically when you have, because of people being out of bars, et cetera, you get a lot of trauma. And at one time there were two people in there screaming and another person moaning. And just hearing that, as I was standing there, I thought ‘it's insane what this does to the human emotion and cortisol levels'. And what's crazy is if you were to observe that and you think about this whole body of knowledge that's come out of the [00:34:00] military in the last 15, 20 years about post-traumatic stress and about the implications of people who are in very high stressed, emotional environments, either combat or otherwise, we've put a massive amount of resources into helping those people. And yet we ask these trauma nurses and ICU nurses and physicians to go home and have dinner with their families. And no one thinks twice about it because they're not deployed. So, we think about this as the environment is different. You might not be deploying overseas to Afghanistan or Iraq, but you are doing consequential heavily emotional work that has a chronic element of stress.And when you look at the implications of chronic stress on human beings, that leads to higher levels of cortisol over time, not being able to focus, not being able to sleep. There's a second and third order, long-term impact that has, so to answer your question, what do we do? When we initially were building the business, the first three years were what I just described as we were running a services business. We were embedding in hospitals and we are helping those hospitals build not only a program around performance in these human factors. Things like, it's one thing to say that we want our operating rooms to run on time. It's another to think about what's the leadership structure in place here? How are we training the leaders who have to run those operating rooms so that they can make decisions and be clear and connect that into a culture? And so, it's implementing all of these elements that allow that human system to do what it does best and then focus on the individual, giving that individual tools around, what does it mean to get good sleep? What does it mean to recover after a stressful day? How do I decompress on the weekend? What we were finding is that as you guys well know, in the services businesses, it's really important for human touch, but it's not scalable and it can be daunting. And I don't think starting with scale is ever the right approach for a startup. But what we started to realize is we weren't reaching enough people and in the dynamic nature of healthcare, it's tough to get in front of people in the right way. So COVID completely killed our business in March, our services business literally evaporated [00:36:00] because we could no longer go into hospitals alongside frontline medical teams. Most hospitals still, if you're not essential personnel, you can't go in.And so that was a blessing for us because classically, we had to say, “okay, we know there's a demand signal for what we're doing here. And actually, it's heightened because of COVID”. And we took three-and-a-half years of learning and we created a content and a data business. So, what we've built is a platform that takes all of the learnings and teachings of our team and our performance ambassadors and it's now built into a series of three pillars. A pillar around the individual, learning about how to be a high performer in healthcare, how to manage sleep and stress, how to optimize interactions with your teammates. And then there's a second pillar on how do you serve on a team that's high pressure in a life and death environment? And the third then is how do I lead and manage in that environment? And so that's all offered digitally, but while you're on our platform, we have a partnership with a company called Whoop, and so you have a wearable sensor that's gathering biometric data on your sleep, on your stress, in your recovery.And so, the things we're teaching you, you're actually getting personalized feedback on that topic. And you're starting to learn how to not only understand yourself in terms of these critical biomarkers, but what that means in the context of recovering and flourishing over the course of a career. And then we take all of that data and most importantly, we now give that to hospital leaders and surgical leaders so that they can for the first time actually see what their team looks like in terms of stress and recovery and be smarter about how they allocate human capital train and let people recover. Bob Wierema: Brian, I want to go back to the Whoop piece. Because I was thinking, are they wearing that throughout the day? And then you're actually taking  not only monitoring sleep and things like that, but also how they are in a surgery or a certain environment within the hospital?Brian Ferguson: Exactly. So, any of these devices is on 24/7. One of the things that we know, we [00:38:00] want to understand acute events, meaning if something really goes wrong in surgery and it's super stressful, the reality is that those events, particularly for veterans of medicine, are not as common as you'd think. If you or I go into the operating room, it feels stressful, but that's become fairly normal, they have acclimatized to that.What we're trying to understand is the chronic implications of being in a high stress environment over time. And so, it's equally important to understand what does the weekend look like? One of the things we learned early on is if you have a really stressful week, your weekend isn't relaxed. There's a residual effect of that stress on your weekend. And that bleeds into interactions with your family. Interestingly, when I was in the special operations community, we were going through this massive Renaissance that was the same thing, because what we realized was that guys were deploying at very high operational tempos on reverse circadian rhythms.So, they were operating at night, awake during the day. They weren't getting enough sleep. They were in high stress environments. So, their cortisol levels were spiked. And with all of that, then they'd come home and try to reintegrate into this family environment. And it was creating this real challenge. And so, a whole sequence of events happens from the stuff we're doing around educating things like sleep, how to optimize your actual sleep hygiene and your environment you sleep in,  all the way down to how does your family understand this so that your family is aware of the realities of your job and how best to maximize recovery time. That over the course of a decade then led to this very sophisticated organization. So, what we're looking to do in healthcare is that same phenomena.Let's start with the basics of getting people educated and increasingly give them tools so they can be smarter and feel more empowered and more agency. Michael Moore: Brian, with the crossroad and defining moment that occurred when COVID hit and business as normal did not exist because you couldn't go in there and you pivot, it hadn't been a lot of times since that happened, right? That was March. [00:40:00] But in that time, what KPIs and ROIs, what has come out of that now that you're implementing it in a different way? What are you seeing?Brian Ferguson: Number one - I think even this gets into Bob's point earlier – the things about we get comfortable and we know something isn't working, we need to change. If I'm being honest, we have built a reasonably comfortable business. It was a services business, but number one, I was increasingly unhappy because I was on a plane all the time, I was in hospitals. And more importantly, I was like, “we're not getting the data we need here. What I'm realizing is that on one hand, people leaders in healthcare are saying their number one issue is burnout, and yet the only way burnout is measured is self-reported surveys. So that's super problematic. We don't actually have data to understand what does burnout mean? How do we recognize it early?” So, the first set of KPIs, Michael, is we for the first time actually have data at scale on teams and medicine. You could go to most hospitals in the United States right now and ask them, “what is the overall state of health? How rested is your team?” They would have no idea, but if you go to the Cleveland Brown, you go to an NFL team, you go to a Cirque de Soleil, there are elite performing artists. This is stuff that's seen as essential. If you want those people to last and flourish and be around, and it's not a big investment, it's just saying this is a priority. So, for us, what happened is for the first time we started getting data on heart rate and what's someone's HRV? HRV ends up being this amazing predictor of how stressed someone is. Just from feedback and qualitative surveys we're for the first time starting to get data around how does a critical event, how is that perceived across the team? And then how does that correlate to the biomarkers in that team? Did they not sleep as well? So, we're starting to get a data picture that we can use to correlate this massive [00:42:00] endemic problem in healthcare which is burnout, and give hospitals a proactive posture, rather than just saying, “this is a huge problem. What do we do?” Bob Wierema: Brian, when you say that, so I'm going through this a little bit right now. And I'm in just the business world, right? I'm in sales and one of the things I've been spending a lot of my time on lately. So, my fiancé's a professional ballerina – going back to your sports analogy – I was talking to her and she obviously has to be in phenomenal shape and do all these certain things and COVID put a damper on that. So, what can she do to stay in shape so that when things do come back, she can be at optical for performance. And then we were talking one night, and I said, "if I think of myself as an athlete, my business, what are the things that I can focus on? All I have is my mind, and then what can I drive most in my mind to keep me good? There's the stresses of business and all of these different things. How do we exercise? What's my heart rate? What's my sleep? All these things you're talking about. And I've already noticed as I'm learning this and trying new things, the little upticks in performance, or how sharp I feel that day from those little things. And it's amazing when you tell me that about a medical community, someone that we rely on to save our lives and they're not spending all that time in that area, because there's probably so many other places they can put their resources towards. And to me it seems like from talking to you that you should be spending a lot more time there to get optimal. You said amplify human performance, that's exactly where we should be spending our time with those people right?Brian Ferguson: Yeah. Michael Moore: Is that stigmatism around because medicine and trying to help – people have been born and died since the beginning of humankind. So, and you've had medical people along the way trying to figure that out. Is it because it's occurred for so long? And the expectation is that [00:44:00] especially if you're a trauma surgeon, it's going to be stressful that this key ingredient was just missing.Brian Ferguson: Yeah. I actually – see personally I've thought about this lot. I think the phenomenon is just for three reasons. But before I get into that, let me say it's really important that I foot stomp this – we are not in any way advocating that choosing a life, whether that's on the front lines of medicine or in the military, those jobs are not for everyone. Resilience and the willingness to do hard things – that's a precursor to make sure that someone can perform when it counts. So, we are never suggesting that these organizations should soften in a way that  takes care of everyone. It doesn't account for the fact that this was just a stressful career and that's part of the society. People have to do hard things. However, when I look at the state of the landscape of medicine, there's really, again, there's three avenues that I find interesting around what culture has happened.So, one is just in the modern world. Technology has advanced in a way that allows hospitals to do more with less. So, it's like the same amount of people were asking you to do more operations, just like we see in businesses, right? People are being asked to do more because technology is an amplifier, but just like we see in business, there's a toll that takes on a human system.And so, when we start to intersect human systems with advanced technologies, like artificial intelligence and big data and predictive algorithms like that, that has an impact. The second is that culturally people – it's very similar to how it is on special operations. So, in the seal community, you go through something called hell week and hell week is a week period where it's the crucible.It's sort of the defining moment in early seal training. And you are awake from Sunday evening until Friday morning. So, for five days, you're awake. You take two naps in there and those naps are critical just for the brain to essentially stay functional. But otherwise, you spend five days in a state of motion and physical activity.The purpose of that is, [00:46:00] as I said on the front end, is to show you what's at the bottom of the well. What you're actually capable of beyond what you think you're capable of. And it is an incredibly liberating experience for people who get through it. The problem then is people are falsely tricked into thinking they don't need sleep, when the reality is that sleep is the single most important performance drug we all have access to. So, then the community has to think, you have to get people to realize if you truly want to pursue mastery and be a special operator at the top of your game, taking care of yourself is paramount and you're responsible for that. And here's the tools to do it. Now that doesn't suggest that sometimes you might actually be deployed and you're not going to have the ability to sleep eight hours a night, you're gonna get two hours. And so how do you maximize that? That same cultural challenge exists in medicine. They just never addressed it. Never addressed it. I kid around that people revere hell week as this crazy crucible and it certainly is, but people who are surgical residents in medicine, these people sleep three to four hours a night for six years at a time. It's madness how hard being a surgical resident is, and what's expected of you, and how under rested you are.So, they come out of that thinking, “I don't need to sleep, sleep is for the weak. If I sleep, I'm not going to be good”. And so culturally it becomes commonplace in medicine that not taking care of yourself, not resting is seen as a sign of strength, and that has not been broken yet. It's starting to break a little more with a younger population, but the most important one, Michael, the third reason – you see this across medicine, I saw it in public service, people who are service minded, who want to give to the world, who want to do hard things and save lives, they will give of themselves and give of themselves to a fault. And they will sacrifice their own health in the process. If you don't have leaders who see that and know how to protect those people from their better angels, what it leads to is a massive human toll of people being burned [00:48:00] out. We see this in the military, you look at what was asked of young soldiers, men and women over the last two decades who were willing to give of themselves. And this is one of the reasons I'm so passionate about leadership, because if you don't think about these things, you don't think about the implications of asking people to go to war or go to the front lines of an ICU day in and day out, what you see is a human toll that you can't reverse. Michael Moore: Brian I want to ask a summary question just because you've seen it from so many angles. You've seen it from the military side. Your time in DC now, your time as a CEO and founder of a company that truly is making a difference. We thank you for that. As you look back on this last year with all the politics that we've endured, with the hit of COVID, with the beginnings of the rollout of a vaccine, from your vantage point, how do you feel about it? Score that for us. Brian Ferguson: I go in and out of this one, Michael, because I – on a personal level – I feel incredibly fortunate that number one, we've been able to navigate this and for the most part are not suffering in the way that I know a lot of people are. when you're asked a question like that, it's hard not to recognize that and just say, from a humble human perspective, whatever one thinks of this scenario, a lot of people have died, a lot of people are suffering economically. Our nation is really in a state of pain right now. When I move myself into a higher level of thinking, or I shouldn't say that – I'll zoom out. The thing that I see in all these sectors is, and I saw this in the military, there's a real tension. If you think about the organizations, the [00:50:00] institutions that govern our lives, that we rely on, that we learn in – education, the military, medicine, they're legacy structures of the 19th and 20th century, and they're not equipped for the 21st century. And that tension is only accelerating.And so, what we see is the reason I personally think that having worked in government and in politics and in the military, those organizations have a beautiful legacy that we're all proud of, but they don't work in the 21st century. They can't move fast enough. You see it in election cycles, you see it in defense deployments. One day we're worried about viruses in a lab in China. The next day, we're worried about a threat from the cyber realm in Russia, and the speed of the change, our institutions can't keep up. And so, in a weird way, I've always felt like everything going on in the world is symptomatic of that creative destruction that needs to happen.I am an optimist in that I think we are as a human society, in a collective society, are going to have to evolve into new structures. I would be lying if I figured out what those are, but I'm not someone who's a post-nationalist who believes in this sort of global environment, nation states are still going to need to exist. I just don't know what the structures are that are gonna allow us to flourish? But I think right now we're seeing a breakdown that is a natural product of Moore's law (?), technological advancement, and all of the complexity that creates. And the last thing I'll say is the beauty in all of it is that it's forcing us to return to the very human side of ourselves. I could sound almost cliché, but think about what the last 10 months has done for all of us. It's pushed us into a state of appreciating the human experience in the most basic way. My Christmas this year was just my wife and daughter and I, and we had nowhere to go. No obligations, no rushing around. I didn't even care about presents. And there was this presence in that existence [00:52:00] that I think is beautiful and that's where the moment in time, that goes way back. I do think that that is the blessing in all of this. Bob Wierema: Brian, do you think that – because we've talked about the social media presence and some of this and do you think there's also the other side? I think there's also the other side of our society that's so caught up in the media and social media and this isolation, I think there's going to be so many challenges with that as well. You're looking at it from the optimist view. What do you think about that flip side of the view?Brian Ferguson: It's a great point. And I would agree. Actually, I was talking to a really impressive woman who's a young cardiac surgeon and having this discussion, and she was saying that we still don't really have data on what social media does to the brain and to the human experience, the longitudinal. There's that the movie you guys may have seen called The Social Dilemma, which talks a bit about the neuroscience of social media. I will tell you what I've said from day one is look, first and foremost I am not in government right now, and it's always easy. It's why my company is called Arena Labs and the namesake of our business comes from the Teddy Roosevelt quote that is commonly known as the ‘man in the arena' quote, but it comes from a speech he gave in 1910 called Citizenship and Republic. Roosevelt is talking to a group of leaders in France. And he's saying, “look, you are accomplished successful leaders, but you have an obligation to stay involved in society. Because it's not the critic who counts, but the man or woman in the arena marred by dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great victories of success, the great failures of defeat”.And the idea is that in life, it's easy to be on the sidelines and be a critic, but it's about people doing hard shit that really advances the world. So, I say that as a precursor, I'm not having to make hard decisions right now, but from the start, my biggest gripe in all of this has been in what one could argue is the biggest domestic crisis we faced in our lifetime, [00:54:00] full of stress. We have asked people to stay inside and in doing so they're consuming news. They're getting more stressed. They're not active, they're drinking more. And we're seeing higher rates of depression, and the psychosomatic impact of asking people to sit inside for a year of their lives and not interact with human beings – I'm seeing that play out in close friends, family. I think we have undervalued the implications of that from the beginning of this. I recognize there's not an easy solution, but that has been my biggest concern from the start. Michael Moore: That's a great point. I guess probably just because it was leading up to the end of the year and people are reflecting, you just heard it over and over again. “I'm so glad 2020 is going to be in the rear-view mirror”. Unfortunately, this isn't just a 2020 problem. Bob and I have talked a lot on this podcast about 2020 being such a defining moment of the old economy and the new economy, and what is that really going to look like? So, I think we would really appreciate the opportunity maybe towards the end of 2021 to bring you back on and just get another rear-view mirror look from where you're seeing things and what your company and technology and the frontline workers are going through because it's not going away, but it's people like you that are passionate about it coming up with out of the box ideas that are certainly gonna get that back headed in the right direction.So, both of us really appreciate what you're doing. Brian Ferguson: Well, that means a lot. I will quote another person I looked up to when I was little, which is the great Arnold Schwartzenegger who when asked, said, he's a self-made man. He's like, I'm the furthest thing from being self-made. And I'll tell you, the reason I feel so fortunate, guys like Michael Davidson, these people who've been massively influential on my journey in our team right now at Arena. [00:56:00] The amount of people who are involved in this mission, I just feel super humbled. So, it's always awkward coming on a podcast representing myself, but definitely part of a way bigger mission, which I'm super grateful for.Michael Moore: Well, we like to ask a question and it kind of ties in with – we may have to ask you if we can borrow it, I love that visual of seeing what's at the bottom of your own well. So, the question really is going to be what's at the bottom of your well? But the way that we have asked it historically has been, there's that saying of, it's not what you know, it's who you know, and then we turn it around and say, it's not who you know, it's who knows you.So, using this podcast as a medium, whether it's future business for Arena Labs, whether it's your daughter and wife, what do you want people to know about Brian Ferguson? Brian Ferguson: I think at the end of the day, it's a very sincere life dedicated to being authentic around the things I believe in. And I work really hard for the person I am publicly to be the person I am privately.And I don't think that's always easy in today's world. It's often convenient to have two different archetypes. When I was young, a senior in high school, I got in trouble. I was on one hand a leader in my class and my community, and I got in trouble for this big party. And my mom was very wise about it. She's like, “right now you're two different people and at some point, you need to make a decision on who you want to be”. And three years later, when I was graduating college, my grandmother gave me a list of her favorite quotes. The top of which was “character is what you are in the dark”. And so, for me, I really want to live a life of virtue and be someone who contributes to society and serves and is a phenomenal mentor and role model for my daughter.That, I believe, starts with being the person I say I am as much publicly as I am privately. And so, for me that I always bucket [00:58:00] into authenticity, and I just want to be authentic in how I engage with my friends, people I work with, the ideas in the world, and that is actually really difficult because it requires a lot of work. It requires having to let go of a lot of things and make hard decisions. So it is humbly being authentic, or humbly pursuing authenticity. Michael Moore: I love that. It's all of it. It's career, it's family, it's what we're deciding. I lost my dad about a month ago, and 15 days after he passed away I got a letter in the mail that he had instructed his wife to send me.And it was just an amazing way of him communicating from the other side and saying I'm still going to be here. Because I was looking for that spiritually, before I was going to bed at night or tucking my daughters in and saying prayers, I was looking for “Dad, how are we going to communicate and continue? Because I've still got a lot to learn from you. And in that letter, he said, you are transitioning from being old in the young part of your life to being young in the old part of your life. I think that's what we're all going through right now is that we've done a lot of cool things. We've accomplished a lot or successful in life and love and business, but what are we going to do with that now? And so, your story today defines that. It's why Bob and I are so passionate about this podcast and just thank you for sharing. Bob Wierema: Yeah. Thank you, Brian. It's been awesome. I've learned a ton from you today, so I appreciate it.Brian Ferguson: Yeah. Again, it's humbling when guys like you ask me to come have a conversation, you're never quite sure what you might add, but I really appreciate it. Michael, I appreciate you sharing that story. Just as a closing thought here, when you deploy in the [01:00:00] military, you often you write a letter before you leave in the event you don't come back. But the idea of doing that proactively for one's kids and survive, I just love that. It's something, I just speak volumes about your own DNA and where you come from, but that it's going to take to talk to the back of my mind. And it's just such an awesome way to, to think about your own life and passing something on.No, I love that, man. I appreciate you sharing that. Michael Moore: Yeah. I mean, if the whole notion is, you know, put others before yourself, I mean, here he is battling ALS. He knows it's terminal. He knows he's got a certain amount of time and he's got the wherewithal to dictate a letter to me and my brother and my stepsister for that very purpose. It's just talking about defining moments. That's the kind of person I certainly want to be and the daughters I certainly want to raise. So again, thank you for your time and sharing. And this has been fantastic. Bob Wierema: We're going to have you back next year. Around the same time, we appreciate it. This was definitely a super enjoyable conversation.  Brian Ferguson: It was great to meet you. Michael Moore: Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of The Climb. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider subscribing. And if you know someone who you would think would enjoy the podcast, feel free to share this with them. Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode. 

Connect with Michael Moore and Bob WieremaThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with Brendan DeelyGabriel's Light: https://www.gabrielslight.org/Brendan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bdeely/Banner Solutions: https://bannersolutions.com/TheClimb_BrendanDeely[00:00:00] Brendan Deely: Let me tell you a problem. You go from 2.6 billion to 1.1 billion in a year in sales. That's a problem. Bob Wierema: Wow. Brendan Deely: That was a problem. So, we had to go from 5,500 people to 2,100, close a hundred facilities, and just try to stop the cash burn. And so that was the business – fight or flight. I'm all in and it said online, the Dragon Slayer, you ever see that Teddy Roosevelt speech  about people just basically saying, “if I die, I'm going to die knowing that at least I was in the arena.” All these naysayer and bullshit sideliners who don't do anything. Bob Wierema: Welcome to The Climb: Crossroads and Defining Moments. Today, Brendan Deely joins Michael and myself for conversation about business, about his family, about some of his personal trials and tribulations and how he got through them.Brendan's an amazing friend of mine, a mentor, and just a hell of a guy. You're definitely going to enjoy this episode of The Climb. Thanks for joining us.Brandon Deely, welcome to The Climb. We appreciate you joining Michael and me today. Brendan Deely: And to be here. Bob Wierema: You know, this is a fun one for me. Brendan, you and I started in working together through business and since, it's turned into a personal relationship. That means a lot to me in a lot of different ways. We'll talk about that a little bit, but I think a good way to kind of kick things off is giving us the overview of who is Brendan Deely? Brendan Deely: Well, thanks Bob. It's been a hell of a relationship that we've built and continue to build. I'm glad to be here and tell you a little bit about me and maybe how I think about [00:02:00] things.So, Brendan Deely, I'm a husband, and I'm a father to five first and foremost. I really liked building things, businesses, teams, to good outcomes. I don't have all the answers and I don't want to. And so, I think it's how do you leverage people? How do you deal with things truthfully? And I think I've learned over the years that it's just hit things head on and be real and there's always a way out, and to never, ever give up, I think I've found out over time that there's that fight or flight. I don't run. And I think I always want to win. I don't always win, but God damnit I go into everything wanting to kick ass and win. And so, there's just a mentality. I see people that just meander through their careers and  just incredibly boring for me. I think the only thing you'd do to wreck a business is do nothing. Michael Moore: Sounds like he's got a little Texas in him. Bob Wierema: I was hoping that we were going to be able to avoid the Texas comment, but it took all of about two minutes for it to come into the conversation from Michael. Michael Moore: Just born and bred, baby. Brendan Deely: I was born an army brat. I was an army captain for a couple of years. And then I've been in kind of building materials for 30 years almost. So, some of those toolkits have helped me kind of move through my career. Bob Wierema: When you're an army brat, Brendan, as you say, what does that mean? Were you guys traveling a lot when you were a kid, were you guys all over the place? Give maybe a little background there and growing up in that type of world? Brendan Deely: I was the youngest of six, and we're six and a half years apart, so good Irish stock. So [00:04:00] my dad did three tours in Vietnam. I didn't really know him until I was five. Didn't have that as a problem, but it just what it was. I was born in the U.S., moved to Germany, moved to Brazil, moved to Panama, left the U.S. when I was three, came back when I was 12, 13. I don't watch a lot on TV because of that, because it was never in my language.And I think if you're in an environment where you move a lot as a kid, I think you're going to go two paths: introvert or extrovert. And so, I've always found it pretty easy to talk to people. I've always found when you moved into a new place, you meet the dorks first because they're starving for friends, and then you move it forward. But I mean, I didn't know any different, but I think that's helped me. When I went to college, it was kind of a non-event, but the people that lived in their same town just went crazy, I had my versions of fun too, but it's a good background. And I think it gives me a perspective that most Americans don't realize that there's other countries that have far worse issues, and we have two sons adopted from Ethiopia. So, it's just the whole perspective is healthy. I think a lot of times people see poor countries and they're frankly, some of the happiest people I've met because they don't have anything but faith and  food. We can break an ATM card and everybody's triggered for a day.So, it's just keeping balanced, I think is good. Bob Wierema: You mentioned you're one of six. So where is everybody today? And were you close brothers and sisters? You mentioned some people down in Texas.Brendan Deely: My mother's still alive. She's 86 in Philly. My twin sister is in Philadelphia as well. And then I have a sister and a brother in the Dallas area. And then two brothers outside of DC in Virginia. So, we've gone West [00:06:00] as it were, but still very close. And it was kind of cool with you're a kid when you move in – I had three older brothers. I'm six foot. They're both six foot four. So, we came in, we took over the neighborhood. We had every kind of coverage. And if you want to bug me, I got some big guys behind me. It was pretty cool, but it was really close now. But one of the things that's come out of this whole COVID gong show is we do a weekly zoom calls with my mother, with all of us. So, it's how you do immediate bingo with my wife's mother and family.We never did that, so we're talking a hell of a lot more than and seeing each other more than we ever did. So, there's always good that comes out of bad. Bob Wierema: And then you mentioned you did some time in the army, right? Was that after college? Before? Where did that fall in that spectrum?Brendan Deely: It was after college. I went to ROTC. I had a four-year scholarship and I went to basic training when I was 18. So, I was in the reserves while I was in school, but I got commissioned in 1988 and I'm an infantry officer and – at 22 years old – here's 40 guys for you to take care of.Well, okay. They're all mostly older than me, but  had some good success. I was stationed at Fort Bragg and then Fort Drum and then reserved for a little bit, but we were activated for desert storm. Ready to go, and I was a company commander at the time, so I had 210 people. I'm  25, 26?You do all this training and you're prepared for it – and then it gets real. Live ammo, here we go. And so, we were down at Fort Bragg, ready to go and the air war [00:08:00] hit. And then they said that the tanks and the cabin, it was basically over in two weeks. So, we didn't go. I was willing to go and, but I was okay not to go, but it was a huge amount of responsibility at 26 years old.And I think that's where I really learned. And the military is the same rank structure and organization design as it was a hundred years ago. So, I think of all the companies that dick around with organizations all the time; hospitals, military and universities are kind of stuck with what works.Throughout my career I've been leading functions or businesses where I was on the lower end of the age. But I think that's where you're going to lean on the. It's just, how do we get this thing together? And when bullets start flying are they going to shoot you or they're going to run with you? And so, it's, how do you leverage people's capabilities? I still ref soccer. I sent a message out to our team when COVID first hit. And I said, “this is like a good soccer team. It only has 11 positions. And you got to put a center midfielder and a striker position. You're going to suck. If you get the right people in the right positions, you're really going to do well”. And then the key is sometimes working with people to let them see that, “this is not really what you're best at. And I can put you in this role and give you the latitude to do what you need to do”.It's usually pretty amazing how people don't want them to be micromanaged. I'm fair, but firm in how I approach things, but I'll give you an avenue to work because – especially in business – people report to me as a CEO, they're not making 50 grand a year. They should be able to do what's necessary and if [00:10:00] they need help, reach out and I'll be there, but I just approach it that we're all adults and make a good call and adjust on the fly.They're always saying it in the military that you can come up with a plan and there's this thing called net T mission, enemy time terrain, as far as planning. And they do all the shit and then it all is great until you start moving and then you've just gotta adjust. You gotta have a plan, you gotta have a strategy, but you gotta be fluid and just keep moving. Michael Moore: So, you really feel like the training and the perspective you gained with your time in the army carries forward into your approach to business and building companies and managing teams? It seems like there's a lot of parallels there for you.Brendan Deely: I do.I think it's especially in a private equity environment, which I've been in for the last two years. I think they get a bad notion, right? So, if it's a growth equity private equity firm, and they're great, they're looking to grow the business. They're looking to invest; they're looking to us to have a strategy and to execute the strategy.And so, there's other ones that turn around, “I'm not interested in that, I want to grow businesses. I'll deal with things if I have to”, but I think it's zero failure mission all the time. We might get wounded, we might get hurt, but let's keep the end in mind and bob and weave as we need to, but we've got to deliver the goods. And so, they're getting people who see that, who feel like they're part of the solution – it is great. Because I've bought enough businesses – about 29 companies throughout my career. If there's a dominating personality running the business, I got no use for it. If you have a dominating strategy, I'd [00:12:00] rather have that over a dominating personality because there's usually weak people below them or ‘yes people' and no creativity. And so, I think that's what the military forces on people as everybody has to play a role here. And that's what I try to do in my businesses.I'm a CEO, but if I have to make all the decisions, I got the wrong people. So, I think creating an environment where it's okay to speak your mind. Actually, I want it. But if you think something's wrong, you better have a pretty good idea how to fix it. Because we're not talking world hunger, we're talking about 7% more door hardware, and it's important, but I think it's that self-reflection of let's keep things in relative perspective. Bob Wierema: Brendan when your first bigger gig, when you started buying some more businesses that was at USG, right? Brendan Deely: Correct. Yeah. And so, I was there for 26 years, great company, Chicago based. I spent 26 years there, 12 of it on the manufacturing sheet rock you've heard of before, sealing a bunch of different roles, general manager roles. I moved over to the distribution business called LNW Supply, which is now owned by ABC Supply, and I had kind of a CEO role for a couple years. And then in 2002, at 36, I took over the business and it was 900 million in revenue at the time, basically operated East of the Rockies and 2,500 employees. And it been growing mostly through Greenfield expansion over the years, it was established in 1971, but we saw a real potential to consolidate this industry. And so, we put together a plan for the board of directors, got approval and in a little over two years, we acquired 15 companies, over [00:14:00] a billion dollars' worth of revenue, and it went from 900 million in 2002 to our peak year which was 2006 at 2.6 billion. 5,500 employees – so to pull that off and integrate the systems and the people and put people in the right roles, I have a good, great HR person, great operations people, great finance, and so I think sometimes the CEO gets too much credit.So many people make this thing happen. One of the things I didn't say before, when I was 19, I worked at a drywall yard and I loaded wallboard. I drove a truck; I operated a boom and I never lost sight of that's really the business. It's not the 18th floor. And so, it's the people out there operating around power lines every day and operating safely, not hurting themselves or other people. Safety was a huge part of that business. And I think it goes back to working on a firing range and using automatic weapons. It's just, that is such a core thing.You don't fuck with people. I mean, you've got to take care of them and you gotta treat them right, but yeah, it was a great run. We got to the peak and then the recession hit.  I was telling my team recently about COVID and all this stuff, which is real. I'm going to tell you a problem.You go from 2.6 billion to 1.1 billion in a year in sales, that's a problem. Those are problems. So, we had to go from 5,500 people to 2,100. Close 100 facilities and just try to stop the cash burn. And so that was kind of the business fight or flight. I'm all in, and it said that old line the Dragon Slayer. You ever see that Teddy [00:16:00] Roosevelt speech about people? It was basically saying if I die, I'm going to die knowing that at least I was in the arena. Naysayer bullshit side liners who don't do anything. Bob Wierema: Brendan during that time, how did you keep people motivated as you shed this many people off? In that role, you're talking, “hey, the CEO gets too much credit”, but at the end of the day, I gotta imagine you gotta be there to keep people around too. Brendan Deely: You're a little bit of bipolar, I think – we were in a meeting one time, we had made an agreement as a management team that we're going to take out 700 salary positions and there's back and forth with burning cash. We're doing all this stuff and we can't do that. So, I'm like, “guys, let's agree we got fucked here and let's get over it. We have got to save this business”.And so, they were short, and I said, “look, we agreed to this thing. It's not fun, but we have to do it. We got to get to the other side, three people have to leave fairly” and it was back and forth and I said, “look, you can either do it the right way, or we're going to oracle(?) and start with the letter S and start picking names. Because my first girlfriend was Susan. We can be that arbitrary”. And I hung up the phone and they did it, and that wasn't fun, but it needed to happen. And on the other side of that, when this was going on, I traveled a lot. I wanted to be out in the field and we had 42 locations in Florida and we ended up with eight. I remember I was out in Sacramento at a big facility and they were talking about what's going on and people are always like, “oh, are you done with the restructure rooms?”(?) I'm like, “I can't tell you that. What we see now, yes. But I'm not going to sit here and tell you, I can't, I gotta be honest with you”.And there's one lady accounting [00:18:00] person. She's like, “hey, how do you deal with it? How do you deal with the stress?” And I have always found humor is a part of me, and it helps cool things down. And I said, “look, I sleep like a baby”. I wake up from two in the morning crying, and I'd wet the bed. It's like, “hey, look, we're all in this thing. We all have to be honest about it,” but I had to let friends go, but I would say we'd laid off 3,200 people. We never had labor lawsuit. So, I was proud that we treated people the best we could in a horrible time.And we also dealt with Chinese wallboard at that time. Have you guys heard about that?Bob Wierema: Yeah, I remember that. Brendan Deely: So, we're the only company who fixed every house that we shipped to. Only one, we were the only company that wasn't part of the class action suit. And so, it's really tough times. What do you stand for?What do you stand for now? I think that was a beast, but you know what? We got through a breakeven point when we came out of this thing at 60% less volume than we did before. And that's everybody getting behind it. Michael Moore: Yeah, that's efficiencies, right? Brendan Deely: It is, and we restructured the whole company.We took layers out; we had three core principles. We got to mitigate the losses. We got to prepare for the upturn, and we have to think big. It can't incrementalize our way to losing. I remember in September of 2006, we lost $18 million that month. Imagine. And the fourth thing was, how do we change the rules in this industry?And so that's one thing that I've tried to do for the last couple of [00:20:00] companies is, where are the inefficiencies in the industry? Where are the points of differentiation? And to drive price into the third sentence, not the first. Service value proposition, team, all those things, because it's wallboard, it's door hardware.There's gotta be a reason why. Insurance: why do Bob and I have the relationship we do? It's execution. You're there. It's bringing ideas. It's saving money and it's giving a shit. That's pretty easy to see. And most times you don't Michael Moore: Brendan with 29 companies that you've been a part of the acquisition, are there some key themes, takeaways, a strategy that you've now developed over time so that you deploy that now every single time? Or is everyone different? Talk to us about the lessons learned in that, because that's a big number.Brendan Deely: Yeah, I would say most of them were pretty good and I almost put them in buckets. Just tuck in and you can run it, keep most of the team, and keep going.But what we call a cornerstone acquisition where we bought a business in 2005, 600 million in revenue and in 35 locations, but really had a great team below the people that were leading so that I think that's one of the keys. If there's no talent below the seller, you got no business. The biggest mistake I made was we bought a business in an area that we wanted to be in and it was a terrible culture. I mean, total opposite around safety, around financial controls and all these things that were kind of core to us. We wanted people to be entrepreneurs, but I always tell people, you can't be an entrepreneur with somebody else's money. But I want you to have the spirit of an [00:22:00] entrepreneur, but there's no rules.And so, we bought this business which had 16 locations in the auto industry, in the early 2000s, in the crapper and got enamored by the revenue and the market share and spent four or five years restructuring and putting in a new team. And it's a fine business now. But it wasn't a good use of capital and we should have really just put the flags up. So, culture kills it every time for me. And as you need a new facility or need to upgrade the team, you can do that, but when it's just diametrically opposed to how you believe you should operate, run. There's another business out there.Bob Wierema: How do you assess that as you're going through those acquisitions? Is it just during that diligence phase, getting to know folks and going on the floor? Brendan Deely: I think once you get a handle on the people below them, or you can get at it. And in the industries that I've operated in, you know, like [inaudible] business, or Walmart business, even the door hardware is just a great business. Everybody kind of knows everybody enough. You can tap into manufacturers in a non-direct way about how they operate, a word of mouth from customers… So, it's not that you have to do psychological interviews or anything like that, but I think once you get below that team that you're dealing with them seeing if there's some chaps there, that's why the diligence phase – we do try to do HR stuff early, before close. Bob Wierema: And Brendan, when you said culture a few times throughout, in your mind, as you're building these businesses, what does foster create a culture that you see is good?Brendan Deely: I'm trying to simplify it for me, is would I want to be part of this family personally? Would I want to live in a [00:24:00] house with these people personally? If there was some inland on the counter, a hundred bucks, would they take it or not? And so it's not so much the financial side of it.  I guess the best way to put it is when you read somebody's resume, it's what they've done. But I want to know who I'm going to be working with. I've never sold a business where the growth trajectory wasn't the Nike shoe. I think it's really, who are you going to be with good times and bad? And don't expect all to be the same, and financial controls matter, doing things safely matters and taking care of your team.Bob Wierema: So, Brendan after your transition from there, why don't you talk to us a little bit about your experience and time at H Harris? Brendan Deely: So, H Harris was a business that was owned by a private equity firm in Chicago called Front Neck. And I was talking with those guys after I left L&W, taking some time and trying to figure out what I wanted to do.They had a nice approach to how they invested. They find the leader first, and then go in an industry and then they go find deals, and they had bought a company maybe a year before I got involved with them that was a multi-location distribution business much like L&W but in the Northeast of the U.S. –  been around 100 years, great reputation, owned by another private equity firm, but family for a lot of years.And so, I invested money in it and started being a board member; I was on a board of a public company and still am. I liked board work, but I didn't want to be 50 when to throw up the shoes , but the thought was, I'll do this if I can help them. And then we'll continue to look for a business. And then there were some issues going on with integration of a very large acquisition. [00:26:00] So they bought the business and then they bought about eight months later a business that was 70% the size of it. So, it was a big elephant swallow and I'd done that, so I thought I could help.The management team kept giving me the Heisman, and so I'm not here to be management, but I can give you some help. And this is one of their biggest investments and the team was just kind of Bush league. And so, I finally told the guys I'm not going anymore. It's a waste of my time. But I'm okay with the investment. But then we just decided let's make a change. And they asked me if I would run the business and  I was living in Chicago, so not moving, but I had an apartment there and ran the business. We hired a great CFO who worked with me and we brought in some team and that business was just more of, hate to be blunt, but let's get some adults in the room and set budgets and hold people accountable and let's win, but I'm looking for effort and U12 soccer, not in a business, you've got to post school. Bob Wierema: I liked that one. Brendan Deely: And so, we changed the team and we challenged them to really move and put in brands, performance, metrics, and  I always said there's 55 locations there's always going to be one on the bottom. Just kind of get off the bottom. It's going to happen, but what are you going to do to get off it? And so, what we saw was a $400 million business. We could grow this thing to a billion or more just by moving South and West. And so, we got agreement to go through a sale process, to get with a larger PE farm to really grow this thing. And then at the last minute, a strategic came in and paid over 10 times for it. And I said, “here's the case, have fun with it”. It was a smart move for them, and they've been great to the employees.It wasn't the outcome [00:28:00] we wanted, but it was a super business. Bob Wierema: That was a quick turn, that was what? Two and a half year business for your business there?Brendan Deely: Two and a half. Yeah. Because we got a five-year plan done in two and a half. And so, it was one thing I learned, from speed is your friend if you have the right people. But no, that was a really good win and they're great people. And they went to a company with great culture. So that's how I feel about that. And then I've been with Banner Solutions for two and a half years and it's again PE owned, was recapped Halloween of last year.So, it's been over a year where together with [inaudible] out of New York are awesome guys. And so, we're looking to, we call it ‘banner 2.0', is to take this thing to the next level and  double or triple it over the next couple of years. And then sell it again. And so, it's a great market. Do you think about how many doors there are? How many handles there are? Commercial buildings? Residential? So it's a great replacement business. And the competition is generally pretty good, but it's the safety and security item. If it's broken, you fix it. And we've seen a lot through COVID around hands-free, a lot of that. And then ironically, the only mineral that really fights COVID is copper. And so, that's coming back, that you just use a dead item (?). So, there's some pretty cool macros in this space that's a hell of a lot nicer than the macros and the commodity drywall business. That's a gunfight every day. So, you know, this is not easy, but it's  a better environment. Michael Moore: When you say copper fights it from a transfer standpoint. Brendan Deely: It kills the virus. Don't ask me any more about it because I got nothing, Michael Moore: But that is interesting. [00:30:00] Brendan, just from your vast perspective in business and in buying and selling and running of companies, Bob and I talk a lot on this podcast, because it has taken off in the era of COVID, do you see the role of private equity continuing on like it has, or like a lot of things pivoting and changing?Brendan Deely: Yeah. It's interesting because I would say the banker who sold our business to tell him(?) with me, [inaudible] I talked to him last week and he said in November, there was like a fundamental shift in private equity where it's back to pre-COVID levels.And a lot of diligence remote. We integrated two businesses we bought recently remotely, and I've never done that in 29 acquisitions. I never even thought you can do it, but ERP system financials, all remote. And so, I think it's coming back. I think the vaccine helps. I think there'll be a real chasm at the end of the day, from how companies did through COVID or not as far as multiple expansion. And we're up this year organically. And so, I think it goes back to the markets, but I think we have a hell of a team who's out there slaying the dragon every day. So, we just keep doing it. But I think it's just a recent kind of Jeff(?). Michael Moore: A comment you made earlier that you love to build to a good outcome, define for us what is a good outcome?Brendan Deely: I think it's not incremental. It's how do we, if we're a regional player doing a good job, how do we really get national? How do we widen the moat between us and our competition? Because customers [00:32:00] have choices. So as technologies and service offer – because its speed to the market is a team, and I think a lot of the time in distribution businesses, there's a notion that the sales cures all.It's sales, it's operations, it's finance, collecting the money. Everybody plays a role. And so, it's more of how do we leave this business dramatically better than it was when we got here? And that's creating jobs, that's creating EBITDA(?) expansion. That's making some stupid mistakes and learning from them. Which is plenty of those, but I think I've learned more from my losses than my wins. And it's really about creating an environment where I go into a business, I'm thinking who's replacing me? So if I don't have it in the team, how do I get it? How do I develop it? Because I think the CEO's job is their own succession and strategy at the end of the day. And then creating a team that can execute and have to be much more complicated than that, but that's not an easy solution. And so, being responsible and not doing things illegal, but most competitors who are independent family-owned businesses, they're not thinking about an ERP system or how do you use a CRM system to really grow your top line? Or how do you get pulled through sales, a share of wallet growth?And so, I think coming from larger businesses, going into a couple hundred-million-dollar businesses, you kind of know what good looks like. So, if you find good people that can augment your management team, then you got five people, it's better than one.So build the right team and let people know where you're trying to get to too. Michael Moore: That's a good point. And so, for listeners that are in the maturation of building their businesses and climbing to the revenue goals that they've set out for themselves, have you noticed benchmarks at certain [00:34:00] revenue where things have to change? You can't keep doing it the same to get to the next level? And if so, what are those?Brendan Deely: Yeah. And you hit those inflection points in businesses and I think it's either a hundred or $200 million increment somewhere where I'm coming from, where you kind of hit that point where – we want to get North of a half a billion. So, I want a team right now who knows how to do it, not in three years. And I think it's really being honest, develop your strategy, develop a structure that does that, and then talk about people and then create the incentives – in that order. And if you maniacal on that, then you really do be thoughtful. But I think you're going to make some mistakes and move people around, but I've seen it in roles like CFOs where you get to a certain point and they don't have the breadth and I changed out of CFO last year, a little over a year ago for that reason. He started in small businesses. He says, “well, God, we're moving at such a pace with these acquisitions”. And I drank drinking out of the firearms and I'm like, “get a bigger mouth. This is the business we're in.” And so I think you get to a point where you've got to find somebody else who can reset the pace, and that can really bring in skills that are missing in the business. And I hired a COO recently who's done that and the CFO and some FPDA(?) people. I had a person that was working for me and running operations and I'd put a COO over him. And I said, “if I put you in this role, you'd fail. And that's not fair to you. And I think if I find the right person, they could maybe get you to where you need to be that the next time, you know, there's a role here, but otherwise I've seen it too often where you [00:36:00] just, people flounder in these roles,” and just be honest. And shit, I've been fired. It happens.Bob Wierema: Yeah. So, Brendon, you and I have talked a lot over the years on some things. I think one of the things is we're transitioning and what I was thinking is, you've shared a lot with me on how you're kind of pushing yourself and your kids and your family each and every day to get better and improve. Maybe talk about that, and then what that looks and feels like for you. Brendan Deely: We have five kids and, I have a Junior in college and a freshman in college, 11th grader, and then a 7th grader. And we lost our son two years ago to suicide at 12, still my son, he's still part of the family, but prior to that horrible thing happening, we were a cool family. The three girls naturally, and then we adopted two boys from Ethiopia, not related, our son Gabe who passed, he came home 14 years ago yesterday. And then Isaiah who's 13. And so, we're totally cool with it. You could go through an airport with nine kids looking like me, nobody looks. But  with us as an interracial family, we don't blend in and I don't like the blended. Bob Wierema: it's because Isaiah's going to be the best dressed one there. I've seen that little man walking around. Brendan Deely: Wearing his Yeezys and all that. But we always told our kids, “yeah, just make a difference in life. You don't have to be a CEO – I didn't know I was going to be a CEO but be a good person”. You know, corny sounding, “climb every mountain” song there. Just find your path and be good at it. If you're going to work in construction, be good at it. If you're going to be a [00:38:00] doctor, be good at it.And so, no pressure to do anything other than what you feel you can do. And so, we provided the environment for our kids, and they all were doing well and then November 14th of 2018, our life changed forever. And my son was in seventh grade and my daughter was in college, the oldest one. My wife took the other three to Iowa for a day and a half to see her mom then Gabe had confirmation thing on Saturday. So, I took him and drop them off – actually Carol left the house and I said, “all right, mom's gone. Let's go to Juul and get whatever you want. We just got to throw it out before she gets home”.He gets his food, and we go off and we have a great weekend. They just stopped and went out to dinner at a diner. And I was walking to Menards that morning, looking for someone walking down the street and we're actually held hands, which you didn't do. And I said, “Gabe you're doing great in school. I'm proud of you,” and he said, “dad. I'm lit”. I took him to basketball practice on Monday night and then Wednesday, he was gone, no signs, no warning, no crying, nothing to his brothers and sisters, just existential crisis for all, like how you know? And so, it was a real defining moment and you're trying to get yourself to breathe let alone take care of your family, and fuck business. I didn't care. It wasn't anyone around, but it was such a crazy environment. Like I said, I've run three businesses at a time, in the army. Okay. There's a problem. What's the situation? What could we have? What's the workaround?There's a child to suicide. There's nothing. It's a total. You're in no man's land. And [00:40:00] so yeah, we went about the whole burial and then it just all kinds of awful, right? Families, kids are suicidal. It's just like, fuck this has happened. We were, you know, not, you know, the Cunninghams, but we were a pretty good family. I didn't even think a 12-year-old thought about that at all, especially when it was great looking, funny as shit, had a bunch of friends. Subsequently we found out that he wrote a note, and he was being picked on in school. He was the only one of two black kids in his school, a Catholic school. And we didn't know anything about it. There was cyber bullying, he was searching suicidal stuff on his iPad during school. And so cyber bullying, all crazy, just surreal, the whole thing. And so we started Gabriel's Light, which Bob is involved with, to really never let it happen to another kid.And he slipped through the cracks and I'm fucking pissed. And I can either wallow in it, or we can affect change. Because the pain is going to be there regardless. And so, we've been out since November 13th of last year. And I give my wife all the credit, I call her a steam roller, with velvet gloves. It's kind of a couple of pillars; it's around internet security at schools, the Reagan Trust [inaudible], because kids are smarter than we are, a lot of training around cyber bullying and how do you recognize it? Both for teachers and for parents, just thoughts around bullying in general.When we were kids, we had to be kind of big to be a dick. Now you can be whatever you want, and the stuff they say is just nasty. You can just wipe [00:42:00] out a friend, I forget the word they call it, but you don't matter anymore. And then a lot around kindness campaign. So we've kicked us off grass roots. My wife's been on Norah O'Donnell from CBS news – and this is all pre-COVID. And so, we know of several kids that we've impacted positively, and we only wanted to impact one and that would have been a win, but I think COVID just kind of exacerbated it. So, we're better, but it's a grind. My other son struggles mightily and as does everybody else, but time helps. Therapy, which I've been in for quite some time has been hugely formative in me working myself through this thing. I was a stage four cancer guy, 26 years ago. I never thought for one minute I could cure this thing by myself. And so, when it comes to mental health, how could you possibly – your most complex thing in your body – figure you can work through it?And so that's kind of whole thing about Gabriel's Light, too is that it's okay not to be okay. I've been fucked up most of my life, but I think that really, when he gets to something like this, it truly resets what's important in yourself. I once told somebody, “I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy's trainer”.And it's still sometimes surreal. I still want to call Isaiah, Gabe, nobody gets upset. He's still part of the family, but being able to take a horrible, horrible outcome and do something good, it's really helped us as well. And I think it goes back to kind of the core of who we are is good people. We want to do good and want to make things better and want to do it with a big group of people. We've had a friend of mine, very close friend, whose daughter died by suicide. This fall, we've known him for 29 years. It's such a horrible thing. And [00:44:00] the amount. It's the number two leading cause of death, of people 10 to 24. I never knew that. And COVID just exacerbates that. I tell my kids that “look, Gabe is part of our family. What happened is part of our family, but that doesn't necessarily define us entirely”. We've come up with this family mantra – we kind of stole pieces out of it, but it's “get up, look up, never, ever give up and giddy up. And you're going to face shitty things. I don't know that you'll face anything harder from here, but don't give up, no way. Not for my kids, not for business and if I'm gonna die I'm gonna swing it. would say my relationship with my other son is probably dramatically better now. I sensed a bit of a gift from his brother. I was talking to him one time and he's a stubborn motherfucker like me, but I said, “I think coming through this whole thing, you and I have a better relationship than we ever did. And I'm really glad”. And I said, “it's, mostly on me”. And he said, “no, it's not just you. It was me too”. And this is an 11-year-old at the time.And so, you live, you learn from everything. I think the relationship with Bob just got that much more real when he told me two months after about some of his struggles, and you can't judge a book by the cover. It gets to the heart of people and you really find out who's real when things get really bad. Because it was interesting – we lost some people that were friends that just, I don't spend a lot of time on it, but it's just, wow. Because it's the whole ‘people act how they want', but I don't need that. I think that's when you really [00:46:00] separate, who's a friend and who's not. And as tough as it might be, it's an interesting process to know who you'd really go with. Bob Wierema: Brendan. Well, first of all, thank you for sharing. One of the things that I was thinking about as you talk and was like, you're obviously struggling as you're going through this, but you probably also got your family there – coming to you is the rock within that family and how did you deal with that? Because there's probably like the part of, “hey, how do I make sure everybody's good here? But I also got to take care of me. There are both parts of that. How did you work through? Brendan Deely: Gabe died in November. I went back to work in December just because I thought I should. And in March I lost it. I just collapsed and had never experienced anything like that, but you can only bullshit for so long, especially when it's as real as it gets.And so, I give credit to the previous PE firm, the guy came, and he said, “do you need time off?” And I started crying and I lost it and I said, “yeah, I do”, and I found a therapist, Neil, who may have saved my life. I certainly got back on track and he just listened, man. The first time I met him – he cried the first three times, and I was like, “who the fuck is paying for this?”He was just a genuine soul – we don't talk about Gabe all the time, it was incredibly invaluable to me. And I'd never thought about doing therapy, save the world, but I like being vulnerable. That's how I got to, how am I going to fix me? Because I realized I couldn't [00:48:00] help my family until I got myself to a spot where I was manageable or at least not spinning down. Because I was just going down a tough spot and faking it with my kids. And so, we did some family therapy, and the other thing that I found is I cried in front of my kids and I meant to do it, but it just came out, but I think for them to see me truly hurting allowed them to say, “all right, let's try to work through this thing”.And so there's smaller much smaller versions of that in business, but I think get yourself fixed first and if you've got problems, deal with them, head on. Because my experience was that they are only going to get worse. So, I went to church – my family's not back at the church because of the stuff with the Catholic school. I swear like a sailor, but I really truly came out in the last couple of years. I don't do the rosary it matters to me. I don't like some people in the Catholic church, but I still have faith. It took me a while, but I've separated those two. My advice would be taking care of yourself and your mind before your body and know that it's going to be work and it's going to be bumpy. It's that line that it's easy to sail when it's smooth water, but the other thing we showed our kids is that grief is like the oceans; sometimes it's smooth and sometimes it's rough as hell, and you just better know how to swim. I ‘m much better at talking about it now because I want to help people. If anybody's out there struggling, get help. You don't want to go [00:50:00] through what we went through?Bob Wierema: Brendon, I remember when we sat down at dinner, after when it was just you and I and we went to that summer house over by you up there. I shared with you some of the stuff I went through when I was in my twenties, and I remember one of the things that you said to me that has always stuck with me is what you just mentioned, which is that you got to take care of your mind as much as you got to take care of your body. And for some reason, a lot of people just want to neglect that and just think they can do it on their own and to go out and get help and to do that, I think is so hugely important. Also, I think what's amazing about you is that I've always loved your humility, your honesty, and your vulnerability. The way that we were able to share was because you opened up when we were talking and that's what's created such a great friendship between us. Now what you guys are doing with Gabriel's Light and all of that, it's going to have a positive effect on so many people and probably so many people you don't even know it has an effect on. And it's really amazing to see what you guys are doing. You and Carol are amazing people and it's been so good to get to know you guys.Brendan Deely: Thank you. Because the year after Gabe died some friends did a mass at the church, and I talked to people because Carol couldn't and I'll say anything, but I remember saying that we would have never signed up for this role. But it's ours now and watch out because we are all in on this thing. I had a guy who – I don't know if it was just down in Texas – but his son Brad Huxtable(?) or something, his son, same kind of thing, 12 years old, last year. And I reached out on Facebook and I'm like, [00:52:00] “man, I'm so sorry. And he immediately texted back and he's starting to build this thing, but his momentum around youth suicide and prevention and it's almost therapeutic for me to help or just listen, or cry with the person, whatever. I think that's the thing that when we were going through it, I didn't want to hear stories. I just wanted my buddy to sit with me at the restaurant. And then it evolves.I learned more in the last two years than I learned in the previous 52 – about me, about how you deal with struggles. My team at Bader Solutions is awesome. One of them asked me one time, “how do you  come back and do this?” I said, “this is what I do”. I had to do it for Gabe, but I have to do it for my wife Carol, and Margo, and Nora May(?). I said, “it's just that these are the cards I was dealt, and I'm gonna play them. Michael Moore: Brendan, thank you as Bob said, for, for just sharing so deeply your experiences with us, I'm glad you brought up Brad Hunsville(?) because I was doing a little research before the podcast and noticed that you were connected with him on LinkedIn. He actually runs a business here in Fort Worth.  I've been following what he's been sharing on LinkedIn and his story, and it's truly amazing as well. Brendan Deely: So you read about the personality of his son and my son, like God, it's like the same person, same age. There's another fight person, not going to fly.Michael Moore: His vulnerability in the way he's turned into it, well technology and the connectivity brought by all of these social media apps [00:54:00] that have the best intentions in the world. We're seeing the unintended consequences of the way kids interact with each other now. It's a hidden monster. It's people like you that are willing to put yourself out there and start something and be humble and share that they're going to turn it around. So, I just want to thank you for that.Brendan Deely: Much appreciated and there's technologies and other things that people can use as kids. I think it goes back to what I told our kids – just make a difference in whatever you do. And this has become part of our making a difference – a painful reason, but we're gonna do it.Michael Moore: Brendan, you've talked a lot about Isaiah and obviously the commonalities there with Gabe, but how are your other children doing? And how's your wife doing? Brendan Deely: My wife, she's a machine. Everything she does she does exceptionally well. She found Gabe and so had to go through some post-traumatic stress training called EMDR – it – worked, and then Margo, she was at school in Connecticut, came back for a year and now she's back at St. Mary's in Notre Dame, finishing her nursing degree. Then Norah is a freshman at NYU, and then May is a junior at Jones College Prep here in Chicago. But everybody went through therapy – some more than others. I'm still involved with it and there's no right or wrong on that. We do some family therapy, but I would say everybody's back to living their life. I wear a band, a Gabriel's Light band and I will for the rest of my life, but it's my way of keeping him with me. I've got his card in my iPhone. I just know he's around. He was psycho about orange. He wore it all the time. So, every place we [00:56:00] go, we bring an orange ribbon and we put it on a chair.So, it's a weird balance to try to figure out how to heal and not forget. We screwed it up, I think we've gotten pretty close, but I would say that our family is as direct as any family I know. I think we were pretty much before. If people are in a bad mood I'm like, “are you suicidal? No? Great.”We shouldn't be scared to say that because somebody might say yes and then maybe you could actually help them with therapists, but I appreciate you asking that. I think  you get through it; you don't get over it. And so, the raw intensity, everybody's different, but they said it's easily two years to get over it.I'm like, it's going to be what it is. The tears and the crying are far less than it was. And so, I want to remember his birthday and the day he came home, not the day he died. I mean, celebrate life and then the way he left, but then also remember him for the 13 years he was alive. He was a nut, he was a blast and had one bad day, really bad day. One funny story – he's like 10 at the time. We lived in the city so there's small ass yards and the leaves are down. So, we're raking the leaves and he takes the rake and – it's like 10 in the morning – he just throws it at the storm window and shatters it. And I'm like, “what the fuck?” He's like, “well, I wanted to see if it breaks,” and I'm like, “hey”, he's like, “what's up?” I said, “start running”.Bob Wierema: That's good. Brendan Deely: There's plenty of good stuff. Michael Moore: So, Brendan, if you think about this new world of [00:58:00] podcasts, why it is one of Bob and I's main passions is that it captures stories forever. And so, in thinking about that medium of capturing your story now that people interested in Gabriel's Light can come back and listen to, your wife and kids can go back and listen to, you can go back and listen to. There's this saying out there that it's not what you know, it's who you know, but we've reversed it around. And we say, it's not who you know, it's who knows you. So, in thinking about this podcast, what do you want people to know about you and with this medium, what do you want your wife and your kids to know about it?Brendan Deely: Great question. I always loved the quote by Walt Disney. “If you can dream it, you can do it.” That happens with thought, passion, energy, building a team, teaching people. But  I think there's a lot that people can learn from Gabriel's life that's going to make the world a better place. From tragedy comes good. That's a great thing. We told our kids to be defined by how you got back up, not by how you got knocked down. Because we didn't see it coming. It was a steamroller. But you're still good people. You still got things you can do and you're going to be successful and you're going to get married and you'll have kids. I don't care if you're gay or straight. I just want you to live a good life and to give back. And so, you know, for me personally, I have people that have come and work for me from two different companies. I got some still coming back to where I am. So, I think I'm generally a good person. I'm honest, I'm genuine, and don't ask me a question if you don't want the answer. But also humble enough to know I need really good [01:00:00] people, really smart people that want to make a lot of money and do some great stuff for this business, but I also have a perspective of at 26 I was diagnosed with stage four cancer, told I was going to live three months, I said, “fuck that, I'm not gonna do that”. And then get married, have a bunch of kids, and then we lost Gabe to suicide and you hit these defining moments. Neither of which I signed up for, but I think it helped me really understand that you know what, I'm at the core of who I am. I just want to be able to say that I left this place a little bit better than when I got here.I don't think I would have said that two years ago. I think I really mean that now. So, there's more work to do. Bob Wierema: That's a hell of an answer, Brendan. We appreciate you coming on and sharing everything with us today. Thanks so much. And as I've told you a million times, I'm blessed to have you as a person in my life and can't wait to continue to build our relationship together.So, thank you. Brendan Deely: No, no. It goes to the same and Mike and Johnny. Thank you. And I still don't know why she married you. Bob Wierema: We can cut that part out, Johnny. Michael Moore: No, no, there we go. Brendan Deely: Happy holidays. Bye.Michael Moore: Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of The Climb. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider subscribing. And if you know someone who you would think would enjoy the podcast, feel free to share this with them. Thanks again. And we'll see you on the next episode. [01:02:00]. 

Connect with Michael Moore and Bob WieremaThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with Chet ScottBuilt To Lead: https://builttolead.com/Chet Scott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chet-scott-0440559/[00:00:00] Chet Scott: I would tell them prepare like their life depends on whatever it is that they want next. Prepare now as if they're doing it now and it's really hard and you've got to really love it. And you're going to have to suck it up for a period of time. And life won't be this comfortable while you transition. Bob Wierema: Welcome to The Climb crossroads and defining moments today. Mike and I had the pleasure of sitting down with Chet Scott, the founder and builder at Built to Lead. This was definitely a special conversation for me because Chet is not only my leadership coach and builder, but he's also a good friend. Over my years in working with Chet, he's transformed not only my work life, but my personal life. And like I said, become a good friend, and by far, one of my best truth tellers. Built to Lead's goal is simple: to awaken, challenge, and transform individuals, teams, and leaders. Enjoy today's podcast, and thank you for joining us.Chet, welcome to The Climb. We appreciate you joining us today. Chet Scott: It's good to be with you. Bob Wierema: So we'll start off with one of our first questions that we like to ask some of our guests, as we talk about some of your passions in your life. When we talk about passion, say number one and two, a lot of people respond with their family and their friends is their passions. If you go to your third and fourth passions, what would you say those are? Chet Scott: I don't know if it would be third or fourth. My work and life are my passions. And so, I don't really think about a one, two, three, or four. I don't do anything [00:02:00] that I don't want to do. So, when somebody asks me, “what are your priorities?” I'm like, “I don't really have any”, “what are your passions?” Well, just hang out with me. You'll see. I'm passionate about everything I do. So, this morning I was working on the driveway where I saw a young client of mine recently epically fail. I was out to a bunch of old 60-year-olds and we were purposely failing building our course and trash talking.One guy threatened to hit me, which was great. Bob Wierema: Now I've been out on that driveway for the workouts. I don't think I threatened to hit you. Did I?Chet Scott: No, you didn't. You were crumbling too quickly. Bob Wierema: I had no straight threat! Chet Scott: But I'm passionate about that. And then I had a practice at 7.15am right after with a business owner that's struggling and I'm passionate about helping him. And I just had a team practice with another team. And then I spent a little time having a meal with my bride and I'm passionate about that. And now here I am with you folks and I wouldn't be here if I didn't want to be. Bob Wierema: To give everybody a little background, maybe start with kind of where you came from to your start of your career and then get to where you are now today, and then we'll definitely dive in a lot deeper to where you are today. Chet Scott: How far back do you want me to go? Bob Wierema: As far as it helps to tell the story. I know the story. So, enlighten our listeners. Michael Moore: Start from the beginning. Chet Scott: Well, so I grew up in Kansas, born and raised. Probably the start of this journey was leaving high school, and I remember I went to a private school in Indiana. I didn't know anybody. All my buddies were going to [00:04:00] KU I was going to go to KU and play golf. Last minute, I decided to take a flyer and go to this little private Christian school called Taylor University in Indiana. I just thought I needed to get a new circle of friends even though I had great friends. I just felt like I needed to do something a bit different. And so, I did not knowing a soul. And before I left, I remember my mom sitting me down and telling me – she was a really great role model – she said, “Chester, go out there, have fun, meet new friends, learn some new stuff. And just remember you're not coming back”, and I knew she meant it. There was no opportunity to come back. So, it was a great defining moment that I was going out and I was out on my own, and I grew up. And so, when I played golf for four years, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I just knew I loved competing. And so, IBM was the place to work as far as technology.I thought “I want to compete in the technology field because that sounds interesting to me”, even though I wasn't technical, it just seemed like the future. And so, I interviewed, and I shockingly got the job. And after a year they introduced this thing called the PC, 1982, and I was joining them to sell them big iron, the big gear. Millions of dollars. It's computers. That's where all the money was and where all the fun was. The PC was like a $1,200 consumer product and they told all us newbies that we were going to go work in a retail store, selling those as part of our training. I didn't want to do it. Then they wanted to move us. I've been moved. They asked us to move. I didn't want to do that. They said, “well, if you don't want to do that and you don't want to move, you're fired”. And so, [00:06:00] my mom gave me a wakeup call in the end of high school. My first job, one year in, I had my first wakeup call from our first employer. It didn't matter what I wanted to do. They had a plan to either buy into the plan or you're fired. And so, I joined this startup called the CompuServe who I'd been interviewing with because I had kind of smelled this coming from IBM. And the next day I started there, and I'd spent 20 years living and working with a bunch of young people, and we basically grew up together. We sold electronic mail before there was such a thing, we sold networking of computers together before there was such a thing.I remember going into Wendy's. My first big client was Wendy's. I sold them electronic mail. They thought it was the best thing since the cheeseburger. I mean, they had never sent an electronic mail message until we walked in there and showed them how to do it, got their executives doing it. Then Dave Thomas wanted to know if he could get sales data from every store every day. We're like, “yeah, you can do that, we'll show you how”. And so, we were selling technology, but we were solving problems really. And I enjoyed that. So, I learned quickly that you don't have to sell – I didn't sell anything really. I just went in and competed by simply telling the truth, working hard for the client, and delivering them something of value.And I remember Red Roof Inns was my second, really big client. They were also in town here and I had been calling on a company called Atria Labs(?). This is 1984. We didn't have [00:08:00] a fit for them. And I remember going into the CTO and telling him, “ Hey, we've done something else to something you want”. His name was Jeff Winslow. I still remember the guy's name. And he said, “that's it”. He goes, “you don't have anything else?” I said, “no”. I said, we can't help. If anything changes, I'll keep you in the loop, but right now you're better off just buying a dedicated network. AT&T(?) can provide you that; we can't touch what you're doing”. I walked away. Well, I've been calling on Red Roof Inns forever because they needed us and I knew it, and I knew we could help them. Their CTO would not even talk to me. Couldn't get in the door. This went on for a year and a half and I didn't give up.I kept calling. Nothing. Well, never got anywhere. So, year and a half after I told Jeff Winslow, we couldn't help him, I get a call from Jeff Winslow. I said, “Jeff how are you doing? I haven't talked to you forever,” and he goes, “I just got a new job. I'm convinced with this one we need you guys.” I say, “really? Where'd you go?” And he goes, “Red Roof Inn.” They became a client the next day. And I remember calling my mom saying, “man, I don't understand this sales thing”. I said, “it is not complicated”. She goes, “what do you mean?” I said, “I'm making sales and the company keeps promoting me and telling me I'm doing a great job, mom. All I do is go out and talk to people and tell them the truth, that's all I do”. And that's still the case. And that's all I do now as a builder of individuals, teams, and leaders; I'm still getting paid to tell people the truth.Bob Wierema: So, Chet before we go down the Built to Lead path, maybe share a little bit [00:10:00] of your stories of being a younger manager at CompuServe. Because I know I gained a lot of guidance from that over the years of you going through similar circumstances that I've gone through in my career.Chet Scott: Well, I'm not sure which stories you're talking about as a manager, there's some million as a young manager. I became a manager the same year we had a baby. 25. Everybody in the office – there was only eight or 10 of them – it was a small office, but everybody was a decade or more older than me. So, I learned a lot as a 25-year-old about leading up.And it took me awhile to get comfortable with telling a 40-year-old that he needs to tick his performance up, and that I could help him if he wanted help or if not, I'd help him get another job. And I learned a lot about human nature just by the nature of the way people reacted to me simply because of my age. So as a leader, I learned that you will be judged by your cover and you have to get over that, make your peace with that, and judge your team by the performance. People judge you mistakenly based on the way you look or how old you are or whatever else and a part of being a leader is knowing that there are no equal partnerships. And you have to be the bigger person; you have to lead and let other stuff go. So, I learned that one quickly, that's my first one. My last leadership lesson was I had a front row seat to the biggest financial collapse at the time in U.S. business history. [00:12:00]WorldCom acquired us, CompuServe, 1998. And we were acquisition 54, 55 was MCI. And that's the one that killed them. And I can remember going to Jackson, Mississippi alongside our CEO. We were there fastest of all there at the time – then they had 57 companies that they owned. They bought two more after MCI and we were the fastest growing of all of them.And so, Bernie wanted to meet the guy running sales and service and the CEO of that company. And so, we went down, flew down to Jackson, Mississippi. You ever been there? Michael Moore: I have, I've been there, but on the way to Florida. So, it was kind of a pit stop. Chet Scott: That's not all it's good for, it's not a place you go except to go somewhere else.But we went there –  having said that, I remember the place we went to lunch. I remember everything about their office. I remember the airport. So, there's a whole bunch of stories that came in one day. But the biggest leadership lesson was I went down there, we were a team of 13,000 salespeople. I ran a group that was only 650, but we were the most productive, that's why you wanted to talk to us. 13,000. We were calling on the same client, our biggest competitors, or the six other WorldCom sales divisions who were no outright threat. We didn't know what we were doing. We were just all over each other. There was no clarity, it was sheer chaos. And most of these people were not technically savvy.They were former people selling voice, and now were in the world and they were clueless. So, it was a [00:14:00] fiasco. So, I went down just matter of factly, and I had a one-pager for Bernie that I thought spelled it out. I laid it out for him [inaudible] the bottom line. I said, “13,000. You could cover the market with three. And here's the way I would organize the [inaudible], where you have the channels to hit all the markets, but really mitigate channel conflict that right now is costing you and your shareholders, for billions of dollars. So, you've got to get rid of 10,000 of us and you can get rid of me. You don't need six guys running the channels, pick one, go with it. He looked me in the eye, and he said, he goes, “Chester I've refused to leave the dance to stop [inaudible] me” like a Southern boy, he had a cigar hanging out of his mouth and he said that. I said, “all right”. And I'm at the airport. I got on a payphone. There were no cell phones, then. I got on a payphone and I called my broker and I said, “tomorrow morning, sell all my options”. And he did. And was it 18 months? The stock was 90 the day I sold. Within 18 months, it was under 10 and it was under a dollar in two years.And so, he ended up laying off 30,000 people and long story short, dying in prison from government fraud. And I guarantee you, he was not the problem. Bush made an example out of him because Enron and Tyco had happened right prior. And he basically told the fortune 1000, “if I catch somebody else doing this, I'm throwing away the key”.I can't tell you how much I learned from that. I can tell you five more stories from that trip. But let's just leave it at that one. Bob Wierema: And so when you were at, I guess it would be WorldCom at the time, is when [00:16:00] you went to the leadership conference, right. That you didn't want to go to.Chet Scott: Center for Creative Leadership.That was in 1993. So, WorldCom had not bought it yet. I was still at CompuServe. And that's when the light bulb went off.  I was there for a week and these [inaudible], we had a guy running the GM division – really old dude, a guy running the Tennessee Valley authority, a four-star general, some other old – everybody was old, and then here's 34-year-old me and everybody hated it. Well I loved it.They videotaped us when we didn't know it. They watched [inaudible] in the ears. They had a psychologist with your personality type, basically watching you nonstop and you didn't know it. At the end of the whole week, they gave you a VHS tape, three hours long, telling you everything about you. And I walked out and said, “I want to do it". I went back to a large CEO, I said it to everybody. He's like, “it's too expensive”. I said, “okay, then I'm going to start on our own. And he said, “no, you're too expensive to do that. We'll have HR do it”. I said, “nobody will listen to HR. So, let me delegate a lot of my stuff to two great guys. Let me delegate to them and I'll start this up. I'll still oversee the cake but let me do this because I'm going to leave one day and go do this. And the longer you let me do it here, the longer you'll get the benefit for me being here”.So, he did, and I would do that for nine more years and I really just started to – I cut my teeth learning, in the corporate world, how to build leaders and teams. And it was really good learning, but I didn't have diddly in 2002, when I started books about how to lead [00:18:00] individuals and how problematic individuals that don't know how to lead themselves really are. Michael Moore: When you said, leaders are judged by their cover, that piqued my interest because similarly to you, early on in my career – and it was interesting because there weren't Zoom calls like this, so everything was done over the phone – I came into a new leadership sales position where I was managing about 25 other sales executives across the U.S., and. I had never met them. They had never seen me before. This was before you could look people up on Google or LinkedIn or whatever, until six months later at the National Sales Conference that they all realized they'd been being told what to do by this 25-year-old. And they had no idea. I was so young and telling them what to do. I guess, I was being judged by my cover, but my cover was that they couldn't see me and they didn't know how old I was. So, for our listeners, how would you advise people to just understand they are going to be judged by their cover but to make the most of it? Chet Scott: I don't have short answers and I don't have hacks. I'm not a guy who teaches people how to work the way around it. The reality is that humans rush to judge, that's just a fact of human nature. And if you're in a position of power or authority, they are rushed to judge you even more.And if you don't look the part, sound the part, or act the part in their mind, they are going to judge you and you will be left wanting. They're going to go, “he's just a 25-year-old punk”, because that's the way they are. And so, I always tell my clients that, by the way, I dress like this all the [00:20:00] time – on purpose, it is exactly the way I like to dress.I have on jeans and a t-shirt and I am judged by that. Some clients have told me many times we want you to follow our dress code. I tell them, “no, thank you”. I will show up in my clothes that I wear, and I will let you, by the way, wear whatever you'd like, and you judge me by my work, and I will judge you by the work you do, and we will transform together, or we will not work together. I'm not here to transact with you. I'm here because I'm here to transform you, and I want you to transform me”. And so, I have found that being truthful and just sticking to it, you get exactly the kind of clients, the kind of circle, the kind of friends, and the kind of teammates that you deserve.There's a law of physics that is mass attracts mass. So, I tell my clients be strong in your core and build a really massive core. A really strong sense of self and then just go be it. And then you don't have to remember who you are, when you know who you are. You just go out and be who you are. The world is out there judging you by a book cover because they're hiding behind some company. Michael Moore: So that along that line, that ability to be so comfortable in your own skin. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it seems like that takes a little bit of, or a lot of conviction and confidence in really who you are. So, what are some of the tactics or paths that you go down to gain that confidence? Because a lot of people don't have that coming out of the gates. They're trying to figure that out. Chet Scott: That is our work. So, when I tell you, you have to build a strong [00:22:00] core –  there's  basically three elements that make up the Meli line of all the nuances of the work that we do at beltway. Three things you'd boil it all down to. First thing we're going to do with our client is get them comfortable in their own skin by making them write: what do they believe their worldview? What are the names they call themselves, their identities? What are the principles on which they want to stand? That's their WIP, the first three elements of the six pack. What are their passions? What do they love? And what are their core purposes, their big why's for working and living? And then the sixth element. What is their process for tightening it up? So, the first element for getting comfortable in your own skin is doing a lot of work inside your own skin. And figuring all these things out, and we make clients write, and write, and write, and write some more.And then we look at how they act, and we gradually help them close integrity gaps, where they believe one thing and behave another. And as they do that, they start to get confident and think something like, “I think I got this figured out. I think I know who I am and the way I want to be. And I think I'm going to wear jeans and a t-shirt. And, you know what, I believe in God, I think I'm going to just start talking about that because that's who I am.” They do that. And you know what, I think I want to be very selective in who I work with. So, they do that, so they get strong in their core. And you know, when you run into somebody who's strong in their core, they're not easily moved. That's a good thing. Once we get them there, then we have them.Well, let's, you're not meant to labor in vain. I believe you're meant to labor towards something that you love. So, ‘opus' is a Latin [00:24:00] word that translates to the English word ‘work' no different than the word ‘boring' translates to the English word ‘work'. And so, we help our clients, author and opus, and aim for the work and the life that they love.And they really get clear they're offering an opus, not doing an exercise. This is not something you check off. This is something you live to get a core that they live, they get an opus that they live and aim for in their working life. And they're like, “this is like living the dream”. I don't have a single client who has done those two big hard jobs, who's really done it, and then told me, “Chet, that was a waste of time. I wish you'd just left me laboring, making really good money doing what I didn't like, because I'm a lot more miserable now that I'm know who I am and know why I'm going after the life I want”. Nobody's ever said it. And I've had people do crazy things crazy, like leave some of the most successful businesses in the world to go do something that they loved. They weren't even sure they could get a loan. They did it anyway. Couldn't stop them because they got so strong in their core. So, we help our clients get a strong core, clear opus, and then we help them build the discipline of productive action that dreaming without doing is dangerous.We build clients that dream and do, so get strong core, clear opus. The playbook of productive action. And that's what we do, help people figure it out. And that's our life's work. Bob Wierema: First, I want to make sure before we go on Chet, when you come to my wedding in May are you going to put it a suit and tie on? Are we going to see that then? Is that going to be a moment? Chet Scott: No, [00:26:00] I do have an, I have a wedding and funeral outfit. But it's not a suit. I do have an outfit and there's no tie, but there is a dark kind of sporty jacket that I wear with jeans. They're dark look like I get away with it. People really actually like it, Michael Moore: Well if Chet's not wearing his suit, then I'm wearing my [inaudible]. And show up like I never knew.Bob Wierema: There you go. Michael Moore: Before we jump into anything else It just hit me because I'm a big believer in things happen for a reason. And we're all talking today on, on my grandfather's, what would be his hundredth birthday. And he, without knowing it, he was a big Corp guy too. And he used that word, opus. I remember. I can't remember exactly what grade it was, maybe fifth or sixth grade. And I had to make like a. A family crest for a history class. For some of them, I called them up and I said, “Hey, you know, I'm trying to put this, this family crest together. You know, I need like a saying at the bottom. I mean, you got any advice for me?” And he said, illegitimate is non carborundum, Michael. Okay. What does that mean? He said it's Latin for don't let the bastards grind you down. If you want to talk about core strength. I mean, if you think about life at every turn. There's somebody trying to discredit what you're doing. And so in sixth grade that became my family creed, and I've stuck to it ever since.Chet Scott: I like it, man. Michael Moore: Hell of a man. Bob Wierema: Well, Chet I want, I have to go back. I can't pass up. You working for nine years when you decided you'd spent time, you thought about built the lead or doing [00:28:00] something to that effect, but you'd spent nine years. Talk to us a little bit about that and what took you so long to make the jump to go out on your own?Chet Scott: Well, lots of things, but I would say the root of it, fear. And by the way, that's what stops most humans from living the dream. So, it took me nine years to get the courage up to do it. Part of that fear was the fear that I wouldn't be able to make a go of it financially. I had a great job, made good money. I had a membership to Muirfield. I had all kinds of executive perks. Stock options  like I told you.  I had all kinds of things that were making me think, if I go on my own and I do this labor of love, there's no guarantee I'm making any money. I got no salary. I have no clients and I just have this big dream.So, I would say fear, fear, and fear. And the good news was that I stepped into it. And I just started reading, see the books here. I have books flooded in this library and flooded outside. I just started studying what makes individuals, teams, and leaders click. Why are there so few that transition well? And I started studying history, and I just started consuming information to form my own hypothesis about human systems. So, I began to become a student of it right away so that I was preparing myself for when I did get courage to leave, I would be prepared. And so, I didn't just sit there and do what I was currently doing. I had the courage to tell my CEO, “I'm going to leave to go do this. Let me do it [00:30:00] here”.I had some courage, but I didn't have complete courage to jump. Actually, it ended up being really healthy because I learned more from watching [inaudible] destroyed than I did from watching and participating in all the years of building it up. I'm a much better builder of individuals, teams, and leaders now, because of what I learned from that. Bob Wierema: So, we talked to a lot of different people and especially in the light of this podcast and what we're doing, business owners, entrepreneurs that are going out and doing their own thing, what advice would you give those folks that have that little piece in their mind that's saying, “Hey, maybe I want to go do something on my own”? What would you tell them? Or how would you tell them to think about that and approach it?Chet Scott: I would tell them prepare like their life depends on it. So, whatever it is that they want next, prepare now as if they're doing it now. And it's really hard and you've got to really love it.And you're going to have to suck it up for a period of time.  And life won't be this comfortable while you transition. I'm writing a book called Becoming Built to Leads I finished it six months ago. It's a daily reader for more or less built lead clients, but I'm sure others will read it to walk somebody through a 365 day. You know, how do you master this thing we call life. And it's a life's work for me, if you will. But I finished it six months ago, I got it back 10 days ago – it was shit. I called up the editor and I said, “what did you do?” “What do you mean?” I'm like, “it's longer now than when I sent it to [00:32:00] you, you were supposed to be editing it and shrinking it. That's your profession. That's what I've been told.” And they said, “well, we love your words. And we think it needs to be said”, and I'm like, “nobody loves my words for long, nobody wants to read more than one page a day. This can't fly.” I said, “tell me exactly how many words it has to be all edited”.And so, 10 hours a day for about the last 10 days, I've been like a zombie because I've been doing my work. And in between I've been rewriting 365 brands. I have 13 left and it's going to be really good, it's way better now, but I had to do a lot more work. and my wife looked at me like, “man, I can't wait for you to be finished with this. Where have you been?”And that's the way it is. If you're going to be a pro in anything. I would tell your listeners that what nobody tells you is there's millions of hours that nobody sees that allow you to do something effortlessly. Effort counts more than anything and preparation. So, your effort is productive. There's no way around it. We coach athletes as well as business owners and professionals, and I'm amazed how many athletes have terrible prep. It's unbelievable. These are one really world-class athletes. And when you study their preparation habits, you can see the ones that are going to make the Olympics. You can see them clear as a bell.They're no different, they're no more talented or skilled, but they prepare more consistently, and they stay longer after [00:34:00] practice more consistently to get the coach to help them with that one thing that they need to master. It's hard freaking work. I've worked with the wrestling team for six years. I've been practicing one-on-one with the coach for six years. Nobody's ever interrupted us. We meet right there in the gym. His office is right off the wrestling room. Nobody's ever come to get us and interrupt us. None of his athletes have ever interrupted with the exception of one, one interrupted us on three or four occasions that I recall. He'd come and rap on the door, “Kyle, what do you need?” “Well, there's nobody in the gym and I need somebody to spot me”. So, we would go down there, and this guy would be lifting like 800 million pounds. And I'm like, I can't spot this, but I mean, I'll stay in here just so you feel better. And he would do like one squat or one press or whatever it was.And then we would go back. He was the youngest world champion in the history of United States. He was the youngest Olympic gold medalist in the history of the United States in wrestling. And I guarantee you, it was not because he was the most talented, no way. He was not. But he loved it, loved it. And he was good enough that the fact that he loved it, he worked his ass off way harder than anybody, and just got incrementally better, and better, and better, and better.And Kelsey Mitchell, I had the chance to work with her. She's number two player taken in the WWE MBA in three years. She'll be a star, same exact stuff. You would just watch her practice habits [inaudible], and I'd say, “Kelsey, what you're doing?” She goes, “I've got to shoot this three again,” and I said, “why” and she goes, [00:36:00] “I missed three from this area last game”. So, she'd get the coach and she'd sit there until she made 10 in a row. Take a break 10 more in a row. She wouldn't stop until she made 20 in a row and this is – like nobody tells you – just a fricking grind that you better fall in love with. Bob Wierema: We've talked about that with somebody like a Kobe Bryant, and talking about how before the team had come to practice, Kobe would be already worked up into a sweat because he was the first guy in the gym, and he was working on just his fundamentals. Chet Scott: I just read that book. It's called Why the Best or the Best? One of my basketball coaches wanted me to read it because it's got a bunch of basketball stories and Kobe's in there. And the best story about Kobe was that this guy was watching him for the Olympics back years ago. He was the best player in the world then. And this guy was shadowing him, like running through his training at six in the morning. He showed up at around 5:30am and Kobe's out there doing other drills on his own.And when he finished, he said, “what are you doing?” He was just working on crossover moves, fundamental moves, from junior high. And the guy said, “how long have you been doing this?” “For two hours.” And he goes, “how often do you do that?” He goes, “five days a week”. And he goes, “as the number one player in the world. You're practicing a move that we taught kids in junior high. That's all you're doing for two hours. Why in the world are you doing that? And then he said, “why do you think I'm number one in the world?” Michael Moore: When you're going to call yourself Black Mamba, you'd better be willing to put in the work. Chet Scott: Yeah. Michael Moore: Have y'all read Relentless?Chet Scott: Oh yeah. Michael Moore: That's another good one that really highlights his work ethic. It's pretty phenomenal.Chet Scott: [00:38:That should not be far from my head. I'm surprised, it's usually right here. I must have pulled that out. Because I usually have his Relentless ones in here with my fault. Yeah, here it is. There we go. Yeah. I've got all my crazy sport books right back there. Michael Moore: For our listeners that aren't as familiar with Built to Lead, you've given us a lot of the buildup to it and of the defining characteristics of  you'd call it the platform or the program. And I know my co-host Bob Wierema is part of this, I've just got to ask what in the world did you see in Bob? Was this just part of the charity week or something? Walk me through just so I can know him a little bit better from your perspective, why is Bob a good candidate and why would other people be? Bob Wierema: This'll be good truth telling for me now, too.Chet Scott: Why is Bob a good candidate? Dave Lockton hired me the year he became CEO. He had the humility to read a really bad first playbook from built to lead. I mean, it was bad. Here's the playbook today. This is the 12 and it is an online, it's nice. It's pretty, it's got color, it's like pretty good. This is what we have now. The one he got; it was like this. Bob Wierema: Just a piece of paper. Chet Scott: It was  stapled [00:40:00] together with a fancy paper over with a built delete Insignia on it. And he did not judge the book by the cover. He read it and he called me after reading it, and said, “I read your, your workbook and it seems like you do some pretty good work. Would you work with me?” So, the reason we're working with Robert is because Lockton has a history of being led by human beings who believe in this stuff. When I started with Lockton and I remember Mike Troster, we were 650 people company wide. [inaudible] organic. So why I'm working with Robert is because you guys both work for a very healthy example of a built to lead company and, and Robert exudes a willingness to work. So, he works, and I studied the way he works his process with his clients, and he does the work on this process we call ‘built to lead'. Our best clients have the same kind of approach, and in the same with the best athletes, it again comes down to: are you passionate about it? Do you have a big dream for it? Are you willing to do the work? And Dave Lockton was humble enough to want to go through this.And what I've grinded in every client I have is that it takes a lot of humility. There are very few CEOs and business owners or people like Robert who have had the fastest trajectory to many, many, milestones. The young age, most of these guys are just arrogant, pompous. [00:42:00] The last thing they want to do is have some 61-year-old tell them they don't know anything, and here's what you really need.So, it's as much on why did I select him as why did he select me? And it's very much a mutual partnership that we've formed, and I'm going to require you to do a lot of things you don't have to do. And Robert does it. Bob Wierema: One of the things like that with Built to Lead is this constant state of being uncomfortable.So, for the last however many years, Chet and I have worked together with this uncomfortable feeling of really digging deep into who you are and why you're here. And I was writing to Chet this weekend, just talking about what's my purpose? Why do I exist? What does that mean? And then why do we even talk about that when it comes to work?Most people think it's an eight to five. You come, you go to work, you come home, you can pay the bills and that just wasn't working for me. And so, when I started working with Chet and understanding that –  I can tell you, my last two years have been two of the best years in my career I've had at Lockton.And I don't think it's by accident. I think it's because I'm putting all that work in and Chet's not easy on me. So that push is definitely something that's been really helpful. Chet Scott: Are you still working on your physical core?Bob Wierema: I am.Chet Scott: See, I believe him because he came here, Michael, and he was a 35-year-old failure of a bunch of old men and I embarrassed him and pissed him off because I told him, “my God, you're weak. And this is unbelievable that you built such a strong [inaudible] core and you've let this physical one go, you blamed it on a quarantine or whatever else”.[00:44:00] And I was laughing as she called me, I don't know when, it was a few weeks ago and said, “it's so funny. Bobby got so mad when he told me what you said, I've been saying the same thing”, but ever since she told him that, he's in yoga and Pilates, and he's been doing this coursework. That's a hallmark of somebody that's going to become Built to Lead.The humility to hear hard truth, not like it, get a little pissy, then go back and go, “is there a truth to it?” There was, he had to admit that he's not been working his course, same level. And he changed it. So, we call that an integrity gap where he believed core work was important, but when it got uncomfortable, quarantine, he didn't behave in alignment. He decided, “you know what, I'm just going work my biceps, because nobody can see my core”. And then he got some truth and he adjusted . Life is not about being perfect. It is about course correcting. And so, we looked for clients and companies that can hear hard truths and course correct. That's the way we live well.Michael Moore: Bob has always been kind of a suns out, guns out kind of guy, but yeah. You know, meeting him 14 years ago, 15 maybe, at this really terribly run sales conference outside of Nashville, you know how it is you just meet somebody along the way. And you're like, “man, I want to watch that guy's career”. And I think that's why the two of us have stayed connected. Part of it is I think I pissed him off at the sales conference, because I was voted MVP and he wasn't.Bob Wierema: How things have changed.Michael Moore: But I think [00:46:00] we just saw something in each other that was like, okay, we're both here on the sales conference, it sucks, but we're willing to put in the work and we're willing to self-examine our stills as many times as it takes. Just when you think you're getting to the top of that mountain and seeing over, let's go right back down the Valley and dig our way back out. No, it's the same thing. The way that we approached this podcast, there's not a lot of people that would get on a phone call right when COVID is hitting, because our daily routine has been thrown off. We're freaking out a little bit about what this is going to look like and how are we going to lead the Fort Worth(?) office and how are we going to lead the Chicago office if we can't be in the office? And we just kept talking and talking and working our way through it. And it was like, “Hey, we need a creative outlet. We need a podcast. Let's start one. Where did truth in storytelling go? Let's bring inspirational people on and just allow them to tell their stories”. And I think that's why we're perfect partners to do this together because we're constantly pushing each other. There was not a phone call that we have that Bob isn't questioning my numbers or saying, “whatever, you're not there,” it's just this push all the time. But I expect that out of him and he expects it out of me. One thing you hit on what was, was yoga. I mean, I started doing that very religiously, probably two and a half years ago, three years ago. Maybe when my mom got really sick and I just needed something, I thought, else is working, I'm going to go try yoga. And it was the first physical activity, sports oriented, you know, core work, that also subconsciously brought in a spiritual aspect, because I would go places in that hundred-plus degree room for 75 minutes in my mind that I couldn't go anywhere else and get this clarity around “my mom is eventually going to heaven. How's that going to work? How can I process that?” But yoga in that moment of holding this ridiculous pose was no place that I could get that clarity. Can you speak to that at all? Chet Scott: Well, no, I can't speak to that because I wasn't inside your head. And so, you could speak to that. You can tell us why that hot yoga class had the same effect that hot saunas had on native Americans. They would get rituals around going in there and sweating to the point of almost dying to meet their gods. I've never done either of those. So, I can't tell you, I can tell you about what's inside my head and my spiritual journey, but I would say you could tell us that story or we can study it.Lots of native cultures have met God when sweating and holding your pose. And I think that's a great thing. I just can't speak to it. I wasn't there with you. I believe [inaudible] was crazy, but I love [[inaudible] what she said or she was all at]. I just used this in our team practice today, after we had a really good practice with people who all had different interpretations, and it was hysterical how the CEO thought he'd been really clear describing what it was in summary that the vision was, and as I had the five or six teammates, just five or six out of the 15 that were there, playback what they heard their CEO say, they all heard it different. [00:50:00] And he was looking at me like, “what is wrong with these people?” And I looked back at him and I said, “you're not clear. And you need to be clear. This is not something wrong with them. It's not clear what you said.” Just remember, this is why I teach my clients to speak clear, concise, and direct. This client takes too long to say anything. And so, they get confused. And so, a niacin then said this, “we don't see things the way they are. We see things the way we are. We don't hear things the way they're said, we hear things with what's in our head because that's what filters it. And so, your spiritual experience in yoga was yours because of the way you were when you got hot and you could describe it. We can't, and we probably wouldn't understand it if you did. Michael Moore: No, but that gives me a lot to think about; I've been trying to figure out the why of that experience and why I consistently go back to it when I need it. Chet Scott: I would tell you to write about it more. Michael Moore: That's great. Chet Scott: The more you write about it, when you think about it, start to write your thoughts. Because when we just think about stuff, like, “I wonder why that hit me so much” we get actually a little more depressed over time because it's called ruminating.When we have something like that moment in yoga and you spiritually thought about a loved one, go and write your thoughts down. The more you write them out the more you'll start to see clarity over time. “That's why I [inaudible] so much, this is what it means. This is what I'm taking from that.” And writing is our clarity accounts too many humans think.Thinking about it just for clarity accounts(?), not true. It's never been true in the history of [00:52:00] time. And that's why we see stuff on caves. They were trying to get clear and they started drawing shit on brick and walls. And it's been like this ever since we started writing books, telling stories, because we didn't want to just keep all these things in our head, we want to get them out. Does that make sense? Michael Moore: Crystal clear. Thank you. Bob Wierema: We might have a new client for you Chet. Michael Moore: This is just incredibly intriguing. I really, appreciate it. One question that came to mind just because this has been a journey of Bob and I's through the world being pivoted a little bit, not truly understanding how global we are in our supply chain, just how quickly COVID disrupted everything. So, if you think about this moment in time, what are you seeing with the pivot and the leaders that you work with? How are they thinking through this? What are some tidbits that you've learned along the way and your teachings?Chet Scott: Well, I have a very skewed view because if you asked me, “how are my clients handling it?” I would tell you, “exactly the way I would expect them to”. There's a reason why we've been working on their core and their openness and their productive actions for years. And I always tell them “it's to prepare you for a moment of truth. I don't know when it's coming, you don't either, but we all have moments of truth, and they come oftentimes when we least expect them”. So, there's another word, people call it the Crucible, and the time to be prepared for a moment of truth – the Crucible or the Storm is not when you're in it. And so [00:54:00] my clients have been preparing, I have clients facing extinction. One owns hotel chains. They went from 99% occupancy before the lockdown; today, before they closed up, they had one person in a 238-bedroom world-class hotel. One room. They're facing extinction. I have another one who collects debt for a living. They almost got shut down by the government because they're shutting down. They don't want you to have to pay your bills. Another one that builds apartments and retail spaces that you don't have to pay rent for. It can't evict anybody.If you were to sit with me and these clients in our practice, what they're doing wouldn't seem any different than it would have been six months ago when every one of those clients was flying high as a kite. I mean, through the roof. And so that's the value of preparing before the Storm. Now, if I were to tell you what I see in the world, it's the opposite. I see a lot of people looking for a hack, a short way around, trying to take a pill, they're losing their mind because they haven't done any of the hard work. Now all of a sudden, they're facing a monumental climb and they've not been used to doing hard things and wanting to do hard things.So now all of a sudden, they've gone from being fat and just living in a surplus to looking like a freaking desert and going, “Holy shit, nobody told me this could happen”. And so, they're trying to muster up inner reserves, which is very difficult. The old ancient Romans had a phrase [00:56:00] that says, “we don't rise to the occasion. We sink to the level of our training”. I totally believe in that. So, I have a bunch of clients that have been trained. They're not going to go extinct. I don't believe that a single one of them will, but they're facing it. And my one client who collects debt for a living, they just had a record month. So, they had a hiccup when they had to send everybody home, and within two months – they have been in business 20 years – they just set a new, all-time record last month. And nobody's in their office, and they're collecting debt for a living and they're crushing it. So, I tell people don't waste a good crisis. One of my other clients in another one, that's going to extinct, they have enough, they've been prepared. They have enough capital reserves because they were not leveraged. Which is another one of my things I tell everybody: one of the best ways to prepare for a downturn is to not be in a debt burdened situation. Every one of my clients hears me preach about the dust bowl and the depression every day and say, “you will not go extinct if the dust bowl comes or the depression comes, you have cash and gold. You will die if you have debt up to your eyeballs”. So, none of my clients have a debt load that they can't weather the storm. And so many of them will be going out and making strategic acquisitions and purchasing because it's a static state, but there'll be many going extinct.And so, there's no silver bullet. It's just a lot of lead bullets. A lot of lead bullets are learned from this crisis. It will not kill you. You may be severely damaged, but learn from it, listener, and begin to prepare now for the [00:58:00] next one. This crisis is not the end of the world. It just feels that way, but it won't be we're too resilient.A little virus is not going to take us out. It clearly is a pain in the ass, but it's not going to eliminate the human population. So, prepare for the next storm now, and you'll weather it a lot better. Michael Moore: Well, that may have been a good question, but that was a way better answer. Thank you for that. you know, this, because it keeps, it keeps flowing along the theme of things that you've said that correlate to the things that I learned from my grandfather. I love that it's not a silver bullet, it's lots of lead bullets. I remember hunting with him in New Mexico, and there was an antelope that was a good one that was maybe just a little bit out of my comfort zone. I didn't take the shot. And he looked over me and said, “Grandson, you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take.” That's always carried with me. Chet Scott: So true, but it's just so true. You know, I have a son who's a professional poker player and I tell this story all the time, but I just told it to a team today, fresh top of the mind and I told them in a roundabout way, I asked them to all write down what are the two things that they think are the root contributors to a great life.We were ending the practice and I said, “you know, everybody just write the two most important things that will contribute”. They were all thinking deep because they've been with me a long time. Some were saying a good belief system, a strong core. And I'm like, “I'm thinking like really surface. I'm just saying, don't give me the teacher's [01:00:00] answer. Give me your answer”. And they were dancing all over. And then I gave them the answer finally, because they were lost. It's really simple. If you want to know what makes for a quality life, it is the quantity of decisions followed by the quality. If you want to study great lives, they always have a quantity of decisions.When we study great leaders, they make a shit ton of decisions, and they make a lot of bad ones. And so, they're constantly reevaluating their decision criteria and preparing for the next problem more informed so the quality of their decisions goes up. You cannot have an improvement in the quality of your decisions if you don't take a shot, you've got to take a shot. You've got to make a decision. It sucks. You miss that, learn, adjust the site, take another shot. So great lives are what your grandpa talked about. Take the freaking shot, Grandson. Ain't going to get any better. Just holding that site. We get better by learning from bad decisions. So, I'm always telling my clients make more decisions.My son, the professional poker player, he's been doing it almost 15 years and does it incredibly well. I asked him, “what's the difference between a pro and an amateur?” He said, “well that's simple”. He goes, “amateurs, wait for the quality hand. The pro makes a lot more bets”. Quantity of decisions leading to the crawl. He goes, “pros just play 10,000 games for every one that the amateur plays. The amateur folds, they just keep folding because the hand's not good enough. They don't want to take a shot. The pros know how to make bets. They don't bet a lot. They'd bet [01:02:00] on a lot of hands. That's how you become a pro. And then you have so many chips in your pocket that you can start to play for more per game, the amateurs just show up to get lucky. They go in on one of the high stakes tables with a pro and [inaudible] their lunch, literally.To me, what works in poker, which is a great life game, works in life. Quantity. Quality. And then a little luck.Bob Wierema: We're going to wrap up. We'll  give you the last question here: what do you want people to know about Chet Scott and Built to Lead? What do you want to leave people with? And obviously do a plug for the book and Built to Lead. Chet Scott: I'm not much of a plugger. They can find out anything they want to know about Built to Lead at bookslater.com, and I write about the work almost every day. It's free. They can go on the blog there and get more than they want. And the book will be called Becoming Built to Lead, when it comes out. If I can get an editor to do it. Bob Wierema: Well, we appreciate your time today, Chet, thank you so much, and we'll hopefully have you back on for another one in the weeks and months to come.Chet Scott: Sounds good. Nice to meet you. Michael Moore: This has been a pure pleasure. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed the time. Chet Scott: Yeah, I'll see you later. Bob Wierema: Take care.Michael Moore: Thanks so much for tuning into [01:04:00] this episode of The Climb. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider subscribing. And if you know someone who you would think would enjoy the podcast. Feel free to share this with them. Thanks again. And we'll see you on the next episode. 

 Connect with Michael Moore and Bob WieremaThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with Michael DavidsonGen Next: https://gennext.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpdavidson/Twitter: https://twitter.com/mpdavidsonMichael Davidson: From the founding of our country up to the eighties was like conflict after conflict and adversity after adversity. Like we really had to fight to be free over and over and over again. And first in the sixties, and then in the nineties, you just started to see the lack of pressure combined with the complacency that comes with comfort wealth; you started to see a deterioration of these institutions that drew people together and then technology through fire at them. And threw gas on. And so now I think you're seeing this sort of collective temper tantrum, and that's happening today. And so, it's a time for  renewal, which is a good opportunity, but we just don't take a little too kata. When you're at sort of like lowest common denominator, That person's identity is associated with their politics.And that's not true. Human beings are complicated. Michael Moore: Bob and I are joined this afternoon on The Climb with a new really good friend of mine, Michael Davidson. I got the honor to meet him this summer up in Telluride. And it has been a whirlwind journey since getting to know him, getting to know Gen next, becoming a member of Gen Next.And we'll talk all about the mission of Gen Next around education, economic growth and global security. Bob and I are really excited. Michael's one of the most dynamic individuals I've ever met. So, we're going to dive into a lot of different categories and life and pursuits and happiness.Listen to the client.Michael Moore: We're just thrilled to have you today, Michael. Welcome. Michael Davidson: I love it. Thank you. Thank you. Bob Wierema: You got a lot to live up to with that intro there. [00:02:00] Michael Davidson: No pressure. ‘Pursuits'? I mean, you end with, ‘pursuits and happiness'… Michael Moore: We're gonna set the bar high. Michael Davidson: Right. America's on the line! Michael Moore: Then just go higher before we jump into your passions around Gen Next, we want to know about you. So just give us a little background where you grew up, what defines you along the way and got you to where you are today? Michael Davidson: Now I thought I was going to get away. I'll give you a simple, quick bio. Michael Moore: No softballs here. Michael Davidson: Let me give you your current state.My wife and I are living in Southern California. She's from North Carolina. I lived in Texas for a while, but I split between California and Texas. I always felt like I was the bumper sticker. I wasn't born in Texas, but I got there as fast as I could. So, we have four kids. I have a son who's almost 11 and I have two six-year-old girls and I have a one-year-old, baby boy. And so, I think one of the biggest things about me is I've always wanted to be a dad. I've always wanted to be an awesome dad. One of the greatest purposes in life is if you care about the world, care about doing good things, it's just an incredible opportunity.So, I'm very blessed. And then before that though, I grew up doing wrestling, judo, pretty competitively. I have five siblings. I moved to Texas sort of abruptly when I was 16-years-old. And then I got to work and live on a ranch. And so, in Texas, I did a lot with draft horses, almost everything you can imagine to a horse I did. And that was just awesome. I mean, super awesome. That was a tough time in my life, or it was at least leading up to it, and just working with your hands and working with the animals – that was incredible. And I had some great experiences in Texas. I got into ranching. I wrestled at Arlington High School for a year, transferred to Richland High School and I made a massive turn, did some theater. And then I got really into theater. I was [00:04:00] ranching, wrestler, judo, jock, martial arts, and then this theater there. I got exposed to people I never thought I would have been exposed to in my time in Texas, just all across the board. Bob Wierema: Where do you fall in the lineup of five siblings?Michael Davidson: I'm number four. Bob Wierema: Okay. So wrestling and judo was probably really important in the lineup of the kids, right?Michael Davidson: It was a dominant role in the family growing up. It was very, very dominant. I thought for the bulk of my life, that was all I was going to do for my entire life. I never even considered anything different, to be honest. It goes, girl, boy, girl, me, and then girl, boy. I think from the oldest to youngest, about 20 years apart and it was super cool. I'm very blessed. I have got awesome siblings. but what was interesting for me is for a long time, I was the youngest and I guess I take on some of those qualities. And then I was the middle-ish for a period of time. Then I was like the oldest of the youngest, especially when we moved to Texas. I moved with my mom and little brother and sister, and so, took on sort of a large role in my younger siblings' life at that time. So, getting to experience – I think if you're into family of origin stuff, there were a lot of ups and downs, but I'm super blessed because I experienced so much of family of origin from so many different angles.I guess one of the things is after getting into theater, and then I did a program at TCC that was in the Tarrant County College in the humanities and just the power of ideas and leadership and the role that a person could play in other people's lives and in bending history, it just captivated me. And [00:06:00] so that became a real seed that was planted or maybe watered. When I was wrestling, I'd have this experience in Russia. I got to go compete in Russia. I went twice. We went to Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan – and we went before and after following the birth of the Soviet Union. And so being exposed at a young age to people who had no freedom, no idea of freedom, and here I am homesick and obsessed with this idea of going to McDonald's and Red Square. And this is something that was just totally removed from their reality. That really blew my mind. And then I was wearing some Russian warmups and I'm in the Red Square walking around, and this military officer was asking, he says ‘Americanski' and he's asking something in Russian. I asked the translator, ‘what's he asking me?' And he says, ‘he wants to know if you're an American'. I'm wearing my Russian digs. How did he know? And he says, ‘Americans get told this a lot and he could tell you're an American because you walk like you're free'.I was very young, but it never left me, that idea of this sort of very romantic abstract concept could affect the way I move in the world. And so I think at a very early age, the idea of, and then being exposed to a lot of different types of people and a lot of ups and downs in life, I think started to weave into me finding my deep purpose, which is to make a big difference in people's lives and advance ideas that make the world better. So, I guess that's a bit of my story and what shaped me. Michael Moore: No, that's great. My oldest daughter is just completely entrenched in theater and this year has been particularly hard for her, because she normally gets to be on stage and perform in front of all of her peers and her family and friends and grandparents, and because of COVID, she couldn't do that. It was interesting this year because [00:08:00] they did a good job. They ended up making the play into a movie. Then we all got to socially distance in the auditorium and watch the movie. So, kind of an unintended consequence of that. I got to see my daughter in a movie, which was really cool, but it was hard, but with the end products, she was proud of. But I asked her a long time ago, ‘what draws you to theater? Why do you enjoy it so much?' And she said, ‘ you just get to escape and be whoever you want to be up on that stage.' So, I mean, was it an escape for you or are you just curious about it? What, what drew you to it? Cause it's a powerful thing and people either get it or they don't. Michael Davidson: I think just the opportunity to create. I guess similarly themed of being able to create, communicate the creation and see how it lands and affects people. It was a very special thing. And then I think being able to transform your devotees, transforming into a character – because a character, one of the things my original theater director had really talked about is that these stories are about the most important parts and in a characters' life.And so, you're really getting to channel a very important ideal, that's going to relate to a lot of different people. And so, you know, Steven Pressfield, the famous author, incredible novelist. He writes a lot about the muse and there's a higher order that you need to summon and, you know, I'm Catholic, and so, I definitely believe that in my context, that you're tapping into something to create and share, so that experience was really powerful in terms of specific, different roles I got to play. It does take you into different worlds and different identities in ways that you just would never expect.[00:10:00] I remember I played a father who was dying of cancer. And in the audition there was a moment where I had to reunite with my son and I remember feeling that very viscerally. And it's a tough thing to describe for people who haven't experienced that, but just the connection to the character. It's really interesting being a dad now. I still think of that moment on stage of connecting with – the character was my son and then I also got to play – it wasn't a Lorca play. That was really funky. That was at a theater out in Fort Worth outdoors. so, I got to cool different stuff.I went to Sage and Silo theater. They did a lot of like risqué, plays that were really fun and different. I remember we did; you can't take it with you, which is this wholesome, wholesome play, but from about a hundred years ago about just being grateful for what you have. This family did it – written over a hundred years ago. He did just invite all these random people into their home. It was recently on Broadway a few years ago, but the director in Texas, there's a crazy aunt or a crazy guest who ends up coming into the home. He cast a transvestite to play that role.And then just to illustrate that look that all these people come from his different walks of life. And so that exposed me to a lot of different, really incredible life stories and being able to play this romantic lead in a story; I ended up getting lucky because I was signed on as the understudy, but then I ended up getting to do a run of show.It was a super cool experience, but you're in these environments that like if I wasn't doing theater, I would never get to experience some semblance of those realities. So good for your daughter? I hope she continues with it. It's a special thing. It always has to stay with you in some way.Michael Moore: I hope she does too. She's incredibly talented. Michael, you mentioned a couple of times just the impact and [00:12:00] importance of being a dad and I feel the same way. I, made a couple of reconnaissance calls before this podcast. I gotta ask, I think you mentioned that your youngest son is Bo, and y'all adopted right? So, can you talk about that process and how you went through that? Michael Davidson: Oh, it was incredible. Actually, for one of the jobs I tried to get out of college, I ended up going to college in the Bay area in California. And then I wanted to move back to Texas, and I tried to get a job in Gladney, the adoption agency. It didn't work out and I didn't get the job. But, the facet stuck with me and I, growing up, I never had it. I never had really experienced adoption. I didn't know anybody. It wasn't a dominant thing. I just always wanted to. I think the idea of being able to provide sort of an unconditional loving environment just to a little life that may not have otherwise had, it just always  drew to me. And so, a few years ago, my first three kids, and the twins, we were surprised and blessed by them. And so once after my twins were born, it was like, we got to get organized. We have to. And so, we started on the process of figuring out what's the right pathway for us.And so, anybody who has adopted, you look at foster to adopt, foster care, what age? It's a very curious, strange process early on because you're having to articulate and express things that you'd never really thought about. You feel really awkward about it. So, we started that process and then fast-forward, we ended up bringing somebody on and it wasn't a fit with them, it was really bad. The person was pretty negligent. And so, we wasted a lot of time and money early on. So we got recommended to a person by this guy, Dave Hollis. So we got recommended this attorney. And so we start with this attorney, he's like, ‘it's going to take us a year and a half because you have three other kids and it's going to take a while'.So, we went through [00:14:00] all the processes of certifications. We had to do the first aid to get our home studied and all this stuff. And we had our sort of criteria-ish and then fast-forward, last August, we did a Gen X trip to Poland and Germany for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I think I was leaving Auschwitz, it was like something really intense and I got an email saying, ‘baby boy in Nevada'. And so, we scrambled into this process. And so, my son and my wife, because I wasn't able to get back, went to go meet him at foster care. It's technically called cradle care, but basically foster care.So anyways, they go and they meet him and they just they've fallen in love and we're learning about his story. Then we were able to, we brought him home later, right after actually labor day, I think. That has been an unbelievable journey. All of my kids are obsessed with him. Last night they had a dance party and he's loving it. I think adoption transforms anybody whose life it watches. So, if anybody out there that's considering it, do it. I was frightened, completely scared, especially when I became a dad the first time and then a dad to twins.Twin girls and then a dad and then adoption, each time I was frightened about my worthiness to provide and these unique circumstances. You just have faith and keep going, and then you just see how beautiful it is on the other side. So, it's been an incredible experience. My oldest son; I have this book idea about the role that fatherhood could play in building great societies and my son and I were chilling in the jacuzzi and he's like, ‘hey daddy, how's your book going along? And I said to them, ‘I need to prioritize again. It's not good'. And he goes, ‘you should really work on that' as he takes a sip of his drink, that he thinks is a margarita.[00:16:00] I'm like, ‘I know, I know'. And he goes, ‘you think, you know, like when you think that, like before I was born your soul had an interview with my soul? I said, ‘What do you mean? And he goes, I'm chilling with God' and you come up and you're, ‘I want to be your dad'. And you had to do that for me, and for the girls, and for both.And I thought it was the most powerful concept that you have to earn being a father and your whole life purpose is to be reminded that you're really being a father. And so, with all of my kids, I feel that in a really big way. And with Bo, given that he is adopted, there's that heightened sense of duty to make sure that he grows up in a home, that he knows that he is unconditionally loved.And he's a little miracle because his birth mom chose to bring him into this world. And, then now we're stewards of the early stages of his incredible legacy. So, it's for all the kids, it's super awesome. And the adoption has just been – I can't, when I try to articulate it, I feel like I'm exaggerating or embellishing, but every cliche of it changes your life. You can't really understand it unless you experience it. It's incredible. Michael Moore: So, you obviously moved around a lot early on and then ended up at school at Berkeley. Is that correct? Michael Davidson: Yeah. Before was fine. I did this at the cornerstone program at TCC, which is awesome. I got really into being a nerd and ideas. It was so new to me. I always got good grades, but [00:18:00] I was way more of an athlete. It was not like I just got good grades.; that's what you're supposed to do. It wasn't because of some pursuit of your best self, it was just you know, get your stuff together. Bob Wierema: Great. Go get it done.Michael Davidson: So it is more a function of overachieving than it is living. And so, when I went to first theater and then TCC, it did really expose me to ‘wow, there really are big ideas about how to live and how the world should be'. And so, I became very enamored with that. And then I went to Berkeley and I got really involved.I tried to get involved in every group; political group, non-profit groups, all this stuff. And Berkeley is a place where you can't kind of have an idea. You can't have a curiosity; you need to have an opinion. And if you have an opinion, you're going to be under attack.And so, it was like, ‘Whoa'. So, I had to learn pretty quickly to develop a worldview and back it up. Which was good – it forced me to raise my game, but it isn't good for free thought. So,  I got really active in politics, really as a way to sort of help young people, including myself, to live freely.And that became a very important theme to me. And then being there during 9/11, it was a very hostile anti-American place after 9/11, and everywhere else in the country was completely unified and mourning, but in Berkeley, it was not like that. And that scared me and activated me in many ways. And so that, that experience started, it carried with me quite a bit. Bob Wierema: Why was that in Berkeley? Why do you think that specifically in that area, you're feeling that? Michael Davidson: Well, Berkeley has this history of – it's sort of sad because it actually has a great history of being the sort of foundation of the free speech movement [00:20:00] and really having a legacy of freedom – but at some point, it got really taken over by radical hippies and they have a sort of political view that's I think more focused on control unfortunately than it is focused on freedom. And so that just spreads. And so, the whole city is like that. I really feel like you get into the ‘America as a superialist empire and the force of evil throughout its existence.And that's just what the sort of dominant thought is of the city, but also the most of the faculty. And then as a result, the student body ends up reflecting that type of activism. So, it is pretty gnarly. I'm from Texas, right. And I had just been on a ranch and I was sort of weird, especially at that point in my life. I remember. I don't know, it was like, wrestle, judo, and then theater but I have been on a ranch. So, I had a truck and they did not like my truck.I remember I'd walk to my apartment with the American flag on my shoulder, but with my stuff. Because, maybe I came from a meeting and we're hanging up the flag  – and I'd get confronted. And so, all my friends who were really involved in the types of causes, they really cared about American ideals and representing them on Berkeley's campus. And so that was a fun time of activism. That's for sure. It was a really fun time. It's a strange place. But my son, I was telling him about Berkeley, and we took him, and he was like, ‘why would you not love this country?' And I said, ‘we've made mistakes, but it is very sad that they don't love this country in spite of their mistakes'.Just keep [00:22:00] trying to make it great. Michael Moore: So, not to dwell on Berkeley for too long, but just one more point. With all that going on, where in that maturation did you get involved in the college and leading the college Republicans there, because that had to have just kind of been pouring gasoline on the fire?Michael Davidson: Well, there are some folks there who were really organized and active and I think it was a way to sort of have the free thought to speak freely, to organize for that. Remember I was in a class, with someone who knew way more about politics than I did. I didn't know anything, but she's in class. She knew all this stuff. And I remember asking her, ‘you know so much about the stuff. How do you know about this stuff? Are you political? You sounded like you might be like a Republican or something,' and she's like, ‘no, no, no'. And I'm like, ‘what?' And she's like Core Spirit or like something that, a very social sports scene. She just won't talk about politics. And then finally she's like, ‘no, a lot of my people won't be friends with me. If they know that I have these views,' and I was like, ‘that is jacked'.That is absolutely jacked. And so that was one of the first moments early in my time there. And then, they'd bring speakers and people lose their mind just because they disagreed with the speaker. Almost like what the heck is going on. I had a mentor. I had a mentor who was president Clinton's domestic policy advisor.Her name is Carol Roscoe. She's awesome. I got to do a trip to DC, and had an internship with her and she was a prominent Democrat at the time and just incredible mentor. So, I was like, ‘you can like people who have different points of view… How do I understand this?' So it really bugged me. I don't like things that are dogmatic and try to shut people down.People don't grow. I want to be on the side of freedom and dignity and  let's go and have that expectation of people and personal agency started to stir quite a few of my passions. [00:24:00] And so then we just started organizing and being, I think, on the side of freedom and free expression.It definitely ticked a lot of people off. I was sort of funky at that time, and broke. I only shopped at thrift stores. So, I end up like plaid pants and really long shaggy hair and people said, ‘I didn't know you had those views. Why are you Republican?' I'm like, ‘well, why aren't you?'Well, the Republican party at the time was a very different animal. And so, we've got to look at the  politics of the time, I just think I was really attracted to again, ideas and people. I wasn't attracted to this sort of party politics, but I ended up getting a lot of opportunities and being a Republican at Berkeley, it's like a man bites dog type of a story. And so, people give you a shot. Then I ended up helping lead the California youth politics effort. And then I ended up running nationally and just seeing the sort of idealism and passion of young people across the country and be part of that energy.I think it really galvanized to me that I need to be committed to a life of, of service to high ideals. And so over time, that just continue to be a trend. And somewhere in there, I did a lot with a government management consulting on government performance. I was just a social entrepreneur and in different ways, sometimes politics, sometimes nonprofits. We would run teddy bear drives for the children's hospital of Oakland, did all kinds of stuff and that over and over just became this constant kind of theme.But the activism was a lot of fun when you do get people who are very offended by just the idea that your simple view is that millions of people in the country share. And so being able to be an activist was a really fun experience, especially in a place where it's quite hostile. It is sad because the country looks a lot today, or at least on social media, it looks a lot today [00:26:00] like Berkeley's campus does in the sense of people freaking out about somebody's point of view without getting a chance to get to know them, even let alone understand the point of view. And so I always started, I always had this idea in college; it has its own charm and it's crazy, but the rest of the country is not, but now it's that sort of dogma and the theatrics have spread. And I think that's dangerous for the country. Bob Wierema: Why do you think that that is spread so much? Michael Davidson: Oh man. It's a long answer.I'll try to keep it simple. I think there's been a combination of things as our wealth has risen as a country, and with that comfort, and as you just start to remove from things that have drawn you together, so institutions have declined, values which were usually discussed in schools and in families and expected of people in business in government.There's not spaces where those conversations are had as much anymore. And so the combination of people getting comfortable being detached from real kind of character formation, citizen formation, and then the lack of adversity overall. If you just think of from the founding of our country to the eighties was like conflict after conflict and adversity after adversity, you really had to fight to be free over and over and over again. And after the fall first in the sixties, and then I think in the nineties, you just started to see the lack of pressure combined with the complacency that comes with comfort and wealth; you started to see a deterioration of these institutions that drew people together [00:28:00] and then technology through firearms or through gasoline.So now I think you're seeing this sort of collective temper tantrum. And that's happening today. And so, it's a time for renewal, which is a good opportunity, but we just get a little too caught up. And so, when you're at sort of like lowest common denominator, that person's identity is associated with their politics and that's just not true. Human beings are complicated and there's this scene, if you've ever seen the play Hamilton, Ehrenberg when he has his, ‘Oh shoot'. He's like, I should have known that the world was big enough for both of us. And so I think when you don't have adversity and you get too comfortable, you get too caught up. And that has been a problem for individuals. I think it's especially been a problem for leaders in society. I think it's very sad when executives and entrepreneurs don't understand what free enterprise is. They think it means just making a dollar. That's not what it does. It's a very sacred, special system, a dynamic system that's created a lot of opportunity. I think being able to live in a country this special and how it's a study of history and our place in history, that's a drift. And so, I think just a lot of these sort of very sacred ideals are taken for granted. I'm on this binge right now where – I don't know about a binge – but I'm reading as many sacred texts as I can.So, I just finished the whole Bible. And, I'll move into the Qur'an next, but one of the things you do notice when you read these ancient texts is they talked about high ideals and best self and generational progress, posterity, prosperity, duty. It just doesn't compute as much today. This high expectation of it. You see this [00:30:00] stuff on self-help shows, but it's not just a stead of who we are in the way the Russian says to me, ‘you walk like you're free'. Right. I walk with a little pep in my step, but that's very different than I think this idea is sort of walking like you're free and you take that responsibility in a very sacred, very kind of cherished way.So, there's, I think there's a lot of trends, but you know, institutions, complacency, wealth, lack of diversity. We're a victim of our own success. I mean, I think those are the types of technology expediting all that. I think those would be the basic reasons. Michael Moore: So see, Bob, it's an answer like that that just immediately peaked my curiosity.Bob Wierema: This could be a six-hour podcast. Literally. Michael Moore: You know,  he talked about me, walking in and his knowing I was from Texas with a little swagger, it was instantly met with his enthusiasm and this kind of thought process and evaluation and just finding meaning and purpose and just being a better person, the next day, I was like, ‘Hey, I need to sit down with this guy more'. And so pretty quickly after introductions, it was like, ‘well, what do you do?' And he started telling me about Gen  Next and the three pillars. So if we can pivot a little bit, Michael, just start telling us about how you got involved and your climb to CEO.Michael Davidson: Well, it's actually kind of funny when I obviously have this deep purpose in me and, after I finished a lot of these political experiences, I didn't go into it, but I was running into a lot of really corrupt people. The other side, like you thought of everything you didn't like of Republicans and politics. [00:32:00] I've got to experience all of that. And I think there was a lot of pressure to be disenchanted after those experiences. I ran this national political campaign – I'd say I was in a team of people who ran, but I was the candidate. And, it was an unbelievable experience, but it was just pretty sad in many ways and I was trying to figure out, ‘okay, I don't want politics to be my pathway to make a difference'. I don't know. I didn't know what that was. And so, I was trying to get a job. I was thinking, well, maybe I should get away from this jugular stuff and figure out a way to make money, I'm broke.I was trying to get a job at like the Kinsey or boss consulting or something like that, or in real estate. And so somewhere along the way, I met the founders of GenNext who were great human beings, but I met them through the course of this campaign. And so, I got to learn more about their vision, and one thing that always struck me was anything in business and life, it's going to be driven by who shows up.And what I always noticed about politics is the people who showed up were intense activists or socialites. And it wasn't enough of normal citizens or leaders – because they're all the leaders. And by that, I don't mean political leaders. I don't mean ruling class, a political class. I mean leadership class, you're in leadership roles. They all thought they were too busy to pay attention to the thing that enabled them to be free. And it always bugged me to know it. I had no idea how to channel that. And so, I've made the founders of GenNext and these entrepreneurs that are super successful, the main founder is a guy named Paul and he's, survived the Iranian Revolution – almost didn't make it out. Rags to riches story. He built the St. Regis Hotel in Orange County, California. I remember when I met him, I was like, ‘this is the wealthiest person I've ever met in my freaking life'. And I called my mom after my meeting with him. I hope he doesn't mind me telling the story. [00:34:00] I call my mom and I go, ‘Mom. I just met this guy who's so soulful and purposeful and cares so much about this country, but his tie is worth more than, than my life'. And she goes, ‘Oh, I love that you know that because you worked at men's warehouse'. And so, that was just super cool. Here he is very polished, very accomplished, but cares deeply about the world. And when you heard his story and he's survived the revolution. I think that we can't let Americans take for granted that our differentiator is our commitment to freedom and our commitment to achieving freedom together, and leaders in society where the one in the U.S. are very committed to that. And I want to draw other leaders in to be very committed to that. Who knows if Iran had had that, there may not would have been a revolution and the world would look very different, and you can see that there's a lot of recent historians who had a multi-volume set up evaluating all major civilizations throughout history. And he concluded that if leaders abdicate, the society is going to fail and he saw this trend, and this was about 15, over 15 years ago. And I was very taken by this and I was really passionate, and I was like, ‘Okay, let's turn this into like a business model'. And so, I was on my friend's wife's parents' couch and I had no place to live.So, as I said, I was super broke and I'm like, well, let's write this up. And so, we turned it into something that would be a community that would draw people who are wildly accomplished, but who actually cared about the world beyond their own financial success. And how do we create an experience that helps them be more generational in the way they think about their own life and the society around them? How they get connected to big ideas? How they [00:36:00] connect and get connected with deep purposeful people and how we could create experiences that draw that out of them?And so, along the way, it's now been attracting really incredible entrepreneurs, executives, thought leaders, authors, and we help expose them to I think the core values that build a free society and help equip them to leave a better legacy, but live it today. And then expose them to issues where they could make a difference. And that could be like on counterterrorism, or education or some other issue. So, we started out early on building that out. Now I've been at it over 15 years and we have a community across the country of all these really exceptional humans. And we've been able to travel around the world to be exposed to some of these big ideas.I mentioned before going to Poland and Germany, and seeing what it's like to have freedom shock therapy in Poland after they're on the boot of the Soviets and the Nazis and how committed they could be to freedom. But what the threats are today to their own pursuit of that go to countries like Rwanda, and you could see how otherism to raging, severe bigotry that could lead to a million people being slaughtered in a hundred days. And then how do you rebuild a country that way? Or just here, in the United States, you're seeing a generational regress, in terms of opportunity and how do we restore that dynamism that we have felt that ambition, to be exposed to those really big ideas with some of the most talented people in the country?I know it's obviously become biased, but that gives me hope about it. And so, my starting premise with GenNext was how do you harness the power of leadership and core ideals, and then translate that into an awesome experience that helps make the country better over time? It was a very attractive thing to me. And so we have been having these founders who were all these impressive entrepreneurs that achieve levels of financial success that I never could even fathom. [00:38:00] It was a pretty cool gig. Obviously, a lot of people, a lot of young people, especially my age, they don't stay at one job for a long time and I don't have any desire to leave. They're probably going to have to kick me out, or I'll try to secure. I'm deeply committed to turning this into a lasting institution that can get really advanced generational leadership in our country and play a big role in helping us make sure the 21st century is the best century we've ever had.Bob Wierema: Well, you can just feel your passion when you talk about it. So awesome. And when you talk about people doing something, I feel like you're just like this is it, you can tell you love what you're doing for a cause that you so deeply care about and is thought so passionately about. It's awesome to just hear you talk about all that because you don't see that in a lot of people, a lot of it's the nine-to-five and, ‘I can't do anything about this world, so I'm just going to live in my little space and control what I can control'.Michael Davidson: Yeah. It has its trade-offs though to be the Kool-Aid man, because my wife will be like, ‘let's go to this event with some neighbors or friends', and they're like, ‘what are you doing? Trying to change the world? What does that mean?' And then I kind of get into that, but I have to be undeterred and, just the right people will be into it. Bob Wierema: So you mentioned Michael, I think maybe you said it was the three pillars of it. What are the three pillars? Michael Davidson: Yeah, the three issues. So, let me give it a go further upstream, right?Like the theory of change is attract people with disproportionate influence that they may or may not be aware of and help [00:40:00] create an experience that builds relationships and knowledge that helps them live out a more effective legacy, and all that is the bank of a freer society across generations.The issues that we've tackled are economic opportunity, education security, because those are issues. I have this rubric that I go through to deconstruct and thiknk about the world and I'll look at what are the core principles? Then what are the issues that would have policies, politics? Then call it history or zeitgeists, whatever the pressure point is on this thing.And so, the principles are really, how do you build a free society across generations? That's the American experiment. Every generation has to commit to that over and over and over and over again in order for freedom to progress. Then the next is okay, now what issues do we do to take those values and see them through? Those issues, the three stools of prosperity are are we economically dynamic? Are we educating our kids? It's a moral and economic issue. And then are we safe and principled? And you could debate which one of those issues is more important. No. I don't know.  There's a book called antifragile and he has a section in there where he makes the argument that economic freedom is the first one.You don't get anything else unless you get economic freedom. And he assessed these other societies that start to invest in education. You need resources to invest with, and that's a product of free society or economic freedom. But I think at a point of our stage of social development, there really are three. Unfortunately, you get too many people who will say, ‘I just really care about education', but then you go further and say, ‘Oh, well, what do you mean?' ‘Well, you know I just want the kids to be better'. And it's like, ‘okay, so how are you getting involved?' He gave all the politics. I hate politics. But you don't care about education because education is a highly regulated thing by [00:42:00] politicians. And so being able to deconstruct these issues and see how they play off of each other, I think is a necessary thing for all citizens, but especially people who are leaders in a free society.Michael Moore: So one of the things that I've gotten to experience in just the short time that I've been involved that I want you to tell our audience about is the Jeffersonian dinners, and how that came about and the maturation of it. And then I'll share some insight on my first one. Michael Davidson:  You know, it's an interesting thing today to my point previously about there's less spaces today where individuals are brought together to go deep, to learn, to reflect, to even draw out their own values. I do think too many people just end up on autopilot and it's too easy to end up on autopilot nowadays. So, we really wanted a way to take our members who are all influential, powerful people. There's a lot of people who want their attention. So, creating a space where they feel like there's a place where I'm going to go deep with other impressive people. It's a super important ingredient. And so, we needed a model for that, and we were looking at who were the best builders of raging talent – an entrepreneurial thought and the founding fathers were a good example. And, Thomas Jefferson used to do this where he in his home in Monticello, he would get some of the most talented minds and have them discuss a set of values or issues.And we just decided to model that with our own community members. So, we'll draw you in, we have a prompt, that prompt might be a time of adversity and the character shaped, the prompt might be American values, and what your experience with them is, it might be gratitude. It might be ambition, [00:44:00] might be wealth. And what you find is to take some of those things that I just riffed on that are thrown around, but to say, ‘no, no for about three hours, you're going to like, think and reflect and share these things that people gloss over all the time'. You find that people get really deep and they grow as people and they grow in relationships. So that's, that's a big part of our experience for our own community to get people thinking. Michael Moore: It's an amazing experience. Back to your point, whether you call it your bubble or your comfort zone or your friend network, real quickly, you can just hang out on the surface and you can still have a good conversation, but it's not a great conversation.It's the passion that Bob and I have for this podcast; we want to have great conversations, not what you see on a headline – or I was counting this morning on the political ads. I saw, ‘liar' and ‘doesn't tell the truth', 15 times in 10 different commercials. I mean, it's bombarding every day of every minute up until this election. But I sat down in this backyard. It was a beautiful night and we dove into American values. And it was that feeling like – Bob, you know this because you've learned Spanish – when your mind just clicks and all of a sudden you're just going in Spanish and you're having dreams in Spanish and you just can't turn it off.I got home that night. I don't think I went to bed until three o'clock in the morning, just thinking through all the cool points that were made, how my point of view changed 50 different times in the course of the dinner. Where has this been? Thank you guys so much for providing that platform. It was just fantastic. Michael Davidson: I love that metaphor of drawing you into a new language. A new wavelength in many [00:46:00] ways. And I do think it's important and it doesn't just make the country better. I think it raises your game in the way that I think you start to approach your family, that you start to think about your priorities, your employees get new ideas about things that you never thought you would have picked up on.And so, we do this in a way that we have our own sort of method for doing it. The idea of getting people together to talk, that's not novel, but the way we go about doing it, of how we curate the topics, how we curate the people in it, how we structure the evening, sort of have a very distinct approach to it. And I've seen more grown men and women cry in these experiences than I ever would have thought imaginable, and it's just super cathartic – it's needed. And in today's world where everybody's expected to be on and brand and blah, blah, blah. It's like, ‘Hey, I want, I want the real you, because I am not going to sharpen iron otherwise.'Michael Moore: Another amazing by-product that I didn't even really understand going into it – and Michael, it goes back to raising your children and the importance of that and talking to them and the amazing conversation you had in the hot tub with your son. The evening before, when we had gotten the topic, I took my family to dinner and brought it up to them. And getting a 14-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old daughter's perspective on what American values meant to them, it just blew my mind how quick they were able to pivot and go deep and really think about it. And it was a 180 degree. Different than the normal conversation we would have had over dinner.And at the end of it, they enjoyed it too. We've got to do that and pierce it in the minds of these kids because they've got it. We've just got to bring it out. Michael Davidson: Exactly. I think the powerful thing too, is that [00:48:00] they see you thinking about that and our kids are not observing us being deep and purposeful collectively. They don't, they don't see that, we know that. Time at dinner is down and family-focused family time is down. Everybody's attention is very divided. And so, kids are not seeing their parents or just adults really thinking deeply about the type of world they want to create and the values they want to live by at all. And I don't think schools are doing this all that well either. And so, then where are you going to learn it? And if you don't learn it, it's going to be lost. Bob Wierema: Have you read a book called Meditations by Marcus Aurelius? Michael Davidson: Yeah. Yeah. Bob Wierema: So that book is literally with me all the time. I'm going to get a second copy because I've gone through it just so many times. And, and you talk about, if you read that book and you really dive into that and you go, ‘Oh, the stuff this guy was thinking about and how he was reflecting on things compared to the way I think before I started to have a lot of love for studying the Stoics, and my executive coach now that I work with today, really has pushed me on doing this'.And it's like, listen, I don't need you in business books. This is where you get to spend your time. You got to spend your time on you, spend your time on your worldviews, figuring out what your purpose is. I heard you like deep thinking and free thought that stuff is so important. And then you also like having the ability to like, I love this idea of these dinners because just to sit there and listen to other people and get their thoughts and not interrupt them and just ask questions and not just immediately jump to, going back to your saying earlier with the society today, like jumping and being like, ‘well, this is my opinion, I believe this. And I, I'm not even hearing what you're saying'. It's crazy. Michael Davidson: It's amazing how in human interaction nowadays [00:50:00] of one thing we've done with our team, when we have retreats is, we'll do this exercise where you just ask somebody and you all should try this. It's a very interesting experience, but you basically take two people on your team or just two people, and have one person talk, just tell us about themselves or their day for 60 seconds, but the other person cannot say a word. They just listen and then the other person does it. And what you become aware of is how much your thoughts are as loud as their message to you and that's noise. And so, getting your head clear I think is obviously very important, but in terms of the marcus aurelius, ancients and the Stoics, and, even just going post-Renaissance, take a system like free enterprise and capitalism and the opportunities that it's afforded billions of people throughout the world now. That followed deep, deep thought by Adam Smith, not about the invisible hand and the price and manufacturing of a pin or a pencil; it followed thought about human beings and what they value, and how they interact with one another. He had another book. Adam Smith has The Wealth of Nations and he had The Theory of Moral Sentiments. If you want a good summary for a contemporary audience of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, there's a book called Adam Smith Can Change Your Life. What he comments on – both Adam Smith and then Russ Roberts who wrote the other book – is that human beings want to be lovely and they want to be loved. For some reason, being loved is completely out of whack from being lovely today. And so, what the markets with really a sense of the world challenge us to do is to figure out what does it mean to be lovely? What does it mean to be good? What does it mean to stand for something? [00:52:00] It's unfortunate that a crisis or adversity is what brings that out of us. As a parent, that freaks me out.I don't want my kids to be raised the same way I was. I want my kids to have a really good life, unconditional love, and just be the best version of themselves and be expected to be the best version of themselves. And therefore, I'm going to shield them from adversity. So, as a society, we live in this wealthy period of time. We're being shielded from a lot of adversity. We're not stopping to think about what matters. It's the only way that you could make sure that you could grow in the absence of adversity is by constantly being reminded that you've got to commit to those values over and over and over again, you've got to think about it. Otherwise, someone's going to threaten you and attack you into being that way. I mean every war, every war throughout history I think has had a spring out of it of, ‘Oh shoot. I should've been better. It should've been higher ideals and I just – as a parent and as a society – I don't want us to go down that road'.Michael Moore: So, thinking about the election being right around the corner, and the mission of Gen Next and possible future Gen Next members listening to this podcast, what would you tell them? What do we need to be thinking about? What do we need to be doing and where are we headed? Not, not just for the next four years, but for the next 40.Michael Davidson: Yeah. Thank you for that. I think that's exactly it. I think for anybody out there, any entrepreneurial person – well, any person – my wheelhouse set for people in leadership roles is to seek wisdom, to really be introspective on your own sense of purpose and to really think about the long view.One of our members had a saying, ‘I want to see, I don't want to look at the moment. I want to see through the moment'. And I think leaders have to do that more than anybody right now. And so, stop, think, reflect, build community. Look for [00:54:00] things that structure this into your life.And so, we're one way of doing that, but there's other ways to do it and you constantly hear from entrepreneurs, ‘Oh, I'm really busy. I'll do that when I retire'. Screw that. It is absolutely something that needs to be woven into your life completely. Otherwise your legacy will lackluster. Your sense of fulfillment later in your life will lackluster. But I think most importantly, society is going to be worse off today. I think the reason why the election feels so nuts is not because of politics. It's because of our culture; politics reflects our culture and that's just how it works.So, if you really, really want a better political discourse, think about how you discourse with others. Do you have an opinion? Are you shutting down other people's opinions? Are you treating people really well? Are you trying to learn? And if you do do that, but you want to see things different in politics, then start financially supporting people who are in it because it's really expensive to run campaigns.It's hard to get your message out. Get out your checkbook and help good people. Go volunteer, run for office yourself. But I think the real space, the highest leverage longer-term space to make a difference – which is not sexy in today's world of instant gratification and scale – it is really just, are you being? Are you informed? Are you clear on your values? And are you surrounded with other people that are going to hold you accountable to those?In aggregate, if we do that as a country, everything starts to get better. You have a network effect, a flywheel of kind of goodness. And so, I would say that for anybody who's caught up in the election. And so, for me personally, I do not watch the news. I pay very [00:56:00] little attention to sort of what's on social media. So, I try to wait a few days to get caught up. But most of the things that I try to read are much deeper, more developed thoughts, but it does take effort. Everybody's really, really busy. You've got to carve it into your life.It's just, I think that's important. And I don't want to come across cynical about politics. I think it's really important to be politically involved, super important to be politically involved. Somehow, we got the idea in this country that that's the way, and that has not been – that's what all-encompassing politics was for dictators, not for free societies. For free societies, everybody does all kinds of things, and it's more dynamic and humans flourish. That's how it should be. Michael Moore: You know, I was thinking back, just thinking about this selection to conversations that I would have with my grandfather, who was a very, very stout Democrat, you know, back 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, that really his beliefs and his way about going about life and his family and his faith mashed a little bit more to at least the center version of the Republican party today. I can see there's been that shift, but what's the next shift? Is there going to be a third party or a fourth party or something that comes out of nowhere that nobody thought about? What are your thoughts around that? Michael Davidson: I don't know about a third party, but there are opportunities for reform. I think there's new ideas percolating: choice rank voting and trying to get more diversified representation. There's interesting stuff like that, but I think going a little further upstream, the Republican party for Trump was basically the Reagan [00:58:00] coalition and that coalition doesn't really exist anymore. And the issues, they were organized against them. I mean the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. And so, some of those issues I think have gone adrift and then there's a similar dynamic with the Democratic party. I think we're living in a time – this is another factor I think of why things are so messy, I think this explains the least – but we're living in a time of political realignment and so there's new coalitions being formed. There's new interests being formed because society is being reordered in many ways.The gig economy is on the rise. There's much more movement of information, enough people, relationships have broken down, institutions especially have broken down. I don't know what the crystal ball is. I would just bet that neither party is going to look the same today or look the same in 20 years or to your 40 year horizon as it does today.That's not a crazy statement. Look throughout history. That's just got to be a trend. And so, I think that there is real alignment going on. Trump is a disruptive force, like him or not, in politics, and government, and in society. And I think he's not only a disruptive force in and of itself, he's representative of disruptive forces.So, I think that the more that we could see that and just see it for what it is and chill, and identify issues that I think people really care about, we'll be better off as a people and as a country.Bob Wierema: I was talking to a friend and, he made the comment of, ‘man, it would have been great this year'. As we look at this election that's coming up, this was such a year to [01:00:00] have some leader, a great leader, step up to really bring this country back together. It is a divide and things seem to be pushing further and further apart. It's like, man, it would have been great. This would have been such a pivotal year to have somebody to step up. But you look at that role of the president and that used to be something when you're a kid and go, ‘man, I really want to grow up and be the president'. And he's like, ‘do you have kids saying that anymore?' Because of all the noise that's there. Michael Davidson: After the first presidential debate, my son wanted to listen to the Band of Brothers soundtrack, because I think he wanted to cleanse himself. I think that I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, obviously, we love the great leaders because they're an archetype and they help clarify a lot of what's going on individually and collectively. I actually think, let's say you look through the lens of the great leaders, and let's say in the United States, they all, if you study history, they followed  pre-existing movements and efforts, like they were risen in a tide. That's the thing that we're missing. And so, it's not so much that we need a leader to come clarify for us. Look, I love what Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan and, JFK were able to do and give us confidence and vigor and vision.So, I don't want to discount that. I think it's important, but what is more important is the sense of vision and entrepreneurship. Well, civic entrepreneurship that our citizens have, that's way more important. So, what I would say to anybody who's like, ‘man, I wish we had a better leader', you ever seen the South park episode? This was during the 2000 election of the douche bag and the turd sandwich running against each other? [01:02:00] I totally get that. It's a bummer that we don't have that turd sandwich and the douchebag, but look at the student body, what is the student body paying attention to? That's why you have a turd sandwich. So, if it's the same thing in the country, if you're dissatisfied with the options, really take stock of, ‘where am I spending any time and attention in my life to learn? To be in community relationships that are there based on those sorts of values and vision? Am I thinking about the type of country that I want to live in?' And that doesn't just mean the political position that I want to tackle or issue I want to tackle. It just means, ‘am I thinking about that? Do I represent that? Do I vote? Am I informed when I vote?' And if the answer is no, which statistically it's mostly no today, then, of course, you're going to get that. But if the answer starts to be a yes, and there's this sort of civic renewal – I think especially if people with high leverage in society, and those are entrepreneurs and executives who have a deep sense of purpose, that we all say that like being an executive is a lonely job. Being a CEO is a lonely job. We know that. And so, go deep with that loneliness. Don't just go deep. It sucked laying these people off or hiring these ton of people or doing my business repositioning or my P and L or which acquisition… Go deep on what does it mean to be a capitalist in the most prosperous country in the world? How do you represent free enterprise? How do you represent being a leader in a free society? How do you draw people in to being deeper in their own sense of values? What do people think when they think of you and do they think ‘that person's a super impressive entrepreneur?'Or do they think, ‘that person has character,' and somewhere it turned into status and [01:04:00] it wasn't about values. We can turn back time, especially with entrepreneurial humans – a lot of the people you guys have had on your podcast, I think they share this, but like attracts like, and I think that we're not seeing enough of that in the country right now.Michael Moore: Well Michael, turning back to you, and we talked about this on our prep call, this has just been hitting me more and more that this medium and capturing these stories and bringing on incredibly interesting people like yourself, we're capturing it, and it's going to be there forever. And your kids can go listen to this 10 years from now, when they're off at college, when they're traveling around the world, whatever they're doing.Bob Wierema: When your son's running for president down the road, I'm voting for him. I like him. Michael Moore: When he's either running for president or hanging out at that Hot Springs without any clothes on, right?Michael Davidson: He'll be running a kegger at the, at the White House, who knows.Michael Moore: But in thinking about the power of being able to capture words and stories and meanings and truth, what would you say to your kids?Michael Davidson: We try to talk to our kids a lot. I get family dinner – right now, we're reading a book, it's a would you rather book for kids. One of my good friends sent it to us and they love it. And so, it's simple things like, would you rather live on a plane or on a boat, and for little kids to be like, ‘why, why?' And to not just get their answer, but ask them why and ask them why a few times and get them drawn out.And so, I think trying to find a way to teach kids that every single one of them has a purpose to [01:06:00] deliver in this world. Every day should be an effort to be very conscious of that. And in order to do that, you've got to be aware of your thoughts. You have to be aware of what's going on around you. You have to be aware of your trend, your trajectory overall. Another way of saying that is, ‘what's your story? And what is this character made up of and what does this character stand for?' This character being you. One thing that being a parent has started to really draw out of me, and it's a purpose that you guys are really fulfilling with your podcast, is to be more aware of my own story and be more aware of where these things come in and shape me. There's a lot of my life that I've blocked out. And, just recently I've started trying to really dig in more on what were these moments? What did they mean to me? I'm learning a lot about my mom right now and trying to ask her more questions about her upbringing. And I learned that there were stories about adoption in her life and how if you're not aware of them and you don't have these stories and you don't learn about your story, and you don't share them with other people, then they're going to be lost.So, I really hope my kids are very aware and committed to a life well lived. And I make it a point to show them that. In a very extreme case, we took a group of D-Day veterans to Normandy for the 75th anniversary, and it was so stunningly beautiful and sad how surrounded these veterans would get. These guys are in their nineties, a hundred years old, and they're getting surrounded. A ten-year-old girl ran up to the soldiers, to the elderly men, hugged them and said that you saved and [01:08:00] liberated my grandmother. And the grad looks over and the grandmother's crying and that was stored over and over and over again.And they had not been back, and it made them emotional, the soldiers. And one of them was like, ‘how is this special for you?' And all of them said, ‘these stories need to be told. We'll forget about what can be lost or what's going to be required if these stories aren't told'. So, the stories need to be told based off of a theme and some greater way of living.And so, I hope that my kids are very aware of that and committed to that. Be a good story. Make sure your life is a good story. Michael Moore: That's a hell of an answer again, knocking them out of the park. Michael we're incredibly appreciative of your time. Just the way you go about thinking through things, we need a lot more of that in society, and leadership, and business, and politics, just across all the mediums that we talked about. So, we really appreciate your time, your insight, your wisdom, your knowledge, your passion, and just keep doing what you're doing, it's powerful. Michael Davidson: You guys too. Thank you. Thank you so much for doing this. You're going to get a time of purpose and connection, then real thoughtfulness is missing. You are filling a pretty good void. So, thank you. Bob Wierema: Awesome. Thank you very much. It was great to great to spend time with you today.Michael Moore: Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of The Climb. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider subscribing. And if you know someone who you would think would enjoy the podcast, feel free to share this with [01:10:00] them. Thanks again. And we'll see you on the next step. 

 Connect with Michael and BobThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with Eric HymanLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-hyman-8861658/Eric, welcome to The Climb. We appreciate you joining us today. Well, thank you for having me.  And this is a fond one for Michael and I in that we have a great relationship with your son. Ryan is a partner of ours and a close and dear friend of ours. So, we're looking forward to the conversation. We won't spend too much time talking about Ryan because there's probably not enough time here to record all the issues with him, but we appreciate the time and have heard and learned a lot about you. I think maybe for the audience, just start with, what's the background, where'd you come from and then, walk us through today and Michael and I'll just bother you and interject with some questions. Sure. I'd be glad to give you a little bit of a background. I was in college athletics for 40 some years and as an athletic director for 28 of those 40 some years. But anyway, prior to that, I lived all over the country. My dad was in the service and I was recruited NAF out of Northern Virginia and went to the University of North Carolina as a football player and I was there until I graduated. And then I started from a university and I got my master's degree. At one time I wanted to be a superintendent of school systems, so I've got my administrative master's in administrative education. And then while there I coached football and then I coached for women's basketball with my wife on the college level, and so one thing led to another. So, I ended up coaching football for nine years, got my degree, and then was a full-time coach. Very fortunate, wonderful experience for me. Then I went into administration. For a couple of years, I worked with the individual that was going to be the President of the one athletic directors' association. I worked with him at Furman for two years. He was AD and then I became – at the ripe old age of 33 – an athletic director. I learned what to do and what not to do. That's what I always say to young people. Life is full of experiences for success and people learn from them.  So, I learned a lot, I made a lot of mistakes and I learned from those mistakes. And then I went to NC state and worked there for five years as the number two person, and then AD at Miami of Ohio and the athletic director at TCU, where I was fortunate to hire Gary Patterson, but I was also fortunate to hire a guy named Jim Schlossnagle who is a baseball coach.  So, then I went to South Carolina as the AD ­– I was the AD at TCU for seven years, South Carolina for seven years, and then I went to A&M and I was athletic director there for about four years. So that's been my professional path. I've done a lot of things, have been associated with a lot of people. I've had a wonderful, wonderful life, wonderful professional experience. Has it been easy? No. It has been challenging, obviously, because from a political standpoint and just the changes that are going on in college athletics, not only when I started but today. I feel that's probably the most challenging time being an athletic director ­­– today, because of what's taking place.  To a certain extent I'm glad I'm not AD anymore. I can sit back and armchair quarterback, ‘why didn't you do this? What did you do that?' I feel for the athletic directors today. So anyway, that gives you a little snapshot of my professional career. That's a very Reader's Digest, condensed version. And Eric, are you still consulting? Well, I was consulting until COVID. Then it came to a dead stop. If you've seen what's taken place in college athletics and obviously having to deal with the budget issues they're having to deal with is a major, major challenge. So, there's not a lot of financial flexibility to hire consultants and those kinds of things.  Being a consultant was very enjoyable. I enjoyed doing it, I had a lot of fun doing it, but then again, I could walk away from a situation. I did this in a couple of places as walk in, and the problems are somebody else's problems after I was finished. So, in answer to your question, no, that's really backed off an awful lot and rightfully so, based on the economic challenges that college athletics are faced with.  I want to go back. I do want to come back to some of that stuff. One of the things you had mentioned earlier was, did you say you coached with your wife? Yeah, it was a really interesting story. When I was getting my masters at Furman, back in those days as a DA you made, you're going to laugh when I say this, $1,800, and then I was a Dean, we'll make it $3,600 a year, and that was $5400. I felt like I was rich. My wife was a college professor. Well anyway, she played college basketball and they didn't have women's basketball. They didn't have any women's sports. So some of the girls came to my wife and started up the team and she came to me about it and asked me, you know, I played high school basketball and I've been involved in coaching and those kinds of things, and she asked me if I would be willing to help her out. I said, ‘yeah, I would be glad to'.  And we started a team from scratch, but I said ‘you deal when you deal with women, you deal with the socialization, the relationships with people – I'll do the coaching'. So I read Bobby Knight's book Help Side Ball Side and I read Morgan Wooten – who is a very famous basketball coach at the math of high school and Washington DC called The Red Book. I read those two books, and so we started the team from scratch and the last year, and this is back in the AAW days, which is before the incident of late days for women's athletics, we went all the way to the final four. In the third year of the program, we finished seventh and it's a little bit different. They brought 16 teams from around the country and it was in Temple, Texas. It was an interesting story.  The school didn't have money towards women's athletics, so we had to do a lot of the fundraising ourselves. So, we drove two station wagons from Greenville, South Carolina to Temple, Texas which is a long way. We had two station wagons with a full women's basketball team and a manager, and we just packed everybody in. So we got to the Mississippi River, and one of our players had a panic attack. She didn't want to go over the river and she was a starter. I said, ‘Debbie, you're going over to the river. We didn't work this hard to go this far and for you to not'. And she said, ‘well I want to go back home'. And that was Travelers Rest, South Carolina. She says, ‘well I'm going back home. I'm going to walk home if I have to.' And here we are at the Mississippi River, hundreds of miles away from Travelers Rest. And I said, ‘gosh, what are we going to do?' I'm panicked because not only is she panicked, but she panicked me.  So what we ended up doing was my wife and I got together and we put her down on the floorboard and put the winter coats on top of her. I drove around and drove across the Mississippi River and got to the other side about three or four miles, and I said, ‘all right, Debbie, you can pop your head up now we're over!' And so, you had to improvise. I don't know that a lot of athletic directors have experienced something like that, but that was all fun. We went out there and we've competed and we did well. And then the next year we went all the way to Vincennes, Indiana and finished third in the country. It was a great experience. And I love doing it a little different. I don't think many AD's in the country coach women's basketball on the college level. That was one of the things I was going to ask is, when you look at the AD, is the path that you took a very similar path to other AD's? And then also to that, 33 years old seems really young for that role. I didn't know this at the time, I was extremely naïve and took the job in December. I know July of 1984. I found out that the gun was loaded when I took the job, the gun was loaded, pointing at the football coach. So, I had to terminate the football coach at the end of the year. Well, I was hoping he'd have a good year and I didn't have to do that. But anyway, we had to let him go. So, it was a challenge. I had never done anything like this before 33. And you, you had to learn a lot.  It's a due to have to handle it. I don't know if you're familiar with Washington Lee University and BMI, they're right next to each other. And so, I went into the library of Washington Lee and I looked at a microfilm and read how Virginia Tech had terminated their football coach a couple of years previously, and then I read up on Virginia – I didn't know what I was doing. So, I read through and looked at all with the media and how they handled it and all that kinds of stuff, because I could see the handwriting on the wall. And then I had to let them go. So it was, you know, it was a great learning experience for me.  How old was the coach that you had to let go that had the gun to him? He was in his sixties. So just talk about that dynamic for a second.  Oh, it was very difficult and he's a nice person and everything, and I don't think he's alive anymore, but quite frankly VMI was a very difficult job in defense of him. It was a very, very difficult job, but to a certain extent, the profession had passed him by. And so it was time. It was a fitting time to go to take the program in a different direction. But, I made some mistakes when I did it and I learned from some of those mistakes, but it was a difficult time. It was a difficult time for me because that's the first time I'd let somebody go. And I finally learned – I had a pit in my stomach, but I learned that there comes to a point in time that it's in the best interest of the university or the institution where you are that you need to separate yourself from that individual. At a young age, I would think about his family, his children, the assistant coach's children, all those kinds of things and agonized over that. At times I couldn't sleep at night, but I finally got to a point where in my mind – and this is what I used later on in life – I finally got to the point where this was the right thing to do. And no matter what, even though you have a negative impact on people's lives and families and children, all those kinds of things, this is still the right thing to do. And that's why I could live with myself and then I was at peace with myself and then obviously we progressed and we had to separate ourselves from the coach.  You mentioned that your dad was in the service growing up. He was a general, wasn't he? Yeah. He was a West Point graduate. My brother played basketball at West Point. He was a general officer and therefore we traveled everywhere all the time. We traveled every two or three years. They moved us around. So, I've lived all over the country and I lived overseas in Germany, but I've lived all over the United States which was a good experience. I had a lot more appreciation and maybe awareness of how great the country was when I went to Germany – and this was before they put up the wall. I lived over in Berlin when they put up the wall. You see East Germany and you see some of the communist bloc countries and you compare them to the West, and then you begin to hear about people. And I won't name names, but you go back to the Chicago Seven and some of those people about the virtues of communis, and then you turn around and you go into East Berlin or you go into East Germany and it's hard to see any virtues of communism and the West. It was so different from the West, as opposed to the East in Europe. And that made you have a great love and appreciation for this country, which I think a lot of times we take for granted.  How would you say some of those experiences helped you throughout your career? I mean, growing up all over, being all over the place? Germany, you don't know how to meet people. You know how to adjust and to adapt and you see things differently. Now, maybe, I was hurt to a certain extent from a fundamental standpoint because we moved so much, and from an educational standpoint. We might be right in the middle of studying geometry and geometry's in sequential order, and then you may end up moving and you're out of the sequence. So, there was a negative impact about doing it, but you meet people, you know how to meet people and you know how to adjust and to adapt to certain situations. There was this one experience when we were leaving West Berlin to go on vacation in Spain. This was East Germany, and you couldn't go into East Germany. You could go on the Autobahn, an American could, but they had a password. Our car broke down right in the middle of East Germany. I was only eight or nine years old at the time, but I was scared to death because I thought that, and there were, truckloads of East German soldiers going by on the Autobahn.  What you have to do is you have to give a pass to an American and they take it to the next checkpoint. And then they have someone to come out and get you which we did a couple of times. But as a young kid, I thought the communists – I thought they were going to take us, and we were going to end up living in Eastern Europe.  They didn't, but that's how you see things. And so, you have so much more appreciation, like I said, for this country, but that was a worldly experience. The Berlin wall was up, but when they ended up putting the barricades up in the fence – well, I'll never forget it. There was a young East German person in a trench coat. He was probably about 18 or 19 years old. And if you remember checkpoint Charlie and right next to checkpoint Charlie on the Eastern side, East Side Escape, we got caught up in the barbed wire, and so the East German Stata killed him.  So he was bleeding and caught entrenched in this barbed wire on top of the wall. Those kinds of experiences, you don't get in a normal life when you're growing up in America, in a country, in a small town or something like that. You see those kinds of things. It makes you a lot more aware of, of what the real world is like. I was sick to my stomach, I'll never forget it. It was on the cover of Post magazine or Life or one of those. Magazines back then having this young person dying, the Americans wanted to go over there and take them out of there and get them off and save his life. But the officials would not let him do it because obviously it could cause World War III or whatever. So, I was answering your question. My lens is a little bit different than maybe your lens because of the experiences that we had growing up.  Absolutely. Well, those certainly define us. We talk a lot on this podcase about the separation between your work life and your home life, and sometimes it's hard to make that transition. Was your dad more of a general when he got home, then he went on the job or vice-versa? And then you're mentioning your own life. I mean, how did you transition between an AD and a father? It was very difficult for him. And, you know, once the general, always a general – and the pressure that he was put under, did he bring some of that home? Yes. He brought some of that home. Did we have to square our meals at dinner? To a certain extent. Do we have to ask you yes or no sir? Pass the potatoes please? All those kinds of things? Yes. There's a lot different than white families. The way we brought up our family. So, there's a lot more structure to it. And obviously his job, he wasn't around very much, and he was gone in my senior year in high school. He took a tour of duty in South Korea hardship tours so I could go to one high school. And so, you make those kinds of adjustments but going back to my personal situation, I probably failed at that. My son would probably tell you that also, but anyway, my wife used to say, and my kids would say, ‘we have you physically, but we don't have you mentally'. Being an athletic director is a very complex, complicated job, and there's a lot of moving parts in it, and it's like a juggler and he's juggling balls. Then sometimes a ball gets bigger and throws you out of rhythm. And you have a certain rhythm in an athletic department like you do in a corporation, there's certain rhythms. And having to terminate a coach, or having to deal with a board member and a corrupt board member or something like that throws you out of whack. And so, what you have to be able to do is try to maintain that rhythm. The job was almost 24 hours a day.  And when you're trying to build an addition to a renovation of a football stadium of $500 million a year, having 3000 people at work and all those kinds of things, all the way to ensure that your programs stay in compliance, making sure you have a schedule completed, making sure you set goals and you have a strategic plan and how you are going to get there, all those kinds of things.  Then you have all the fans and they're at your throats, you know? So those kinds of things, it makes the job very difficult today. And to answer your questions: I wasn't great at it. I'm a lot better in retirement about being involved and being more physically and mentally there. I'm not the best person because I didn't do that well. And I think Ryan and my daughter have learned from some of the things I didn't do as I should have done. And they do a much better job of raising their children and they're more attentive than say I was when I was raising my kids. No I can see that. I live walking distance from Ryan's house and your son is an incredible dad. He does a really, really good job raising those kids. He really does. I'm very proud of them. I think one of the things that you had mentioned is some of the hiring and firing and some of the challenge within that within all these different dynamics. Maybe talk through a little bit of the dynamic of the hiring and firing with I can only imagine how many different political pieces pulling you in which directions and I'm sure you've got some good stories there. Yeah, we'll talk about Gary Patterson since that was mentioned earlier. I had hired a guy by the name of Dennis Franchione at TCU, and he was there for about two and a half years, and then he went to Alabama. Well, we ended up hiring Gary Patterson, and I'll tell you a little story about it. So, we hired Gary, and Gary is a genius. I think this was 20 years ago before he was hired, he was a genius defensively and I've coached on defense. I played on defense, so I had an immense appreciation for his skill, his talents.  And another thing Gary did was Gary was great at judging talent. He could see somebody and he could project where they would be two or three or four years down the road. And as a high school senior, high school junior, he's phenomenal in that, but you know, Gary in other areas hadn't been really exposed to some of the things that you need to be exposed to.  He was as a defensive coordinator and it was interesting because I really didn't know Gary that well, but I try to do a lot of research on people before I hire him. We had a national search and one of the people on the search committee, we were looking at a defensive coordinator at another school, and he said, ‘you know, they were very comparable' but the issue was Gary was a TCU. So there wasn't going to be a learning curve to the extent that maybe you have, if you were bringing somebody from the outside in. So anyways, he was a little bit controversial as far as the hires concerned. You might want to put an exclamation point behind that because Fran was so different and Gary is so different than Fran, and we had success under Fran, and so hiring Gary did go on a traction with a lot of TCU people in the beginning.  So, the first year, I had to make a presentation at halftime and first Gary's here and I think we were playing Northwestern State or something like that, a school that did not have the resources we had. They had a lot of the players that had transferred there from some larger schools, well anyway they beat us. But at halftime, I went down there to make a presentation and the fans booed the heck out of me, and so I went back up to see the associate athletic director for marketing. His name was Kevin O'Connell. I said, ‘Kevin, don't you ever do that again. Don't you send me down'. People were booing me because of the hire, but now from a historical standpoint, Gary's one of the best coaches and has been the longest one, the longest tenure, one of the best coaches in the history of college football. Considering the resources we had at TCU back then was not at all what the resources they have today.  So, Gary was able to really put a program on and it took time to be able to do. And it's like I said to people at TCU that an ocean liner doesn't change directions overnight, it's taken TCU a while to get where they are. It's going to take them a while to get where we want to go. So you have to have patience and great virtue, but the history has shown that Gary was a great hire. Was he a real popular hire in the beginning? He was not as popular back then as he is today, and I really give a tremendous amount of credit to Gary for what he's done at TCU, and he's really but them on the map. We talk about San Diego and Danny Thomason playing out in California. His exposure, the Damien's exposure in California has done wonders for applicants from California coming to TCU because it puts you on the map and so was a good school in the Midwestern part of the country in Texas. But other than that, it wasn't real well-known, but it's the success athletically. There's a good message at TCU, but athletics got it out to every nook and cranny around the country. And so people. began to find out about TCU.  But so going back to your question about hiring – it's probably one of the most difficult parts of the job – hire and fire people. And I talked a little bit about terminating people. It's very, very difficult, but when I was at peace with myself, I knew it was the right thing to do. I've analyzed it, overanalyzed it – whether to let somebody go – but to try to hire somebody, I thought it was very important.  The three things I looked for was integrity, work ethic, and intelligence. Experience was important, but it wasn't at the top of my list. Where you have a smart person, they can make up for maybe a little bit of lack of experience, if that's what you want to be able to say. So in my job, you have to do a huge amount of research. I mean, a huge amount of research on people. It's like hiring Jim Schlossnagle who is a baseball coach at TCU. One of the best baseball coaches in the country. I was in a meeting with the AD at Tulane and Jim was assistant coach at Tulane, and it was the meeting with a conference of USA athletic directors and North Carolina was flirting with the baseball coach at Tulane.  I said to the AD, ‘so what would you do, who would you hire?' Because I knew the possibility of having to hire somebody at TCU. I knew it was pretty high on the radar screen. So, I was keeping my eyes and ears open and asking questions to a lot of people when the AD said he had hired this guy, who's a pitching coach named Jim Schlossnagle.  The Ad's name was Rick Dixon. And so I said, ‘Rick, why?' He told me why, well then obviously I started to track him in addition to other people, I tracked him and he went to UNLB. And Mountain West wasn't the best baseball conference in the country. But the first year he was 500 and the next year he won the conference, which is tremendous compared from when he took over.  So, the issue was that I hired him. So what I'm trying to say to you, you got to keep your eyes and ears open all the time, and you got to have a sense of what the marketplace is. And then you got to find out. Interviewing people was about 30%, 70% was checking their backgrounds and because their actions speak so loud, you can barely hear what they say – coaches and people are salespeople. You got to look in depth and you got to look down and scroll all the way down as you possibly can and find out as much information. So some of the things I've done in the past that I probably – as far as compared to people in my profession – was probably one of the individuals that did a lot of research on people because I want to make sure what I was getting to. I didn't want to make a mistake, but it's not an exact science. If you have success, more success than not success in hiring people, then you're going to stay as an AD. If you don't, you're going to be on the road. So I don't know if that helps you at all. The biggest thing is research people, research, research, research, and find out about them. Who's the true person? Like I called somebody, a coach at another school and I happen to know the women's tennis coach. So, I called her and I asked her, ‘what is this individual like when the lights are turned off? What's the true person?' And so, she was going to be up front with me. She wasn't going to lie to me. She wasn't going to mislead me or anything like that. So that helped me as far as beginning to develop a profile. So, so that's one of the things I've done. Another thing I try to do is I try to bring the players on the team. That's what I was going to ask. So what I would do is I would – I would say there's three things I try to do, the athletic department and I got through a little bit of that. We sort of have an idea of what a successful program is. So we try to mirror that to the individual. I also would sit down with the players on the team and I would say, ‘you're not going to hire the coach and your parents aren't going to hire the coach, but what's important to you? What do you want? What do you want in a new baseball coach, a football coach, or whatever it may be?' And they help develop a profile. So hiring something that's not perfect, and you're not going to find the perfect person, but you're going to find somebody that hopefully has got the most of the characteristics that will match up to what you're trying to accomplish at the institution that you are.  You've obviously had a ton of exposure to a ton of different personalities and people. I played college ball at Illinois Wesleyan, just T3 football, but these coaches shape a lot of these young peoples' lives. They're very influential people when you're in a sports program. So over these years of these coaches you've come across, what are some of the attributes that you see that you're like, ‘man this guy or girl,' or just a phenomenal leader of these young, multiple minds? What did you see that was great? Or what did you look for when you were looking for those leaders? Having a coach gave me a little bit of experience now. A lot of AD's have never coached before. They've never coached. A lot of my generation had coached the next generation or not. You asked about the AD's today, they're going through fundraising or they're going through compliance or something like that. So I've coached. So I always felt as a coach, that coach make the main thing the main thing, and what's that? The student athletes and the players have to know that you have their best interest at heart.  That's extremely, extremely important. You're going to be tough if you have to be, or do whatever you need to do, but they have to know that it's how much you care and you got to be able to care for your student athletes. And that's why we're in this business. And so when you have an athlete come back to you and tell you, ‘thank you', you couldn't put a million dollars on it. When they come back and tell you how much it's helped them develop and grow in life. And personally, I made mistakes when I was younger, and in some of the people, I was probably too hard on them. I was probably too tough on them, but over time I mellowed a bit and I saw things from a little bit of a different perspective.  It's like one of the players I had, I'll never forget it. I happened to be very vocal. Well, he was a big, tall defensive tackle. He's about 6'6” and he was probably about 245lbs or whatever. And he came over to me one day and he said he didn't respond well to being vocal, being really vocal. I sat and I thought about that and I said I'll make a change and I won't be as vocal because he didn't respond to that as I would be to others. But I said, ‘what I will do, though, if you screw up, I'm going to come up and whisper in your ear and tell you, get the heck going,' or something like that. But I will tell you, I will not do that anymore. And this is what, to me, this is why we're in the business is to help these young people and help them develop. And I'll give you a great example. At an institution and FCC school – I've been at two of them, but one of them, we had an attendance policy. And so, we had the attendance policy and my expectation was for them to go to school, because what is the number one determining factor for success in college? What's the number one? SAT ACT class rank? What do you think? The number one thing to be successful in college academically is what? To go to class. That's the nut. If you don't go to school, you're not going to be successful.  No, I found that out the hard way. Tests are a whole lot easier if you actually went to the class. Some of the football players – that didn't get traction with them. But anyway, with the starting quarterback. So, he was taking a class, this is the starting quarterback. Now do you people do this today? I doubt it, seriously. So othe young man didn't go to class at night. He was warned ahead of time. I don't remember how many in summer school, there may have been 15 classes, but he missed about 10 or 11. And so I called him in and I said, ‘listen, we've had this discussion,' and I said, ‘you're not going to play the first football game'. Now think about this today. If you did that to a person, because of something like this, then there would be a firestorm on social media. But I did what I did, what I thought was the right thing to do, because if I didn't, then this is something that would be a negative impact on his life, if I didn't do anything. So anyway, to make a long story short, I told him that – well his father was furious with me. So he came in and he sat down the dad and the son and he went through his diet, traveling about, oh this is a travesty, you know, yada yada yada for an extended period of time. And I said to him, after he was through talking, I said to him, ‘Mr.,' – I don't want to give his name up – ‘Mr. Smith. So what are you going to do? When your son leaves here and he gets a job and of the first 15 days of work he misses 10 of them, what are you going to do? Are you going to go in and talk to the manager and tell him you can't fire him or whatever?' I said, ‘what I'm trying to do is teach this young man that he has a sense of responsibility and I'm going to teach him a value or something that he can take for the rest of his life. He'd better be in class because if he's not, he's gonna fail. But if he doesn't learn this lesson and he gets out in the real world, he's going to be without a job'. And so, this is what I'm trying to teach them. This is what a coach or an athletic director I think tries to do is tries to work with young people. I'll give you a phenomenal example, which is Jadeveon Clowney. You ever heard of Jadeveon Clowney? Jadeveon Clowney was a student athlete at South Carolina. Jadeveon Clowney was a man among the boys, as far as an athlete. I mean, he was phenomenal. And Jadeveon Clowney was a freshman and he wasn't going to class. We had an attendance policy, the reason we had an attendance policy was because I wanted him to go to class. Because the number one determining factor for success academically is going to class. And so, he didn't go – when I checked, I would check with football, I check all the athletes, but mostly the football and basketball players about every two or three weeks. Well, he wasn't going well. I warned him. And he still wasn't going.  And so, I called him into my office on a Sunday morning. I'll never forget it. It was the Clemson game, which was a huge risk to Alabama Auburn. So I called him into my office and at 10 o'clock, I'll never forget it, his position coach came, the administrator for football came, the academic person for football came and I wanted his grandfather to come but he couldn't come because his grandfather was a stabilizing factor in his life, Jadeveon's life. But Jadeveon came and so we went through and we talked and I said, ‘Jadeveon,' I had a round desk in my office. I said, ‘in three years, this desk is going to be piles of money that you're going to be able to get, because you're going to be able to make a lot of money with professional football.' But I said, ‘what you're doing is you're taking, you're knocking money off the table. And if you continue like this, in three years, there's not going to be any money on the table because you'll have flunked out of school. And I'm doing this because I'm trying to protect you from yourself.' And so, anyway, it got out with the fans. They were not happy campers about doing this to Jadeveon but the issue was they were so myopic and I was trying to look at the big long-term and not the short-term. So, I ended up suspending him for part of the Clemson game. And thank goodness we won.  I was scared to death that we would lose. And who do you think would get blamed for it? I would be. And that's what AD's are good for. They're good to blame on. If the coach was successful, they get the credit. If they're not, the AD gets blamed for it, I'm being facetious. But my point is that, you know, we won. Thank goodness. So we won quite decisively. Well, now we fast forward.  I run into Jadeveon and he is in the spring time. He's going into the academic center. He's walking toward the academic center and I roll my window down and he's walking, I'm in my car and I rolled my window down and I said, ‘Jadeneon, come here'. And he walks over and I knew what was on his mind: ‘I've got to go see the principal and I don't want to have to see the principal'. So, he walked over and I said, ‘Jadeveon, I'm so proud of you'. He had the biggest smile you've ever seen in your life. And he was so happy, he was rewarded for going to class and now we fast forward. So, when I'm at A&M, the Atlanta Falcons and the Texans are practicing with each other. And there's a bunch of players for the Falcons. And there's a bunch of players for the Texans that had played at South Carolina or played A&M. So I asked Bob McNair, the owner, I said, ‘do you mind if I come down and watch practice?' He says, ‘sure. Come on down'. So anyway, I came down and I saw a bunch of them and talked to them and that kind of stuff. Well Jadeveon was the last one to come off the practice and practice over.  ‘Jadeveon, come here'. And I put my hand out. I said, ‘I want my money. You know what I'm talking about?' He said, ‘yes sir. I know what you're talking about.' You tried to be a leader. It takes courage, and to do the right thing, it takes courage. And even though people were so shortsighted about it, I understood it, but I took abuse about it. And I did those kinds of things in the professional career that I was in because I tried to do what was the right thing to do. So, dealing with student athletes, I dealt with student athletes. I love dealing with it, and I bore you with the stories but there's a lot of times that that's what we're in the business for. And so, you try to help them. And I tell them, ‘I've got erasers on all my pencils.' And sometimes when we disciplined a player, I'll never forget – we disciplined a football player defensive back at A&M because he was doing some things that were inappropriate. And so, I called him in and bottom line was, I said, ‘now if I was a wide receiver, he was the defensive back, and I ran a pose pattern on you, and I beat you for a touchdown. I mean that's going to happen. And if it happens time and time and time again, what's going to happen?' I asked him, ‘what's going to happen?' He said, ‘well I'm not going to be on the bench'. And I said, ‘that's exactly right. And so that's what I'm trying to teach you is that you gotta learn from your experiences, if you're defensive back and that guy's beating you on a post pattern all the time, you're not going to be playing. Well, you get out in the real world and you just make these kind of mistakes, you're not going to be successful.' Those kind of things that you try to relate to your athletes, and tried to do. And I mean, I've had this across the board of women's soccer.  It's not all football, basketball; it's other sports also that have run them up. And like I said, they make mistakes. It's a game. Life is not perfect. And so, the key is to learn from them and to learn from your mistakes. And that's what I try to do as an athletic director with our student athletes. No, that was great. Well, while we're on the topic of players, any color you can share around your time with Johnny football? Oh, Johnny Manzell. Johnny was probably the best improvisor I've ever seen in my life on a football field. He had gifted talents the first year there. Johnny Manzell, you would see him and he's upbeat, positive, ‘hello Mr. Hyman, how are you doing?' And that kind of stuff. I mean, a very effervescent personality and Johnny, he's a really smart young man. I mean, he's very smart. Maybe some of the things he does don't rank high on the smartness category, but he really is. And he's a good kid. Well, what happened when he won the Heisman? He was 19 years old at the time. It would be hard enough for a 40-year-old to win the Heisman, much less a 19-year-old kid. And there was a huge transformation with him. And unfortunately I felt sorry for him. I really did. I felt sorry for him, the Adelaide and the visibility. He couldn't go anywhere.  I'd be sitting on a plane, we'd be flying someplace the first year. We would be playing LSU or Alabama or something like that, and he would walk down the aisle on the plane and say, ‘hey Mr., hi Mrs. Simon, how are you doing?' Very, very engaging. Well the next year I noticed he'd have a hat on. He'd have his headset on, head down, and I felt for him because of what he had to go through. It was a very, very difficult experience for him. I really felt sorry for him because it's just difficult for anybody to deal with that, much less a 19-year-old kid.  So there was a chain, there was a transformation in his personality and some things like that took place, but he was a hell of a football player. I'm telling you, he willed us in some games, he absolutely took the team. We played Duke in the play bowl. He willed the team to win. We played Louisiana Tech and Shreveport one time. He just picked the team up by the bootstraps. He was a very, very, very talented young man and a smart young man too. He was gifted, he was just gifted athletically. He was thoughtful. And he was a challenge. I'm not going to tell you he wasn't because there were some things that we had to do while I was there which was very unfortunate, but the bottom line with him is I feel sorry for what he had to go through. And some of the challenges he had because of how successful he was athletically. Well, I'm sure the personalities of some of these athletes that you have to deal with – you got some such extremely talented young men and women coming into these programs that are going through that. I can't even imagine.  They're all different. Every single one of them, different. They all come from different backgrounds. There's some common things or common things that you're trying to help them develop as time goes on. And when you bring them in, they come from all walks of life and there are certain expectations that you have, and we tried to do that I think they do it. We tried to do some things long before other people were doing them, and we tried to teach them how to dress properly. We made it mandatory for their junior year that we would bring somebody in for the male athletes and we would bring somebody for the female. My wife would do a lot of that and teach them how to dress properly. Cedric, what's Cedric's last name? I can't remember, but anyways, an offense to tackle for the Cincinnati Bengals – I'll think of it in a second, that's what happens when you get to be my age! I tell people I have met a ton of people and I have a Rolodex in my head, and there's a ton of people in that Rolodex. Unfortunately, when I get older, the Rolodex goes through a little bit slower.  So, anyway, we sat down and I happened to work with Cedric, but we had a tie tying contest because when you deal with young people, you got to deal with competitiveness. And so, we had a tie tying contest and there were five male athletes from different sports. Well, Cedric was who I was trying to teach how to tie a tie. And so, we had a limited amount of time, we're in front of all of the junior male athletes and here, I'm trying to teach him how to tie a tie. So, then we had a clock stopwatch, and so we had a clock on them, and they all had to tie their tie within a certain amount of time. And a lot of them had never tied a tie before, but we were trying to help them for later on in life. Well, Cedric won the contest, he won it, and I found this out later on, he was so proud that he had won the tie tying contest. Here's a football player, offense alignment. Well, he went out and was bragging to the offensive line that he won the tie tying contest.  So the point is we left an indelible mark with him and some of the things that he had to do to be successful. Well, we also taught them how to eat properly. We would have the fall sports in the spring time and the spring sports in the fall time, but we would make it mandatory because of, in some of my experiences that I told them one year, Steve Spurrier was our football coach. And one year, we had the coaches, we had Steve and his wife, Jerry, and then we had another head coach and his wife sitting at a table in front of all the student athletes. And we tried to teach them how to eat properly, and a lot of them didn't know. So, when you go on a job interview, you don't want to eat like a slob because you might lose the job. So, what we ended up doing was – I'll never forget it – Steve, on his own, dropped a roll on the floor underneath the table that he was eating off and he got on his hands and knees and crawled to get it. Well, it was funny. The athletes just wanted to laugh. I'm here, you got the head in front of you when he's on his hands, on all fours, trying to grab the roll, and we're trying to teach them how not to do it. How not to do these kinds of things. But the point we got across to them in a fun way was these are things that you don't need to do.  And for example, I interviewed a coach for the head basketball school. One of the coaches, one of the schools I was at at the time. And he showed up for the interview with no socks on, chewing gum. Well, today maybe people don't understand it, but that was not the proper thing to do as far as how to dress appropriately. So if he's making that kind of decision with me, what kind of decisions is he going to make later on in life? So, what I did was this young man, I went to his head coach. He was assistant coach at the time. I went to his head coach and told him what happened. Well, the coach that didn't have socks on and was chewing gum, he ended up writing me a letter. He wrote me a letter of apology. So, he learned, but anyway, he ended up coming in SEC head basketball coach.  So, I try to tell that to the kids. I try to tell that to them. We try to teach them those kinds of things. The first year we try to teach them transitioning, like Johnny's situation. He played in front of 500 people, maybe in high school, and now he's playing in front of 10 million. So, what we try to do is help them make the transition. And we have former athletes, we have a panel discussion, former athletes come up and talk and all those kinds of things help them.  And then the last year we taught them how to write resumes and I would bring in people, for example, I brought in the general, the commanding general for Jackson and talked about leadership to our kids. And then another time, I brought in the guy that was head of Infor. Well Infor had 9,000 people. He's a former track athlete at South Carolina and he was an NCAA champion. So, the kids could relate to him. So, he talked about what was important in interviewing for a job. So, I try to do these kinds of things. The former president of Shell Organization was an A&M graduate. I brought him in to teach our administrators about leadership. So you try to help, they're not the finished product, so what you've got to be able to do is help them as they begin to grow and mature I their lives. So, when they springboard out of college, then they can be successful in whatever they do.  Eric, with where we are today in sports, trying to do what they can to continue to compete and bring fans in at a limited basis, and then just your historical perspective on decades and decades in the seat has become such a big business. It's an operating number that's bigger than a lot of companies right? With all the challenges that are out there now, what would you say to the AD's of today? How they navigate through the rest of this season, next season, going forward. I tell them they probably ought to go get a lobotomy. I feel for them. I think this is the most difficult time to be an athletic director. And I think there's three reasons why. Number one is COVID and the financial impact, and we haven't seen the end of it. And maybe there's some positives. Maybe there could be a reset button and maybe we can bring real things back a little bit. But COVID for example, it's going to be hit substantially because of not being able to bring the revenue and now being a private school, the school may be able to help underwrite them and make the transition. But you can talk about public schools. the state universities are really being hit financially.  So how are they going to cope with it? Well, that's a game changer in my opinion. And it's something that's probably going to hang with us for several years. Now, college football is going to be important and it's going to stay important. The amount of level of interest from fans' standpoint, they're staying home and they're watching it on TV, you may see a little bit of a drop-off there, but I think college football is here, will weather the test of time, but it might be configured a little bit differently than what it is today. [inaudible] So if you have X amount of dollars and those X amount of dollars run out, what are you going to do? I mean, you see schools around the country dropping sports. You see people are taking pay cuts all the way – they're having to cope. Quite frankly, some of this might be healthy in the long-term for college athletics because the spending has just gotten outrageous and the amount of money that you're paying for coaches – say what you want, but what happens is it's just going to springboard into the next thing, which is the empowerment of student athletes. And they see a coach is making $10 million a year or $7 million a year off of their backs and they get a scholarship. I've heard the rationalization, I've been involved with it. I know it's a little bit different than propaganda and it's coming out, having been immersed in it for so many years that the student athletes are beginning and the families are beginning to see it. And then why isn't there a little bit more of a balance? And, you're getting defensive coordinators who are making two and a half million dollars $3 million. And I don't begrudge any of the coaches. Don't get me wrong. That's the way our country was based. After the impact it's having and the kickback on it is what's happening to your student athletes. What's happening today, they feel they draw the short straw. And so that's why you're going to see the empowerment of student athletes. That's why you're seeing some things that could happen that could have a dramatic impact on their, their feelings and their say so. They're going to be more of a factor in the future than they have been in the past and they feel empowered about it. And some of its saying, ‘follow the money'/ Money corrupts, the money has just gotten so big in college athletics that there needs to be a little. bit of an adjustment period, and I think that will be healthy for college athletics if that takes place.  So, there's a lot of things that are going on. The first two things are COVID and the devastation financially, and then the empowerment of the student athletes. And then the last thing is name, image, and likeness. And that's something that's in the pipeline. Where it all comes out, I don't really know, but you're now having government intervention. They're saying that the discrepancy between what some of the coaches are making and how much money is being generated and what the student athletes are getting.  College athletics is sort of like the wild, wild West – the recruiting and everything else. I mean, you talk to people that are totally immersed in it. This might make it more difficult. Depends on the rules and stipulations, but it's going to allow students to generate income for themselves. So, how do you control that? I don't know. So, you have a coach of an SEC school comes up and says ‘we got 15 car dealerships' and they're gonna be a little more discreet than us, but they got 15 car dealerships and one of the dealerships would like you to represent them. And so they pay him X dollars. Well, how are you going to deal with it when say that guy's a quarterback? Trevor Lawrence at Clemson. Everybody knows Trevor Lawrence, the quarterback at Clemson. How I'll come out in the wash I have no idea, but the pressure points are there and something's going to come out. Some of these can come in the pipe, that's come out of the pipeline and it's really going to change the dynamics of what college athletics is today. Never a dull moment.  You mentioned when we were briefing earlier this week that there is a definite similarity between an athletic director and a CEO, but an athletic director always has that fan base in the media to deal with. Can you talk about how you navigated that and what that's gonna look like? I told my brother, a CEO of a company, and we would talk a lot of times about – I'm curious to how he runs his business and all those kinds of things, because maybe there's something that he does that could help me. The bottom line, the difference between the challenges that he went through and the challenges I went through, there's a lot of similarities business-wise but the biggest separator was the visibility. And so, I made decisions based on the facts. I knew at that time, not six months later, not a year later, I made decisions based on facts, but you have to deal with the media. You have to factor into the media of how they're going to deal with it, and it's gotten a lot worse today than what it was. I understand that there's a term that you've heard, the ‘fake media', and to a certain extent, I dealt with that. I dealt with firsthand the media, some of them are really trusted and some of them had no scruples whatsoever. That's just the reality of it. So I understand and I look at some of the things that are going on from a national standpoint with the John design because of my personal experiences. So, to deal with immediate is a challenge. And some of the media will probably tell you I was very – I can get my cards close to my chest – I was very guarded because I always felt as an athletic director, the athletic directors today are totally different.  They're out there. They're tweeting. They're instant. They're always there right there in the middle of it, a lot of the visibility was taking place. They want to be in the middle of it. I was a little bit on the other side, I felt that the athletic director got his name in the paper. That's probably not good news. And you know, was I over reacting to that? Probably so, but it changed. And I know in South Carolina we met with administrators. A lot of the young people, we had probably about 50 people in the room. Well, after the meeting was over with, about 10 of them came up to me and wanted me to do a Twitter account. And so they set up a Twitter account for me. And when they left the room, I said, ‘I ain't doing that'. And I never did, but it was a mistake on my part. I should, because there's so much information out there, it's more today than it was back then. There's so much misinformation out there.  This would have been a way to combat some of that. But in my mind, I said, ‘if I start having to do that, then I'll be on Twitter all the time, having to combat with the information that's out there'. So, the dealing with the media and I've had some of the media just flat lie. And they say things that were not true. They attribute things that I said were absolutely not true. And I confronted him, I confronted him about it. And of course what happened was once you confront them, then they're not your friend anymore. Not that they were your friend in the first place. So you have to have tough skin.  And so dealing with the media was a challenge. And like I said, I probably was over conservative with them. Maybe I should have been a little bit more open, but I just wasn't because I just felt through my own experience, there's some things that happened that I just didn't feel comfortable about. I can tell you a ton of stories; hired a coach at South Carolina, very highly visible men's basketball coach, I did everything to get them on the wrong track. And you have a number on the plane. We try to change the number on the private plane. I would park in the hangar. I would not let anybody know. I wouldn't tell anybody. I said there was no search committee. And there was no search committee that had an. individual help me with it, but there was no search committee. He did a lot of the groundwork. And so, the media, I mean, they drove him crazy and because the fans want what's going on, who they're interviewing, and it's the media.  If you throw enough against the wall, something's gonna stick. And so, we're trying to recruit this particular coach. Well, we did a pretty good job because in the end they didn't have a clue. And in the end they thought the individual, when we had the press conference called they went to the airport in Columbia and they were all out there waiting with their cameras, waiting for the person to walk off the plane.  Well, there was no person because that person flew in Charlotte and I went to pick them up. And what I'm trying to say, it's a game. That's the way I looked at it as a game. It's like, you're playing chess. And I gotta get after the King, I gotta know a checkmate to King and that's the way I looked at it. I looked at it a little bit. It was a game. And did I outwit him? What was the survival Outwit or whatever the TV show, out-think or outwit to survive. And that's what you gotta be able to do. And I didn't look at it as when somebody would make stories up about who I was recruiting or who I was talking to that we're not, I had no interest whatsoever, but they were putting them out there and that irritated me because they're lying. They're not being truthful about it. And they said a source, ‘well a source said this, a source said' – there was no source. I was the source, and I tried to control the message that was going out. So, all the things that we're putting out there were not true.  I mean, some of them made sure, like I said, something may stick against the wall just based on luck. But, the bottom line is it wasn't. And so, when we hired the guy and I was excited because we did a good job, keeping it as confidential as we possibly could – dealing with the media is a challenge. I had some people I really trusted. And I was very open with them. Some people really did not trust and I was very guarded, but I think the scruples, I think the ethics, I think the standards that the media operate today are so different than what they used to be. And I just don't think they're part of the equation as much as they used to be, and that may be because of the pressure of some getting it first and social media and all those kinds of things. But I think the AD's got a lot more difficult jobs than what they used to have.  Well I do want to ask one question that we may or may not have been fed prior to this podcase, but we've heard about a recurring annual nightmare. What can you tell us about that? Well, I have two of them. One of them is that I didn't take a class I should have taken in North Carolina. So, I'm going to have to go back and go to school and finish. I didn't really get a degree. So, I mean, that's one nightmare. I didn't want to have to go back and study. I don't want to have to go back and take the class because it was just a nightmare.  And then I had a nightmare that – I don't really want to say the school – but I had a nightmare that I'd have to go back to this particular school that I worked. And it was a very, very difficult experience for me. And I had that nightmare. I had it once a year. Now it's fallen off a little bit, but I had that once a year. So, I have had some nightmares from somebody that has maybe mentioned it to you about, and I don't know why it happens, but it ends up going back to those past experiences that had left an indelible mark with me. So in the spirit to the podcast, we heard about your climb of Grey's Peak. Can you talk about that a little bit? I have a bucket list of things, like I'm a biker and I bike 40, 50 miles, 20 to 50 miles. And one of my bucket lists was going over the Golden Gate bridge on bike, and I did that. One of my bucket lists declined by 14 and I did that with my son. And that's one of the highlights of my life – was it easy? No. And, I was 60 years old when I did it and we probably crossed maybe 20 people and I'd say most all of them were in their teens or their twenties. And when we cross paths, across all people, I saw one guy in his thirties, he was running up the mountain. But anyway, we got to about 1500 feet from the top, and I again, I'm 60 years old and we got 1500 feet from the top and it was getting to me and my son comes up to me and says he starts being a cheerleader.  And I said, ‘I don't want to hear, listen to you'. So, for 1500 feet, all I said was right foot left foot right foot left foot. And I just focused on putting one foot in front of the other. Well, I got to the top and people don't understand it. So this was 1400 to 14,280 feet. So, I got to the top and there's no McDonald's up there. And there's no park ranger saying welcome or a bathroom or anything like that. You just lay out rocks.  It was a great experience. I loved doing it and it'll be one of the best memories of my life. It's one of the best memories of my life to be able to tell, to take that challenge with your son and to be together, he brought his German shepherd and to go through something like that – I'll never forget it. And it was a unique moment in my life.  That is awesome, Eric. One of the questions that we'd like to ask, and it's kind of become probably an unrealized passion about doing this if you think about the medium of a podcast, we're capturing your story right now. It's not a Twitter feed that disappears into the mix. A Twitter feeds this. This is a story that now people can go back and listen to and remember your journey along the way. And so there's that saying that its not what you kno, it's who you know; we reverse it around and say it's not who you know, it's who knows you. So, and think about the people that are going to listen to this, your family, your son: what do you want people to know about you? Well, you know, that's interesting. You're around here once. So if I had to look back over my career, I would stop and smell the roses. And I would want people to do the same thing because you get on the fast track and you're turning as fast as you can turn, but if I had to do it again, I would like to go on a vacation. I'd take more time with my family. Now, the great thing about grandchildren. It gives you a second chance where with your children – and my wife did a marvelous job of raising our children. And not that I wasn't there, I coached their baseball team and our softball team and that kind of stuff, but I wasn't there as much as I should have been. So, what I would say to somebody else is to try to enjoy it and live in the moment. Not in the past, not in the future, but live in the moment and enjoy, look, stop and smell the roses and to focus maybe a little bit differently than maybe what you have in your job, because – and this is what my wife told me – when it's all said and done, when I'm near the end, who's going to be there for me? It's going to be my family. It's not going to be all these other people in life. And you begin to find out who your true friends are when you're through with your professional career. And so that's what I would try to tell people, stop and smell the roses and enjoy themselves. Don't get too far ahead of themselves. And that's the first thing that comes to my mind. I mean, there are other things, but that was the first thing that would jump out at me.  That's perfect. Well said. Well thank you so much for joining us today and sharing all this great stuff with us. It's definitely a different podcast for us to have, and we've had a lot of folks on from the business world, and not saying this isn't the business world because clearly the roles you were in are very business and in so many different respects, but we appreciate you sharing everything with us today.  Well, it's been my pleasure and I'm glad to be able to visit with you. And I think I said this earlier to young people, be a sponge. And listen in your life, look around and try to learn. Always learn, always learn as you're always learning. When you stop learning, you stop growing.  And so, it's been my pleasure to visit with you all. And hopefully, maybe there's a person out there that can benefit from one of the things I've said or they can say I'm thinking about athletics, but I'm going to go get that lobotomy first. I told that to a girl, one time a student athlete at A&M they came to me and asked me what it was. You know, everybody's got a different perception of what being an athletic director really is. And she came to me and she wanted it. What did it take to be an athletic director? How can the path I took and all those kinds of things? Well, I said the first thing I said, ‘you need to have a lobotomy' and she didn't know what that was. And so, I said, ‘well go ask your parents'. And then I went through and I explained to her, well, she went to her parents and asked what a lobotomy was and they laughed. And she came back to me and she was mad at me for saying that to her.  But I say that all in fun. When I talk about that, it's a very challenging job. It's never been boring. It's never been dull. Has it been over challenging? Probably. Over stimulating? Probably. But it's been different. And I think different than the people in that, we're all different. Your job's different. The two of you have different jobs, different responsibilities and people in whatever walk of life you have. And so sometimes in athletics, we think woe is me, but everybody's got problems. The key is to solve. And you have to solve your problems. Like I said earlier, the only thing is you're so visible, which makes a difference. If you work for an insurance company, obviously you have people that work for the company. If it's a privately owned, you don't have shareholders stock, but if you're a publicly traded, then you've got those people that you got to deal with.  So, you know, everybody's got challenges. You just got to be able to try to hit, to take them head on.   

Connect with Michael and BobThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with Keaton TurnerWebsite: https://turnermining.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keaton-turner-b400a34b/[00:00:00] Keaton Turner: Behavior is a super tough thing to change as businesses grow, right? Because when you're small, you're scrappy, you fight for every dollar you get big and you make some money people first spending money like crazy, right. Everyone's got platinum Amex cards and they're, you know, there's just behaviors, really tough to change.And so I'm, I'm looking at like, okay, I'm coming in as an outsider. What are the things I'm changing? It was just clear. It was super clear. And, and when it's that clear that that are some people changes that need to be made, regardless of if three of your buddies are not like. We're not running a nonprofit, like we're not running a church mission.Like this is a business and I have stakeholders that I'm going to make a return for. I'm going to make a return for myself. I'm going to treat the clients the way they should be treated. And. If there are people that are in the way of that, as much as you love them, you just got to make those tough changes Bob Wierema: today on the climb.Michael and I had the pleasure of sitting down with Eaton Turner. Keaton is the founder and CEO of Turner mining and is, is out there to make mining sexy. Again, we had an. Awesome conversation with Keaton. He has an absolutely infectious personality and unbelievable passion, not just for life, but for his business.He's gracious, humble. And I think you guys are gonna really enjoy this one. You're going to hear it throughout the, uh, the podcast, but Keaton is definitely on fire. Thanks for joining us today.welcome to the climb. We appreciate you joining Michael and I today. Keaton Turner: Absolutely guys, thanks so much for having me looking forward to it Bob Wierema: is we reached out to you. We actually reached out to Tracy. And she connected with us phrase sees what, she's your head of [00:02:00] marketing, Keaton Turner: correct? Yep. Yep. She's our chief marketing officer and she's phenomenal.It's been great. Bob Wierema: And you know, the reason the emphasis behind us reaching out was, you know, we've seen amazing social media presence from you guys on LinkedIn, Instagram, and a few others and said, man, we got to talk to this guy. He's doing some really cool things. So looking forward to, we want to dive into that a little bit more, but maybe first let's start with.You know, who is, who is Keaton Turner, and maybe bring us back a little bit and bring us up to when Turner mining started and then we can kind of go down that path. Keaton Turner: Yeah, absolutely. So when you ask, who is Tina Turner? I tell everyone I'm a normal guy. I'm just like you guys. You know, I love football. I love drinking beers with buddies and hunting and fishing and all that.I happen to be a guy that, you know, when I was 27, I realized how short life is. I would just woke up one day getting close to my 27th birthday. And I'm like, man, you know, the stats show my life's a third of the way over. So I took the leap and I was with a family company at the time. And we can get into that later.But, you know, I took the leap of faith to start a company and start a business. I had a couple of small young kids, but you know, I talked to people all the time about. Life is short. And I just don't. I just had a conversation with a kid the other day. I just don't think people really grasp, you know, how short it is and how much you're going to regret, not doing crazy things.So I do crazy things. I was in a hot air balloon the other day. That was like, I took my wife out for her 31st birthday and I just, I love living life up. You know, I know this has been a weird year with COVID and everyone's. You know, emotionally razzled I get that, especially the stay-at-home moms, but man, I just like enjoying life.I like living it up. Bob Wierema: That's awesome. Well, I've never been in a hot air balloon, but you're talking to the right guys. When you talk about hunting and fishing [00:04:00] and drinking beer in college football. So, you know, this will be a good conversation, Michael Moore: checking all the boxes, Keaton and all the boxes Keaton Turner: last week was some clients, uh, night vision machine began is it was like, These are the right kind of clients.If you can take them shooting hogs. Bob Wierema: Well, I'm sure we can. We can talk after this. We can get that all set up with Michael Dan outside of Fort worth. Absolutely. Michael Moore: No, just keep coming back and eradicating this problem that we have down here, because I mean, the hogs are not going Keaton Turner: away. We made a, we made a small dent in that last weekend.Michael Moore: Thank you. Bob Wierema: Well, and so did you, you're Indiana Keaton Turner: born and raised. Born and raised Bloomington Indiana. Bob Wierema: Okay. So you who's here then? No, you went to Indiana state. I saw it, right? Keaton Turner: Yeah. You know, it's funny everyone that grows up in Bloomington, most of the people either go to ICU or they're the they're, they're like the weird theater kids that move off to LA and do the whole loss, you know, Los Angeles thing.So I, I was one that was kind of in between. I wanted to get a little bit further away from home. Uh, my dad played basketball, Indiana state with Larry Bird way back in. Wow. Yeah. And, and you fortunately, or unfortunately they didn't have any construction programs back then. And so Indiana state did, I went to Indiana state.It was an awesome, had a blast there. Bob Wierema: What drew you to the construction space? Keaton Turner: Uh, like I said, I'm one of those guys. I'm like, I'm a guys guy. Like I love being outside. I'm not that smart of a guy. I'm not a numbers guy. I just kind of wing it. I'm not super organized. I think of something and I want to go do it and I want to see some results.And so I've, I really wanted to be in commercial construction. You know, I wanted to build buildings. Uh, I thought real estate was cool. I worked for a real estate mogul, so to speak in high school, a big developer. And I thought that was really cool. And then I, [00:06:00] you know, I got to, I got to college and went through a bunch of estimating classes on how to cost projects, how to manage projects.I did some business stuff. And so, uh, yeah, it was just kind of off to the races. I I'm, uh, I think I'm a natural. DNA entrepreneur type guy. I have a real hard time working for other people. My mind just doesn't really work that way. So it was just kind of off to the races after, after college getting out in the real world.Michael Moore: Hey Keaton, real quick. As we think about kind of the, the pillars and cornerstones of this podcast with crossroads in defining moments, you know, you mentioned that age of 27 and it was, I think. A lot of people, probably that light bulb goes off, whether it's because you're having kids or, you know, college was a long time ago.Uh, I'm a, I'm a big music history follower. And you know, it was, it was Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Morrison that all died at 28. So, I mean, I, I just got, can't let you off the hook. Like, what was it about 27 that just said I got to kick this into Keaton Turner: high gear. Yeah. I don't know if people have asked me that and it's weird.I was living the dream from 22 to 27. I was working for my family's company, my uncle's company. That was making a great salary. I was, I was kind of like the number two guy or number three guy, uh, you know, basically they gave me free range. I could do whatever I wanted. I was managing my own projects stuff.That was probably way outside the realm of what a 24, five, 26 year old should manage. Uh, so I was living the dream really. Um, but I don't know something just as I, as I got. It seems like every year, whether it was like new year's Eve or my birthday, I started to get kind of depressed. And it was, it was a weird feeling.I've never really talked about this, but it was like, man, my time is running out. [00:08:00] And, and I was like, well, what am I, what is my time running out for? And I kind of bolded down. I'm like, I just feel like I could do more. I feel like I could impact more people. I feel like I could wake up and just feel excited.Instead of those, I talk about Sunday scary sometimes where it's Sunday night, Sunday night football is over. You gotta wake up and go to work on Monday. And it's like, man, I don't love the feeling of Sunday night now. Well, what I'm doing now, I can't wait for Monday morning. Like I'm, I'm in here on Saturdays sometimes and there's people coming around.So I don't know. I think I just, you know, I'm a Christian, I'm a believer and I realized there's a, there's a, there's a verse. And I can't quote it. Cause I, like I said, I'm not that organized, but it's your life. Your life is a vapor. And I, every year I got a little bit older. I'm like, man, my life is a vapor and it's a third of the way over.I got to go do something. So I don't know. I took the leap and I tell guys here in the office, I don't think they believe me, but I tell them all the time, if what we're doing fails today or tomorrow, we've had a lot of early success, but what if it all fails tomorrow? I'm going to do the same thing again.And I can fail four times, five times being a young guy in business and. To me, that's just, okay. You know, I don't know. Maybe I'm weird, but that's just the way my brain works. I think Bob Wierema: what I love about you saying is love and wake up on Monday and go to work. And we talk a lot about, you know, when you got work and play and how do you, how do you make that feel like that's happening every day and there is no work in play, right?Like, and it sounds like you've got that, which is go going. For you, which is awesome. Michael Moore: How do you Keaton Turner: continue to Bob Wierema: drive that forward? When some challenges come at you and things like that? Like, how do you keep that mindset? When you know, the stress is inevitable of business or life come at you? Keaton Turner: Uh, it's a great question.We, you know, early in that we've been in business almost four years now and we've been sued. [00:10:00] Probably more than four times. I, I quit counting after the second one. Um, but you know, just recently I've had, I've had to let go of some of my best buddies that worked for us that were early guys in the business that had a ton of loyalty.I had to let go of some people who didn't quite fit our company, but were amazing human beings. They were just awesome people. We just lost two massive contracts, sort of really transformed our company. And we lost them on a technicality that, I mean, would just. If a normal person knew the circumstances, it would be super depressing.So I say all that to say there are a lot of dark days in business, especially as a young guy, as a founder, you know, trying to start a business in a big, scary industry, like mining. There's a lot of bad days. There's more bad days than good days. But I think, you know, for me, cause I I'll have those bad days and I'll get home and sometimes I'll sit in my truck and say, these are the things I'm thankful for.I know life is short, so it works to make these massive swings and strike out sometimes. I also, while I know how short life is, I'm, I'm kind of fighting for an eternal goal, right? Like I'm trying to impact people in a positive way. I know I can't take the money with me, the watches and the cars and the equipment and all the, all the stuff that the world says is awesome stuff to have.It's awesome stuff to have. But it just, it doesn't mean anything at the end of the day. So I try to think about the big picture even when days suck and you kicked in the balls, like I'm super blessed to be a guy that gets to go try to do something like this in America. If I were, if I were in Saudi Arabia, I probably don't get to do this.Right. Or some of these other countries, this, you know, we have tons of opportunities. So I try to, I try to look at the positive, even when man it's hard sometimes. Michael Moore: And one of the things you mentioned that I want to circle back on is, is, you know, when you started this company, you brought [00:12:00] on a lot of your key buddies from growing up, which, you know, it doesn't get any better than getting to work with your buddies, but then you also mentioned that you've had to let these buddies go, which I can't imagine anything tougher.I mean, talk about a crossroad and defining moment in your business. Just give us some insight into that and how you went about it. Keaton Turner: Yeah, it's me guys. These guys. They're just like you and I, these are the best dudes. These are guys that have worked for me in the past. I mean, I built my company around these guys.These are guys that, you know, some of them were like, one of them was employee seven and employee like 20. Uh, and so they were really early guys on a list of 800 plus employees, whatever the number is, you know, really early guys that were loyal, I mean, would have taken a bullet from me. Uh, after I fired them, I don't know if they take a bullet for me today, but they would have.And I just think that sometimes, I mean, we've had massive growth and that's a good thing and a bad thing. It's a blessing and a curse, sometimes founders as they go through these growth curves and they realize their company has to transform to get to the next level. You just outrun certain people, uh, you out run their capabilities.I think one of the massive mistakes that I made. Was I gave those guys a ton of, I gave them a ton of responsibility and authority, and I gave them a title when we were a small business. Uh, and it worked really well. They were awesome operators of a small business climate when we got to a big business and we had a team of executives and we have real structure in our organization.Those titles didn't mean as much, and their responsibilities were shrunk down. Um, you get sued so many times you realize that you need to have some real rules and processes and regulations in place. Those were guys that just didn't fit that mold. Right. They were people in the office call us Cowboys, like, you know, it's [00:14:00] okay for the founder to be a cowboy a little bit, and just kind of say things and do things like Elan Musk.But you got to have people around you that stop you from making monumental mistakes. And I make tons of you can't have a bunch of Cowboys. You know, you've got to have really thoughtful people, really smart people. Again, I'm not that smart of a guy. And so I, it just led up to, uh, uh, us trying to get to the next levels of business and as an organization and those guys, while they're awesome, guys, It it's, it's really hard for everyone to fit into that next, that next ring up as a business.So I think there's a lot of founders and business owners that go through that through Michael Moore: growth. Well, there's also a lot of people that wouldn't take the chance or the dive of, of hiring their friends. To build a business too. So, I mean, it's, it's, it's kinda damned if you do damned if you don't right. But it is, you guys were experiencing this, you know, monumental growth and you've got these, these lawsuits coming in, like how, how did you go about, or, or someone helping you on your leadership team, identifying the issues and who they were.And then the realization, Oh shit. These are some of my best buddies. And then, okay. Hey, you know, Jimmy, we got to sit down and talk. Keaton Turner: Yeah, it's a great question because if I didn't have the people around me now, I would have kept all those guys. And we would have been the same business that we were two years ago, you know, because I'm thinking, well, these guys are loyal.They're legit. They know how to do the work. They're awesome, guys, why would we need to ever get rid of them? To answer your question. I've put so many smart people around me that are, I mean, this business runs. If I leave tomorrow, this business probably runs better, truthfully. Uh, and I don't [00:16:00] say that in like a humblebrag kind of way.You know, our chief operating officer has got an MBA from Harvard, our acting CFO. My business partner, you know, went to, went to Yale and another one went to Stanford. Like these people are just Riddick on a different level. Right. I got a guy that does analytics and stuff for us. He walks in here and starts rattling off numbers.No, you just go do it. Cause I don't know what you're talking about. So, you know, you get enough, really smart and now they've got to be good human beings. Right? Cause there's a ton of smart people that are jerks. But you get really smart people who know things that you don't and are experts in things that you're not experts in.They start to call out your dark corners of your company. They start to tell you areas where there's waste or where there's efficiency problems or you know, where there's financial issues, which we had a ton of. I mean, I, I'm just a huge fan of putting people that are way better than me. And all of these management roles and they just elevate you, you know, it's, it's wild, but if you put people in that, you know, if you're the smartest guy as the owner of the company and everyone else is kind of below you, the company lives and dies on that guy, my company would die.If I'm the smartest guy, it just would, I can, I can run an awesome small business of 50 people or 80 people. I cannot run a big corporation without a ton of people, way smarter than me. So that's, I've recognized my own weaknesses and I've tried to, you know, cover them up. Michael Moore: So, so then when you are going to sit down and have that conversation with one of your friends like this isn't working out is, do you have some of these other people in the room with you, like walk us through how that process took place?Keaton Turner: You know, I, I didn't, there was such a, there was such an emotional thing there because I love these guys so much. It had been made aware to them where the company was going. And I think they [00:18:00] had sensed for a while that their role and how they fit their role. It just wasn't quite jiving anymore. And so there was kind of an unspoken thing, right?Everyone, there was an elephant in the company. So I just took these guys aside and sat down. I don't know. I'm like, man, I love you. It's just not working. And it's, it's really not even a use thing. Like I'll refer to you, I'll get you a job tomorrow with any company. I paid them well to go do the next thing.Like I, I want to be, I want to do it as, as the most professional way I can. And some of these guys here in the office are saying, man, you did that for him. I, you know, It's to me, it's just a love thing. Like I love these guys and I trust they're probably not over it. Right. It sucks. It's things. It's not fun.There are days I still wonder, like, did I make the right decision? You know, I kind of regretted, I think we could have coached them out of it, but you know, it's just, I, I've always just, don't, I'm a big fan of brutal honesty and I'm a big fan of, like I said, the big picture and they've both. One of them, not both.One of them has said it was the best thing we ever did for him. So, you know, whether he's saying that to make us feel better, him feel better, whether it's the truth. I don't know. But you know, it's, it's not fun. Anyway, you slice it up. Bob Wierema: Were they surprised or did they know it was coming? Keaton Turner: I think they were surprised on the surface, but I think in their heart, man, they'd known it.I don't think they'd ever tell me that or anyone else. Because they were so loyal and they thought, you know, this company will take care of them forever, but I just, I don't know. I don't know. Bob Wierema: When you said to, Hey, we could, you know, when you're thinking back, we could have, maybe you could have coached them out of it.I think that's an interesting comment because Keaton Turner: I think that happens a lot Bob Wierema: and it says, well, we can keep working with this. [00:20:00] We can keep working with, at what point did you go? Okay, I got to draw the line. We can't. Be coached anymore. I mean, because I think that can go on and then all of a sudden you got people below them that are going, this person's not working for me is my leader.And then maybe you get exited there and that big, then it becomes an even bigger problem. So like, how did you decide when to act? Keaton Turner: Yeah. So there's a, when things aren't going right in your company as the guy, as the one that kind of orchestrated the whole thing. You look at what's not going right. And, and sometimes, you know, I'll go home and I'll get in the shower, the hot tub or whatever.And I'll just think, okay, if I'm there, there's a show, a restaurant and possible where this restaurant consultant comes in to failing restaurants and tells them all the things they need to do to fix it. Most of the time, the owners know all the things they needed to do. They just waited for someone else to tell them to do all those things, right.They, it was a person, it was a process. It was, uh, uh, you know, uh, operating line of credit, whatever they knew what to do. They just didn't do it for whatever reason. They waited way too long. And so I looked at our business. I'm like, man, if I'm a guy that this company hires to come in. 100% objective is to make this thing work or people don't matter.Relationships don't matter. What are the changes I'm going to make? And when I looked at it from that lens, man, it was clear. You know, I, I love these guys and there's several, it's not just these two guys. There are processes, there are behavior. Like behavior is a super tough thing to change as businesses grow.Right. Because when you're small, you're scrappy, you fight for every dollar you get big and you make some money. People start spending money, like crazy. Right. Everyone's got platinum AmEx cards and they're, you know, it's really tough to change. And so I'm looking at like, okay, I'm coming in as an outsider.What are the things I'm changing? It was just [00:22:00] clear. It was super clear. And when it's that clear, That there are some people changes that need to be made, regardless of if they're your buddies or not like, you know, we're not running a nonprofit, like we're, we're not running a, you know, church mission. Like this is a business.I have stakeholders that I'm going to make a return for. I'm going to make a return from it myself. I'm going to treat the clients the way they should be treated. And if there are people that are in the way of that, as much as you love them, you just got to make those tough changes, you know? Michael Moore: Kayden you mentioned.I mean, it, first of all, it was just incredible that. All of this has occurred in such a short amount of time. I mean, this feels like much more of a story of somebody we'd be talking to 50 years into their business with the lawsuits and Bob and I see this a lot in our work, you know, that that is the test of the fabric of, of your culture, of your mission, of the people, of how you go about doing your work.And that can, that can either be proven or wrecked. As the result of the lawsuit, probably these lawsuits aren't done yet, um, is, is quick as they've come. But can you talk about that and how you guys have worked through them? Keaton Turner: Yeah, I mean, for me, you know, I, there was, I was meeting with a guy CEO of a massive company and, and you would think this company has been sued a zillion times, right?From there. I mean, there are a billion plus dollar company, 10,000 employees. They've never been sued. And so I asked the guy, how have you never been sued with 10,000 employees? I was like, I would think you'd have a hundred lawsuits pending. He takes the approach of if I'm doing something to someone that they have a reason to go after my company or after my money or whatever the case may be.He's a 51 49 guy. So he wants to give a little bit more than he gets every time. And he's happy to do [00:24:00] that because he's got an eternal perspective, right. He's thinking, okay, God has entrusted this business to me and this money and these, these employees, I'm going to go above and beyond and make it make everyone's lives a little bit easier.So you got a vendor who doesn't deliver. Yeah. You could Sue them. Right. And you could go get the money or what, you know, whatever the thing is, you're chasing. But instead this owner and he's, this guy is worth a lot of money. He drives and meets with the vendor and he sits down and he talks to it like a normal human being.He's, it's kind of like divorced, right? It's like, well, it's not even an option. Sign the thought we're going to sit down and work this out and you're going to hate it and I'm going to hate it. And maybe we hate each other, but there's a bigger picture here. And so I dunno. W we, we try to take that now we've won a ton of lessons, especially as it regards to rules.Like I said, some of these lawsuits, I'm a cowboy, right. And I just do crazy things and I'm not a big fan of rules. I don't want people telling me what I  can and can't do. I don't want the government telling me what I can and can't do. I just, that's my DNA. But you go through that enough, you know, you get people that are like, Hey, this is we're going to do this the right way.And you start to mature, you know, as a 27, 28 year old kid with early success, you're even more rebellious. You care less about the rule. You know what it's like, Sue me, whatever, you know, So you start to mature, but I mean, it's, for me, I just try to look at the big picture. And when, when we have conflict, whether it's a lawsuit or a disgruntled employee or whatever I want to, I want to be the 51%.I want to go a little bit further. I want to give up the more money or whatever the thing is. And, and, you know, I just want to be the bigger person. So it doesn't always work out that way, but that's kinda, what's going through my mind. Bob Wierema: Was, and you mentioned a couple of times being a young guy being in business.So what are some of the challenges [00:26:00] there from a leadership standpoint and then also, and maybe after that is the second question is it seems like you have a lot of a younger group surrounding you too, at least from what we're, what we're seeing and reading. Can you talk a little bit about that though?Keaton Turner: Yeah. So I think that a young guy being in business, I would say that the toughest challenge that I've had. Is the same, the same challenge, a new first-time parent has. Right? You get, you have a baby, you have no clue what you're doing there. You know, you can read all the books, you can meet with all the advisors and the counselors.You can go through the classes at the hospital until you're holding that baby. None of it makes any sense. Right. So I thought I was super ready for business at 27. I was like, man, I'm going to go build the best thing ever. And then you get there. You're like, No clue what I'm doing. Right. And, and I'm a big believer in like you learn through all the lessons, you learn through all the mistakes.I've got three kids, the third kid, we have parents that are going a whole lot differently than the first kid. And so, you know, for me as a business owner, I think the thing that I would go back and tell my 27 year old self don't beat yourself up over all the mistakes, you know, we've, we've had. Several.And I can't tell you how many million dollar mistakes where you look back. And you're like, man, I, you know, I could have that kind of money sitting in the bank and it's, you have to worry about adjusting to those failures and learning from them and moving forward, then dwelling on, you know, or, or being even afraid to change.There's so many business owners they're just afraid to make change. We make change really quickly. You know, when we see, uh, when we see a thing not going right. Forget, everything else we're changing right now. We're gonna pivot. We're going to change the process. We're going to change the approach, whatever the thing may be.Um, so that's, to me, that's the challenge of a young business owner. You don't know anything you learn every year. You make mistakes, you repeat, and then someday 40, 50 years [00:28:00] from now, we'll think maybe we've got it figured out. So that's the first thing. The second thing is with all these young people. I, I truly believe that passion.And what you do is the most important quality. You guys probably know a lot of really smart people or a lot of really talented people that just don't have passion and they don't go anywhere. I'd rather have the passionate 26 year old guy who is learning and we're paying for some of his mistakes while he learns.I probably have that guy that works 80 hours a week to try to figure out and master his craft. Then the 50 year old guy, who's learned it all, but has no passion, you know, because again, for me, it's not, this is not about money. Like if I was trying to maximize profit. Sure. Maybe you have a bunch of non-passionate people and everything's mundane that doesn't excite me.You know, what excites me is seeing people develop. And, uh, I, it excites me for me to develop. Now we do have a lot older people. I'm not going to say, you know, older people throw them away. But our older people are on fire like Paul and I don't even know how Paul is. He's our chief commercial officer. I think he's 60.Maybe the dude runs around here faster than the young guys, you know, JJ, one of our sales guys, one of our op ops and sales guys. He's, he's probably, you know, 55 or 60. I don't know, maybe I'm off, but he's got the gray beard, not much hair. Best dude on the planet. Super passionate. You know, so for me, it's not even an age thing.I don't discriminate with age. I discriminate whether you're passionate or not. That's just how I think about it. Michael Moore: Keaton, you can't judge age by the, uh, gray beard and the losing hair. I mean, I'm only 43. Like where am I going Bob Wierema: from here? Keaton Turner: There's plenty of gray coming in. And, and honestly I have told, I've told several people, I am going to get a, just for men gray kit, because I've lost contracts.Cause I don't have enough gray hair. That's a true story. [00:30:00] That's the truth. That's the other tough part about being a young business guy? Bob Wierema: No, that's what, that's what I was going to ask. I mean, you're, you're sitting down in the room and especially in like the industry you're in, right? Like it's a very much an Keaton Turner: older industry.Bob Wierema: And here, here comes Pete, this young guy, right. Walking in. I mean, I can only imagine some of the meetings you've had with that.Keaton Turner: Not, it's not so much more to these days because we built an awesome brand and we've done a lot of work. We've done a lot of really good things. And so I try to stay out of the spotlight as much as I can. You know, if you follow any of our content, some of the podcasts and stuff, you see me, but I'm not that I'm not the focus.I'm not the mascot. But two years ago we had a massive contract. It would have been our biggest at that time. And we were the best proposal we were. We were the cheapest. We were the best service, everything. Everything was perfect. The board said no, because they knew how young I was. And I saw a picture of me and they were like, this guy looks like he's 18 years old.You know, we can't trust, we can't trust him and his company with this massive opportunity. Fast forward. We won that same opportunity. They gave it to someone else two years ago. They kicked those people out. Our company wanted this year just a few months ago. So I think you just got to persevere. I trust me, I'm getting plenty of gray.It will come. And I'm plenty. I, I think I'm too young to have all this gray hair already, but you know, that's, it's definitely a challenge getting people to say yes to a young person. It's just a challenge. A Michael Moore: question I had around that was you talked about, there are some, some older, more seasoned people in your organization, but their energy level.Is as high or higher than, than the rest of the workforce. Is it, uh, is it a two way street feed, meaning the younger people are feeding off them and they're feeding off the younger people? Or do you really just think they're [00:32:00] getting that energy because they're so passionate about what they do or just talk us through that.Keaton Turner: Uh, it's to me, it's a DNA thing. Those people have a DNA to be passionate. We just, we, I wouldn't say just a few months back, we had some, some folks on staff here in the office who were the most talented young guys in their twenties and thirties, the most talented, like, if, if you saw their resume, You would think these guys are a no brainer for this company?Uh, they look the part, they had the experience, they had the education. I mean, everything, they had everything they did not have the passion and they're no longer here. And so for me, it's just a DNA thing. I mean, I think that, you know, I wasn't taught how to be passionate. It's, you know, I just, it's the way I am.Some of our people here in the office and I, I don't think you need every single role. To be someone who's passionate, right? Like if you have an analyst, for example, maybe they're not passionate about mining, but they're passionate about numbers. You know, you've got an it guy, the it guy, he could care less about our equipment.He doesn't care about the fancy pictures or Instagram or any of that. He cares about I'm going to go problem, solve computer stuff today. Uh, so I, you know, I don't want it to seem like every single role, every single person has to just be on fire. I think that's unrealistic. But I think there are some critical roles where passion is the number one ingredient.And I think that it's just a DNA thing. Bob Wierema: How do you continuously keep that going as you guys continue to grow? Keaton Turner: Uh, I think getting people to buy in to the vision of, of where we can go, I I've said this several times over the last six months or a year, I think what we're doing, we've got a big enough opportunity that someday, hopefully soon, hopefully later, rather than sooner, but someday this thing gets bigger than what I can manage.I don't [00:34:00] think I'm equipped to be the CEO of a huge company. Right. I, I think my talents top out somewhere. And so by saying that, what I'm really saying is we have a humongous opportunity as a company. If people can see that, you know, the number, the number 12 guy at Facebook is doing okay. You know, the number 20 guy and Twitter or Instagram, like any of these companies, right?Salesforce, for example, the 50th guy in line at Salesforce probably didn't have to worry about too much. And so, you know, I want people to realize we are three and a half years in business. You know, we, we are, we are doing things we should not be allowed to do. We have, uh, we have a hundred plus million dollar proposal going out of our office at the end of the day to day that shouldn't even be a thing.I want people to buy in to where this thing could go. And you know, to me, that's motivation enough. If, if you're, if you want to do something in life that is a rocket ship ride, like this is a great opportunity to do that. And you know, if, if that's not what you want, that's okay too. Maybe you do your three or four years here.Get some really cool experience and go somewhere else. Um, you know, this is a little less fast paced or crazy or whatever, but that's, that's what I want. And that's what our core group of people here have signed up for. They, they want the rocket ship ride. Michael Moore: He knew Bob and I talked to a lot of, of business leaders and entrepreneurs.I mean, at 27 to already understand that your vision, what you're creating now could get bigger than what. Maybe your skill set or just what you want to do is insane insight. So, I mean, if I'm sitting there as part of your team, I'm thinking, you know, I believe in this guy because he has the ability to look inward and say, You know, here are my strengths.I'm bringing those to the table, but there might be a [00:36:00] certain time when somebody else needs to help me. That's that is awesome. Keaton Turner: Well, I can tell you that, you know, it comes, it doesn't even come from a place of humility. It comes from a place of practicality, you know, Twitter force, their CEO, the founder, you know, he, he wasn't the right fit at, at, at a certain stage.He wasn't the right fit. And I just know. That my abilities and my education and my experience only take us so far. And so if I'm the, if I'm the limiting factor on the opportunity that this company has, that's a big problem, right? Like I will gladly step aside and watch someone else do what I'm not able to do.A buddy of mine, the guy, the guy was just telling you about the 10,000 employees. I compare myself to that guy and his abilities. It's night and day. You know, and I wish, you know, maybe, maybe 10 years from now, the story is different and I can, I can feel confident that I can go do 10,000 employees.Well, I can't, I can't sit here and lie about that today. So, you know, I, I want the brand and the logo to go where it can go first, me personally, um, you know, I'll be all right. I, you know, I can sell baseball cards or whatever. Um, but I, I just, I want to be super practical. And that goes back to the getting rid of your best buddies.You know, you just, if you want to go where the company can go and I, you guys know a ton of small business owners. That could take their thing and turn it into something unreal. Right? Problem is they're the, they're the limiting factor and they don't want it to go above them. They want the control, they want the ego thing.They want to be the guy. You know, I love that too. Don't get me wrong. I got an ego and I'd love to be the guy. But if everyone around you is looking at you, like, man, you're not the guy get out of the way you got to get out of the way, Michael Moore: but you're right. I mean a lot of the, to their credit, right? It's their company.But a lot of the small business owners becomes a lifestyle business. Right. And it supports their [00:38:00] lifestyle and that's good enough, not, not really wanting to take that next step or that next risk of where they could take it. If, if they did the inward looking that you do, you know, Keaton, you're running a massive mining company.I mean, Some people, some people say the insurance industry is the second oldest profession, but maybe mining's the third, like it's been around forever, but you're bringing this, this social media, YouTube channel podcast pumped, like, can we just kind of go down that rabbit hole of you're changing an industry that's thousands of years old.Keaton Turner: Yeah. And, and honestly, guys to me, It's not even the technology, right? Like people see what we're doing on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube. And they're like, wow, they're using all this technology in such a cool way. All we're really doing this, the real secret behind it is. We're just exposing the people that have been doing this work for thousands of years.Right? Like if people, if people in the eighties had TV shows about minors, It would have been awesome content. Right. And I think one of the reasons why we've had early success. Is, we're just peeling the curtain back and we're showing everyone, this is what happens in mining. You get kicked in the balls, you have massive wins and massive losses.You know, you've got Bette and Bobby and they're fighting and things are bad. And then they love you. Like, we're just telling the stories and, and, and it's, you know, it's almost like our own TV show and people resonate with it. Cause we're real, you know, we. We have over-hyped ourselves and we have sugarcoated things in the past.I hate it. I want to be real good or bad. That's why the keeping up with Kardashians went for 20 years, right? Like you're getting a real look at what their crazy family goes through. I want the same thing for mining. You know, people are so scared to show [00:40:00] their haul truck flipped over. We had one catch on fire and burn to the ground.That's real stuff, man. That happens the biggest mining companies in the world. Have fatalities, haul truck burnt on fire. They have people doing idiotic things. We're no different. We're just, we're just showing it. Michael Moore: No that, I mean, that's, that's just phenomenal perspective because whether it's the mining industry or the energy industry, I mean, you mentioned, uh, Salesforce, you know, it just replaced Exxon on the Dow Jones, right?Like that's an absolute old economy versus new economy example right there. And then you've got like this investor sentiment around, you know, ESG. And your approach to all of that is like, we're just going to showcase all of it. Like, how did you, how did you say. You know, the kimonos open, walk in, check it out.Keaton Turner: Yeah. Well, I'm a, uh, I'm a consumer of content. So I love, like I tell people I'm not a mining guy. I'm not even really a business guy. What I do well is marketing and I love attention. Uh, and I don't even want to be the center of attention, but I love to think about like, where is the tension going and where are people spending their time?Is, they're not looking at, you know, Pitt and quarterly magazines anymore. And I love pit and Corey, but kids are on Instagram, right? Like you guys, you guys are doing a podcast, you know, guys, your age five years ago, weren't doing podcasts, you know? And so I don't know. I just, I want. I want people to see mining, where they consume content.If we were just doing this, you know, on certain mining channels or just focused on mining people, we would be missing 95% of the people that consume our stuff. And so I, you know, I, I'm a big fan of real marketing. I'm a big fan of getting people's attention. And you, and we kind of have a little bit of a cheat or a hack to it because the equipment is [00:42:00] so big and so cool.Everyone just loves it. Right? Like if we were an insurance, I'm trying to think how I can make insurance sexy. You know, like there are people that do it. What we say is we want to make mining sexy again. And so that's what we're focused on that. And our, some of our clients love it. Some of our clients hate it.Right. They want to say a secret. They have enough environmentalist after them that, you know, they don't, they want their stuff exposed. Uh, but you know, we have a ton of fun lighting up. What I think is one of the coolest industries, the planet, one of the oldest industries on the planet, like it's, it should get a ton of recognition and people should know all the environmentalist's that are driving their Prius' around or their Teslas that are against mining.That car, every single material and it, besides the leather on the seats was Keith to my mind, you know? And so I just, you know, I think there's a ton of education we can do someday just to the general public, but you gotta get their attention first. And that's what we're super focused on is we need to get everyone's attention and we're doing pretty good at it.I think there's a ton more we can do. And we're making some big changes currently with how we do it. So yeah, a lot of, a lot of fun stuff coming up. Bob Wierema: Yeah. I just think about like what you said about getting attention. I mean, that's how we are trying to draw into you, right? I mean, would we have come across you guys without that?Probably not maybe, but I got to imagine too. It's probably drawn for you guys from an employee standpoint, a lot of diverse backgrounds too, that makes a company different. Is that, is that accurate at all? Keaton Turner: Yeah. So we've hired, we've hired a person from all 50 States. We get the number changes a little bit, but it's actually going up.We just, a few days ago, we were getting 26 applications a day. That number, as you get into winter time, it goes up to closer to 50 applications a day just through the people being displaced through the seasonality type stuff. But I mean to think about getting 20 [00:44:00] people apply to your company a day. The, the real issue in our industry is people, right?Like most of the people we service, they can't get anyone to apply to their company. We have, we have 2000 people backlog that if we said you're hired tomorrow, they will be ready to work tomorrow. So 2000 people's a lot. And I'm sure that number goes up and down. If someone finds a job, whatever, but to me, how we win.Get everyone's attention and get all the people and, and, you know, that's what we're focused on. And obviously they gotta be good people that, you know, they got to know something or have some sort of skill or talent or, you know, passion, whatever. Uh, I always say my biggest mistakes are people mistakes, um, without a doubt.So, uh, you know, to me, that's, that's, that's how I'm thinking about our industry over the next 20 years. The people problem becomes an even bigger problem. The average age of the minor in our industry is 52 years old. The average age of our employees is 28 years old. So we're yeah. We're setting ourselves up for the next 30 years.Not, not just the next two or three years. Cause it's, there is a lot of pain. I don't think I've ever said this. There is a lot of pain and learning and a lot of expense that comes with building a company around 28 year old people. You just, there's just a ton, you know, they don't have the experience. You know, we had, we had a kid super talented 20 year old kid rip the blade off of a dozer.You know, that's a, that's a five or $10,000 mistake. You know, if that guy was 52 and had 30 years in the industry, he probably wouldn't have done that. You know? Cause he did that 20 years ago, but I don't know for me, we're making the investment now in our workforce and our marketing and our brand awareness.We, you know, we want to be positioned for this people game. Yeah. Bob Wierema: Coming out of that, what's, what's one of the biggest [00:46:00] challenges you have. I mean, you talked about some of these little mistakes and are you, are you pissing people off in the industry with what you guys are going about things? I mean, do you have some somatomedin out there?Keaton Turner: Yeah. What I would say is we're pissing all the right people off. Bob Wierema: I love it. Keaton Turner: Can you explain? Cause there's some people that listen that, and they're the ones that are pissed off saying, Oh, that's wild. Uh, there are companies we compete against. Who are just legit companies. Right. They, you know, uh, the Kiewit Ledcor, H like the big companies who do things, right when Ledcor or Kiewit or someone like that sees us on a bid list.I don't think they get super pissed off. I think they know that we're professional. We have the right values. We're not, we're not the scabs of the industry. They're just going to go after the lowest price. Like, you know, there are people out there that we know when we see them on a bid list or an opportunity.There's just no reason for us to go any further because they're the bottom feeders. They do things, the costs, they nickel and dime the clients. It's just a terrible way to do business. In my opinion. But we're pissing those people off, right? Because you know, what we do is we try to hire good people. We try to develop our team.Uh, you know, one of our values and our mission statement is, is make life better in the mining industry. Well, if you get, if you get a contract, let's say it's for 50 million bucks and your cost is 50 million bucks to do it. You make no money. Eventually you got to hit the client with change orders and nickel and dime me for this and that to go make some money.That's not making life better for anybody that's making life worse. So I think, I think all the right people are getting pissed off. The people that are rooting for us are the companies that have tried to make some changes in this industry for a while. Michael Moore: Kayden, you mentioned like Elon Musk and electric cars.And I mean, from a mining perspective, like you said, everything, but the leather seats, um, I mean, do you [00:48:00] see that industry and what's needed for the batteries as an expansion opportunity for you guys globally? Or how does that play into your business strategy? Keaton Turner: Yeah. So there was a saying, uh, if it's not farmed, it's mine.And you know, as you see the world population continue to grow, common sense would tell you you're going to have to mine more natural materials, whether it be, you know, stuff for coal, that's not, you know, coal is not happening much here in the States anymore, due to a lot of reasons, but you know, lithium, I mean, there, there are you, you could, there's a list of minerals and materials and metals.That our government puts out every year and you can see that list and how much we import from other countries. Right. We have a lot of those right here. It could be self-sufficient, you know, and, and people feel a lot of it, different ways that I'm not going to get it, all the politics, environmentalist and all that.But common sense would tell you, as the population grows, the mining industry grows. You know, you just mean the farming industry. Like the more people, the more food. You know, the more people, the more roads, the more cars, more, whatever buildings. Uh, so yeah, there's a, I think it's one of those industries where on a global scale, it's never going to slow down.And, you know, we, we get asked all the time to come to different countries, uh, Canada, Mexico, South America. We're going to figure out our business here in the States first, you know, three and a half years in. I'm not, I'm not super ambitious to go to like Africa. Um, but yeah, I mean the goal someday is to make an impact beyond just the U S soil here.Michael Moore: Keaton being down here in Texas and the whole mining of, of sand for the fracking industry, you know, started up more Wisconsin and other areas too, but for a variety of reasons, um, mostly transportation, [00:50:00] uh, the end basin sand got a lot more affordable down here and. Uh, in, in my backyard, outside of Fort worth.And then certainly out in West Texas, sand mines have popped up everywhere. Uh, and you know, so much sand was produced. Then there was a pricing issue and a margin issue. Do you guys have any exposure there? And if so, or if not, just, what are your thoughts on the mining industry? Is, is it results to the sand?Keaton Turner: Well, thank God. We didn't have any frack sand contracts. Um, we were fortunate enough to lose. We quoted it, hold on a frac sand stuff over the last two or three years, we lost all of it because the pricing was just so cheap. And we had safeguarded a little, I don't want to, I don't want to act like we're geniuses and predicted the crash, you know, but anytime you get into a commodity.That ebbs and flows, you know, goal, right? Like, okay. We can go heavily invest in gold right now. Well, what happens in 1224, 36 months? Is it come way back down? You know? So, like I said, we've got a lot of smart people around here that are thinking about risk and thinking about markets and those sorts of things.So when we weren't in frack at all, I think we did one frack sand project. And, um, I'm, I'm remembering now we have one frack sand project. They almost a million dollars and they're probably going to file bankruptcy and we're going to maybe kiss most that million dollars goodbye, but that could have been $50 million, right?Like that could have been a whole lot where, and there's companies that we compete with that I know are in a bad way due to their heavily investment practicing. But I think if you're doing business for the right companies, which is one of the reasons why we love building materials, aggregates, cement, um, industrial sand stuff, not used for fracking, we're always going to be building roads.We're always going to be building bridges. You know, uh, the [00:52:00] housing market and commercial construction market comes up and down. But you know, you look at those materials versus some real volatile stuff. Like oil and gas or gold, uh, copper, copper is taking a beating this year, iron, or you just got to know the game, your plan, and you got to know your risks going into it.Bob Wierema: You shared a lot about Turner mining. Thank you for that. And you've shared a lot about some of the trials and tribulations you've gone through when it comes down to Keaton as the person, how do you continuously work on yourself? Both, you know, whether it's personally professionally to get better. Keaton Turner: Uh, well, I think the real answer is I don't always continuously work on myself.Uh, I'm not, you know, I'm not going to sit here and lie to you and tell you, I get up at five in the morning every morning and read, you know, business journals and stuff. There are times where sure. That's the case, right? Like I, you know, I'm just like any other human I to get motivated in chunks. I may have a three month chunk where I'm super motivated and I'm on fire to go do X, Y, or Z.Uh, I had a chunk right in the middle of COVID where I didn't want to do anything. Um, mentally out of it fogged up like no desire to work out or no desire to improve anything. And so, you know, I think it comes and goes, but I think I listened to a guy, Andy, for Cielo, someone he's on Instagram. He, you know, he runs a big supplement company.Uh, he's someone that's super motivating. And he said the other day, You're either getting better and you're growing as a human or you're getting worse and you're dying. You know, it's one of the reasons why as Americans, you look at most, most Americans at 55, 60 years old they're way overweight and unhealthy.Whereas 20 years old, they were healthy, right? So slowly they've died and slowly they've gotten worse as they've gotten older. And that really just. That hit me right in the mouth because I'm like, man, the last few months, you know, I've, I've not been getting better. [00:54:00] So I've, I've been getting worse, stuff like that.If you can feed your mind with the right thing, which I don't always do. Uh, but if you can feed your mind with people that are improving and people that want to get better and want to take big swings. Everything we do here as a business, we are, we are swinging for the fences. Like, like we, we are just not big fans of bumming one out there just to, you know, get on base.We'd rather swing for the fences and strike out and try again, Michael Moore: you know, Reggie Jackson strike Keaton Turner: out a lot. I'm sure. Michael Moore: Yeah. I mean more than anybody and look how many home runs he hit Bob Wierema: getting uncomfortable every day. You know, Michael, we talk about that all the time and, you know, finding a way to get yourself uncomfortable and get out of that comfort zone.He, one of the things we like to ask is, you know, you have your, your passions in life. And when we ask people, you know, we used to ask and they'd say number one. Well, my, of course my family and my friends and number two, maybe his work. So talk about. Three and four. And what are some of those other things that you keep front and center in your life that keep you keep you, uh, you know, you mentioned fishing and hunting and I don't know.I mean, what are they, where, where do you get some of that passion from Keaton Turner: great question. Mine change all the time. Right? I, in the spring, I can't wait to go fishing. By middle of the summer, I've fished plenty. I'm tired of, Bob Wierema: I don't want to fish, Keaton Turner: you know, um, you know, I'm one of those guys that I'll buy four or five guns and do the gun thing for a while.And I'm like, man, I'm over guns. Like I want to get into whatever the thing is, you know, buy a motorcycle. So I am a sporadic diabolical person, right. Whatever my mind is into. And sometimes it's end to the business. Sometimes I want to focus on the business. I'm going to work 120 hours. I'm going to pour into people sometimes and it goes to something completely away from the business.And I actually might take away what I'm doing at the business. So, like I said, I love hunting. I love fishing. I love guns. I love dirt [00:56:00] bikes. Um, I love building people, uh, but I get tired of all of it at some point. So I just, I just try to keep it fresh. I, you know, Bob Wierema: A good stable of different things that keep you interested knows that.That's great. Keaton Turner: Why do you do many hobbies? Bob Wierema: You mentioned that Michael Moore: too, because like I was up in Bob Wierema: Northern Michigan Muskie fishing the other day and we've been fishing, you know, all summer Keaton Turner: and Bob Wierema: we pulled the boat in and I'm like, I'm done. I've had enough. You know, like we've been doing this it's time to move on to something different.And I think my fiancé's very happy that that time has come for me. Sure. But hunting seasons around the corner. So the, you know, the eyes had shifted elsewhere. Keaton Turner: Yeah. They don't realize you, you spend more time in the woods hunting than you do on the boat. Fishing, not a great trade-off for them, Bob Wierema: but. You have a, I'm like, I'm a very outgoing person.Social want to be out, want to be docking to people. And she goes, how do you sit and hunt? And no, one's around. I'm like, because that's my time. It's fantastic. Cause some of the best time I have Michael Moore: no, you know, I mean, the reason that they're seasons is a lot more for like the population control of. The particular animal or waterfowl or whatever we're talking about.Um, but I also think it's for us. I mean, if I could hunt year round, it wouldn't be as special is when it comes back around again, it just feels like that that changing of the tides, the, you know, the leaves are changing and you get all fired up about it. Again, one thing I wanted to ask, just because I think your mind's a lot like Bob and I's where it just, it it's.It's the reason that we can handle a whole lot of things going on at once. As you can bounce from meeting to meeting to strategy to this proposal, this proposal we're going after this. But I think another reason that the Bob and I are effective, what we do, I don't want to get your insight on this is the ability when you have to, to slow that down and just narrowly focus [00:58:00] everything on this one thing.And like everything else slows down. Do you have that? That process when you really got to zero in on something? Keaton Turner: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, my phone is a great example, you know, it's just a million notifications and I don't, my phone doesn't ring it. Doesn't vibrate. Doesn't do anything. I leave it off all the time.Um, when I'm in a meeting, my mind is very easily distracted. Right. I, I probably have add or something. I don't know. But when I'm in a meeting that I'm passionate about, whether it's a proposal or meeting with the person that we're trying to improve, or coach or mentor or whatever, like, I want to be super conscious of focusing on that thing a hundred percent.Uh, I do really well at that, that sometimes the things that I'm less passionate about, I'll notice myself in a meeting on my phone, scrolling through emails. Like if it's something I'm just like, add this. This is not this doesn't like light me on fire. I'm not going to add a ton of value in this conversation.There's I mean, just the other day, there was an important meeting happening here and we had some visitors in the office and. 15 minutes into an hour long meeting. I realized I'm not going to add any value here. My time is better spent somewhere. I just got up and walked out and I apologize later and I'm like, Hey guys, don't take it the wrong way and not being rude.I'm just, I'm not going to add value to that. So, yeah, I'm my time. I've had to learn how to manage it way differently than I did three years ago. Uh, especially with kids, I'm hoping my wife doesn't divorce me. So I got to pay attention to that. Like there's, there's, you know, you gotta be very conscious about time and it's something that I always underestimated.And so now I live and die by my calendar. Uh, I have appointments for everything I say no to almost everything. Um, social stuff, good things are okay to say no to. And it took me several years to learn how to do that. Um, but yeah, I just, I want to be intentional when I'm sitting [01:00:00] somewhere or talking to someone or having a meeting like this, there's a million things going on around here, like said there's a massive proposal going out just a few hours.I'm not even thinking about it. I'm with I'm with you guys. So that's, I try to do that. I'm not always great at it though. Well, we appreciate you saying Bob Wierema: yes to us because we've definitely enjoyed the conversation. Keaton Turner: Yeah, I have to. I love it. Michael Moore: You know, just in thinking about coming on this show, is there, is there anything that you had wanted to hit on that we haven't.Keaton Turner: No, I don't think so. I mean, my message is pretty similar across all of these that I do, right. Life is short, go have fun and be happy. Like don't, don't put your focus on the wrong thing, which is so easy to do, you know, especially with Instagram, you know, you, everybody wants the new truck or the new car or the new house or whatever.Like, you know, there's so much good in the world. I think that's the one thing I would touch on. Like everyone, especially in an election year, everyone is so divided. Like, man, there is a lot of good going on, amidst all the riots, amidst this COVID thing. There is a ton of good, there's a ton of opportunity.People just need to think about that. Michael Moore: That was great. That was awesome. So you kind of, you've teed up my question. You've answered part of it, but I want to direct it more just towards, towards Keaton and you, you can, you know, you can use it to talk about the company and the culture again as well. But this is the question that we ask.You've heard the saying growing up, it's not what you know, it's who, you know, But we like to say, it's not who, you know, it's who knows you. So if you think about your podcast, your YouTube channel, this podcast, what do you want people to know about Keaton? Keaton Turner: Yeah, that's a great question. I, you know, for me, I want them to know that amidst all the chaos.I, I truly have good intentions to be a good human being. [01:02:00] Um, I, my goal is to impact as many people in a positive way as I can. Uh, you know, we were about $300,000 in revenue per employee. So if you think about it, man, someday, if I have 10,000 employees, that's a lot of revenue, right. That's not even a thing on my radar.I won 10,000 so that I can impact 10,000 families in a, in a way that maybe they wouldn't have been impacted. Otherwise it's a huge goal, right? It's not easy to be different in an age old industry and still impact people in a positive way every day. Don't get me wrong. We screw up a lot, but man, I just, I want to bring more good to the world.Just like car. I'm going a second ago. About how much good is it going on out there? I want to bring more good to the world then, while people are hearing or seeing, you know, I want our content to be happy. I want our employees to be smiling, not just for the camera when it's on them, but like every day I want you to be happy and fun and, you know, enjoying life.Um, that S that's what I want people to get out of what we're doing. Bob Wierema: Okay. Now I'm going to say one thing that I don't want to hear from you Keaton Turner: anymore. And it Bob Wierema: stopped saying you're not that smart of a guy because today's conversation was awesome. You got Keaton Turner: an Bob Wierema: absolutely infectious personality. I mean, your passion, the gratitude, the humility it shows.And that's exactly like, I can just tell that's why that company is thriving, that you're building and that. Well, you probably got people around you that are just running through walls for you. So keep it, man. Awesome. We appreciate the time. This has been a lot of fun. Michael Moore: Could not agree more. I think, uh, Bob and I are ready to get into the mining industryKeaton Turner: and come visit anytime we are hiring and you know what I'm going to do, I'm going to take that recording all those nice things you said, and I'm going to play it on. Repeat for people here. Bob Wierema: Don't Keaton Turner: forget it. You had your wife. That that's the real one, [01:04:00] right? That's Bob Wierema: the important one. This has been great.Thank

Connect with Michael and BobThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with Chris LeeWebsite: https://www.rtcpartners.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-lee-97816344/[00:00:00] Chris Lee: There can be multiple approaches to accomplish the same goal. And you can also learn a lot from people from different backgrounds and experiences, because it's so easy to get caught up in, Oh, this is what happened to me. This was my experience. Everyone else must be treating something the same way. And even when you know, that's not true and there's always the almost need to, you know, fight that projection.Oh, because I would behave like this in a certain situation. That must be that, you know, whether it was you, the one going back to the simple things in Italy, like not asking for substitutions and the plates, or, you know, it might take a little longer for the food to come out, or it's not for you to start eating when the food's there because it's hot.And instead of waiting for it to be there for everyone, but just all these kinds of different nuances and the way people are addressed, the way you treat other people. That really, I think have been helpful for me in understanding different perspectives. Robert Wierema: Welcome to the climb this afternoon. We have the pleasure of sitting down with Chris Lee from Round Table capital.Chris is a friend of mine that I've gotten to know over the years. And, Michael and I are really excited to have the conversation with Chris today. He shares a lot of good things that are going on, not just in a business climate, but also some of the challenges we're facing across the country these days.And Chris is just a fantastic guy that has. It's an absolute love for what he does a real love for life. And, it's just such a good conversation and so great to have Chris join us today, Chris. Thanks for joining us.Robert Wierema: good afternoon, Chris. Thanks for joining Michael and I on the climb today. Well, this is a, this is [00:02:00] a fun one for me, Chris and I have gotten to know each other over the last number of years of doing work together. met through some God. I don't even remember how we met probably five, six years ago now, but, our paths have crossed many times.We've become good friends over the last couple of years and you know, so this'll be a good conversation. And, you know, Chris, I think maybe just for everybody to get started, tell us a little bit about who Chris Lee is, where you're from and, and we'll just kind of direct the conversation from there.Chris Lee: All right. Sounds good. Thanks Bob. I grew up in Southern California, originally outside of the San Diego area where I was raised by my single mom, but also fortunately lucky enough to live with my aunt and uncle at the time as well. So those were the early years growing up in Southern California. Great family background in that regard, but never really had the chance to travel much and really get out of Cal.So one of the things that I always wanted to do was explore, right? Robert Wierema: We know you like to do that. Chris Lee: Yeah, definitely. And so other than well, Las Vegas, of course, because that was easy drive going off to college was really my first time outside of California. And ended up going to Harvard and Cambridge first exposure to the East coast, first of all, exposure to the winter and the snow and the jacket, but really loved the experience.And one of the best parts about it was, you know, at that time I was studying history and history of art architecture. No two things I thought were really interesting. And so I had the opportunity to do my junior year abroad. the first semester grown and the second semester in Paris, that was my first, I was a country.It was really a life changing experience. I had the opportunity to live with a bunch of Italian guys in Italy and really exposed to the country. And then, you know, Paris was great as well. And so the number since that really established her love for travel, and then, you know, senior year of college rolls around looking at kind of the [00:04:00] options that are out there for art historians, and that really jumped to mind.So decided to go straight through to law school. Any vote in full disclosure, that was without really fully understanding what it entail. I thought I wanted to be able to put a Gator be in the courtroom and much of that was based on, you know, but I had seen on TV, not very many people in my family had professional careers and that sense.And so I was kind of on that law school path. Got to law school realized litigation was not for me, just a bit too adversarial, not the Courtney drama that I was kind of expected. And so after doing it first internship to go the MMA route, which I really enjoyed. I had a great mentor at Melvin when I do make somebody's internship there and really liked the aspects of M and a, and kind of putting a deal together.And just because there's so many ways to look at it, is it a bit adversarial? Yes, but it's not a zero sum game. You know, sometimes it's about maximizing the pie as it will be say. So you're making the circle bigger for everyone. Robert Wierema: Chris, let me, let me interrupt there because, so with Harvard, you didn't, did you study business at all while you were at Harvard?Chris Lee: no. There's a couple of classes here and there. You know, the Harvard at that time, the undergraduate curriculum was pretty interesting. So I believe it was, you know, 16 courses you had to take half of them would be in your major. But then the other half had to be in the areas that were furthest removed from your major.Oh, interesting. Because I was doing, you know, modern architecture history. The other classes I took were introduction to investments, biological sciences, and some other aspects like that to try to get the full well rounded picture. Robert Wierema: Yeah, no, I just wonder, cause like, if you think about a [00:06:00] lot of the people in your business, right?A lot of them go back and do that traditional track of business school or in school study business, come out, do the analyst role. I was banking on going back to school and then, I mean, that's just a very different path. So it's, I think an interesting one. Chris Lee: Right. And I actually found it really helpful in, you know, throughout my career because a lot of times when people think of.You know, history, they're just thinking, Oh, you're reading a book and memorizing a lot of facts and regurgitating it, or same thing with a, you know, a painting. You're just taking a look at it and describing what it looks like when really what you're doing is you're trying to construct your own historical narrative about what happened.Right. If you're looking at, you know, the fall of Constantinople, You're reading so many primary sources of different accounts and actually trying to figure out, well what actually happened, but at the same time, projecting it in the light that, that particular story and fields. So it was a good experience with taking backs, but also kind of understanding, you know, how many different ways those same facts can be interpreted.Interpreted and even skewed based on interpretation. Robert Wierema: Yeah. Interesting. So I derailed you there. So you, from there, you had, you said, mentioned great mentor. maybe even hit that a little bit. Talk to us a little bit about your mentors. You said that. Came into the, you know, as you came into the MNA space, Chris Lee: right.because his name was Mark, you said, I don't know how many. And part of the thing is when you're doing, you know, an internship or going to a big law firm with hundreds of lawyers. So much of what I really believe success is based on is how much interest people actually taking you and are willing to go out of their own way to kind of nurture and guide in the development and really act as a resource in that regard.Because so many times, I think, you know, the banking or legal life cycle is so short. People are in there two to four years and then they're out [00:08:00] and be an attitude we're kind of when you're at a company, that's how the machine works. And those are the expectations and not really investing in the growth.So it was really fortunate. They're gonna have a couple of people that I can really talk to kind of map out their options and things like that felt really comfortable talking with. And that would be on the court. I don't know to be, so it was dead set on MNA. After that internship, there went back to law school for my last year, managed to do about a semester and a half abroad again at the university of Florence, keep him working on his Italian skills, trying to perfect that, and that was really cool.And then after that graduated and decided to take my internship offer to go back to LA. Right. It had been about seven years at that point, since I hadn't been back in Southern California and in my mind that said, convinced that, you know, Hey, that's where I want to be. LA is going to be great. And then after six months there quickly decided that it was not for me.I don't one of the few West coast people that are really misleading.It was great, but there was nothing more depressing then. Being trapped in an office building at all hours, looking at the beautiful weather and not being able to enjoy any of it. And then just being in the traffic. So I said, you know, for where I am my career, on the one hand, I want to know I want to be in New York and to after about two years at the law for realized that the path of the lawyer really wasn't for me.Right. I think I learned a lot of skills working, a lot of interesting details, got exposure the first time to private equity and venture capital. And what did I look like? And a lot of those different things, because, you know, during law school, you're basically learning a lot from the book theory and what the law says, but not actually how that comes together in the form of a deal.And so I was just looking for my [00:10:00] longterm path. It's a great path here to be a lawyer, push for partnership and do all of those things. But is that really ultimately going to fulfill me and make me happy? What I want to do for my career? Michael Moore: Hey Chris. So you mentioned real quick. That or maybe Bob did that.You guys have known each other for five or six years. I mean, I got to say that right there shows your compassion and a desire to help others because most people that we talked to that have known Bob for five years have kind of shut him off or stopped workingimpressed with that aspect of your character. And, it's much appreciated cause Bob needs friends. In all seriousness, the aspect that you talked about around education and like the history classes that you were taking and kind of how that shaped the way you thought about things. I mean, do you see direct correlation between like, learning about history and cultures and like putting an M and M and a deal together?Chris Lee: Yeah, because it really is. Step back and realize that how so many different people can be looking at the same set differently. And Ethan that's just the deal document or an employment agreement. And even getting into what people actually care about because there's a tendency, you know, you will often say to just think that people do things the same way you are.They're not, there's no way that anyone could see it differently, but it's kind of that history background and got me used to saying, Hey, you've read the same event, at least 10 different perspectives. And you get 10 different viewpoints. And so what are the common grounds there? And if you're trying to deal with something and come and do the consumption, maybe treat items as facts, but also be cognizant of how those facts can be interpreted.Robert Wierema: Yeah, no, that's, that's a good point. I think [00:12:00] it's interesting to Chris, like if you look at your background too, of being in the space that you're in and taking that. And then being a lawyer as well and going into the M and a space, I think that's gotta be a, a huge advantage for you as well, given that you know how to do a transaction from the law side as well.Chris Lee: Yeah, it definitely, because one thing that I realized as a lawyer was that people were so silent, right. Even, so you had a team, a massive team who knows how many people are working on this deal, but you had the accounting over here, the tax advisors over here, the bankers here, the lawyers here. And each, you know, doing their job in a very siloed fashion without maybe the same amount of communication to get a holistic understanding of the deal.And so after I went law to go to business school, I'm in Columbia and we did New York with the focus on learning more about the finance side. Right. And then that's what I did. I did time at Evercore as an investment banker on the sell side and move to Coller capital, which is a large bond to be on the investment side.And really, I think utilize those different experiences. I think I knew bring that approach to RTC. And whenever I look at eels kind of working together, to get them executed, Robert Wierema: tell us maybe a little bit about RTC and how that came Chris Lee: to be. Well, RTC funny it's like the perfect case of a business school is supposed to do.Right. Everyone's always talking about other networks of people you beat one day, you know, that'll pay off because don't tell you how long, right. It was fortunate to join. What was then a different company with a couple of other people from Columbia, helping support and really high net worth individuals and family offices.To execute on a buyout transaction, the first deal there. And then from there, it really snowballed from there. We had the [00:14:00] opportunity to continue doing investments. the LPs and a lot of the investors that we met at that initial time wanted to continue being active in the space and doing more deals.And so we had the opportunity myself and the other managing partner. They're totally Brindisi. We're going to our classmates at Columbia business school. When I went to banking, he went on to BCG to work on the measurement with a focus on operations. And so then we really had the opportunity to take the lead there in 2017 to really try to turn something into a Buick call.A lot of fun, but for the independent sponsors, you know, doing fund by fund investments. And so we decided to really focus there. We're fortunate enough to bring on Ashley, but, and work with long was at Evercore. And so you kind of have this whole nexus of people that have spent a lot of time together, work together in various capacities and trusts.And so from there, we just had a goal to continue working in the lower middle market, doing buy and build strategies, really in the services space. And that's because both Tony and myself came from services, backgrounds, he kind of understood it. And so much of private equity is focused on tangible assets or something like that because people are a bit more cautious to invest in services.Because you're, you know, your assets are walking out of the door every day, but you kind of noticed that in a lot of the service industries, that's a unique opportunity. They're highly fragmented and there's opportunity to solve the ownership transition as well. Because a lot of these are coming from the baby boomer generation of grown great businesses and are looking to monetize them at this point.But the next layer of management might not necessarily have the capital to allow that transition to happen. And so, you know, but our model kind of [00:16:00] became, was let's find people that we can really partner with that want to monetize the value they've created. But also that we can help continue to grow both organically and inorganically.So we're really big on equity rollovers, having the next level of employees or management buy into their transaction. So everyone is really aligned, not just, you know, monetizing that initial transaction, but really getting that second bite of the Apple at the ultimate exit from there. And so since we shifted to that approach and then about 26 deals now launching four platforms since 2017 I'm across the platform was more than 4,000 employees, 25 offices across the country playing.We're just really continuing to grow and focus there. Michael Moore: So Chris, just because I've, you mean mentioned it, the study abroad that you I'm jealous, you got to do more than once. You got to do twice and having studied abroad myself. And this seems to be a repeated theme with our guests that have studied abroad.I mean, give us some more insight into the perspective that that created for you. Not only internally for yourself and who you are and ultimately have become, but. Just in general and conversing with people putting deals together. Like how does that weave into you? Chris Lee: I think it basically helped develop a real, not just comfort, but a real appreciation for people from different backgrounds and different cultures and really broadening my horizons and the extent that it's not always just one right way to do.There can be multiple approaches to accomplish the same goal. And you don't also learn a lot from people. From different backgrounds and experiences, because it's so easy to get caught up in, Oh, this is what happened to me. This was my experience. Everyone else must be treating something the same way. And even when you know, that's not [00:18:00] true and there's always the almost need to, you know, fight that projection of, Oh, because I would behave like this in a certain situation.That must be that. You know, whether it was, you know, even going back to the simple things in Italy, like not asking for substitutions and the plates, or, you know, might take a little longer for the food to come out or it's not to start eating when the food's there because it's hot and some waiting for it to be there for everyone, but just all these kinds of different nuances and the way people are addressed, the way you treat other people.That really, I think have been helpful to me in understanding different perspectives, especially when we're dealing with the services businesses. That's what it really is. And then the lower middle as well, you know, we're not doing,  what we're essentially doing is getting the people to buy into what we're trying to build.And so that's a two way street where we want them to continue to be a part of the growth going forward, but they also need to believe in us that they're making the right decision. And their food, as well Robert Wierema: as you think about kind of some of the transactions you've done and said 26, 26 deals with four different platforms, you and Tony and your team.You're probably a little bit younger in the industry. Talk a little bit about some of the challenges maybe that's presented or whether it's from fundraising to get these deals done or working with the management teams. Chris Lee: That definitely. And it's easier now because we can kind of point to the track record there is, but that was definitely a huge challenge at the start because, you know, everyone's kind of questioning that we're often the youngest people in the room, all of our experience.It looks great on paper, but when you say, Hey, we're going to go execute on a buy and build strategy, you know, take our dura for example, our first one. And you know, we're going to do 10 acquisitions over the next couple [00:20:00] of years, we're going to grow it from, you know, 2 million something EBITDA to 15. Plus, trust us with this.Well, have you done it before? No,that was really that. And even on the fundraising side, you know, we would attend so many of the different conferences, especially for independent sponsors to try to raise funds and the feedback, you know, it was consistently, this looks great on paper. But come back to us a little bit later, Robert Wierema: you've gotten some deals done.Right? Chris Lee: Right. And then unfortunately, you know, a year later we were able to come back and show that and you know, people said, Oh ha, they can actually really do what they said they were going to do. So since then it was a bit of a snowball effect where, you know, we launched the answer platform, something similar there recently launched within the optometry space, as well as environmental consulting space.And, you know, even on the investor side, now it's repeat investors that, yes, we really love what you did with the first one. How can we continue to be involved and do that? So I think we've built up a lot of credibility in the space that has let us spend more time focused on. How can we improve the companies, continue to execute on that strategy rather than, you know, fundraising justify why you should be allowed in the game to begin with.Michael Moore: Chris along those lines for, for some of our younger listeners that may be experiencing those same kind of challenges. Like I feel there's so much of growing up where you're, you just want to play the game. You just want to be on offense. You don't value the time on Saturday to watch the game film. Like when you guys got that feedback, you know, come to us when you've gotten some deals done, how did you take that and internalize it as a team?And then. Go out on offense the next week. Chris Lee: Yeah. On the one hand we were like, okay. Yeah, we definitely [00:22:00] understand that perspective very enough, but we started just focusing then internally, but how can we do this and how can we be even more thoughtful and showing that we actually have a plan, execute it.And that was a lot of it too, was just realizing that no one was just going to give us credit because we were saying it, but how can we then again, tell a story that will get people interested and, you know, and that's what we did. We realized rather than chasing some of the larger investment checks, we'll have to start smaller and keep on building that kind of trust and reputation within the industry until we can get there.And so a lot of it was just not getting discouraged, but when you realize that you're going to hear no, you know, 95% of the time, and part of what made that easy was just the team, you know, that we were working because, you know, we always consider ourselves a startup, but the strong relationships were there.That it was almost like we were working as a team, as friends. So even when things were rough, it wasn't as painful as it would have been otherwise and say, yeah, know that didn't work out, but we're all sitting around the office together, bouncing ideas off each other, which in itself was. Pretty enjoyable.And we were liking the challenge. I'm doing it because I remember that was the best interview question you ever got. When I was interviewing for an investment bank, you said, what do you think makes a good investment banker? I gave one of the. Not canned answers, but as you know, hard work communication skills, you know, the whole list of things we'll be prepping for an interview.And he just looked at me and said, okay, that's all very true. But what separates the great bankers from bad ones is that the great ones, like what they do. Because if you like what you do, [00:24:00] everything else is going to come naturally. If you don't like what you do, they'll always be something in the back of your mind that is asking, what else should I be doing?I'd rather be spending my time elsewhere. I'd rather be doing something else. And so I always liked that and I found that it's proven to be pretty true. Robert Wierema: Well, and I, I know that with you, Chris, cause we talked a lot about this stuff and have over the years and like I can see and feel your passion when you're working through these things and getting emails from you at three o'clock in the morning and you know, nonstop.But now, now that I know how much you're traveling, maybe it's just because you're on the other side of the world. So it feels like at three in the morning,Michael Moore: he is Chris Lee: definitely the time to take advantage of it. All right. Anyway, Robert Wierema: Chris, when you get, you know, in the, in the MNA space too, I think it sounds like you guys are doing things a little bit differently in the way you're approaching these deals, where you're not trying to kind of take the whole deal. You get this roll over component that you're doing.You think that's an advantage. Do you see, what do you see happening in the M and A industry in general? Given. You know, not just the current environment, but you know what I hear from a lot of bodies that are, you know, our age are saying, well, Hey, we're not getting the economics because the older partners aren't at the PE firms.So I see a lot of guys going out, doing things similar to you, the independent sponsor out, like what do you foresee the industry? As things continue to change. Chris Lee: I think you're going to see the independent sponsor network. Just continue to grow. I mean, you know, I remember a few years back, we would attend a conference.There might be 90 independent sponsors. And now there's because I think generally if you're an independent sponsor, you're doing it on a deal by deal approach, right. Where they're taking the investment money, but for a specific investment, I think that LPs actually really appreciate that visibility.[00:26:00] Right, because it's not going into a blind pool who knows be invested over that. It takes a bit more work in diligence on that particular investment, but it's a great opportunity to know exactly where you're parking your money, especially if you're trying to diversify the portfolio specifically, showing that deal by deal route the very attractive.Robert Wierema: Yeah. And you know, we're, we're seeing that a lot more. I mean, I'm, I'm seeing a lot more independent sponsors coming out. what, what do you think some of the challenges are being an independent sponsor as you go into some of these deals? Because it's not the traditional route. Like how do these companies respond to that?Is it as you go in. Chris Lee: Oh,I'd say that's why we ended up really pushing forward in person management meetings because the first hour it can be somewhat hostile when you're getting looked at with the eyebrow raise. Oh, wait. This is. This is who's going to be coming in here to do it. But I think once you can explain the independent sponsor model and how the focus works, it kind of turns into a positive as well, because they know that, Oh, we're not just one company and some larger portfolio.Three X on this one exit over here, and then we're no longer important it's that we have the full undivided attention here and working on this. So the same team that's coming in and setting up the deal and doing the diligence is some of the same team that's helping the business grow afterwards. And I think, that's been a great selling feature because there's a lot more personal and those direct lines of communication.You know, the sellers, they know who's going to be making the decisions is on an investment committee and things like that, as opposed to, it just goes up into a black box and then the decision comes down. So I think that's been extremely helpful for us, especially at the lower middle market level. [00:28:00] Michael Moore: Going back to the route of like your historical perspective.Have you had in your 26 deals that you've done? Have any of them been a multigenerational family business? Chris Lee: No, Michael Moore: I was just wondering if history played a role in that, like you've got somebody that's, you know, second, third generation, this is their company. They're going to entertain using you guys, like how you walk through that, that process Chris Lee: with them.It's actually interesting. Most of the deals, you know, we've come across. Part of the reason we are getting in there in the choir is because oftentimes the children had no interest in being a part of the family business. And so that kind of logical transition you often see isn't really even an option.Well, Robert Wierema: I've Def I've definitely seen that Chris and some of the deals we've talked about over the years where it's a, you know, run that kind of construction engineering space, the design space, the services, businesses, where the kids just don't want to be a part of the business anymore because they're, they're doing something else.And, and I think there's going to be a lot of opportunity in that space in the years to come. Given that dynamic of the baby boomers leaving that, you know, kind of that industry. Chris Lee: Right. Completely. And especially, we expect to see even more of that, especially in light of COVID and the business interruption, and actually, you know, targets that maybe we had talked to in the past, not coming back to us and say, okay, actually wait a second right now, it actually sounds a lot better to be part of the larger, more stable organization.Can we. You know, get back to talking again and, you know, again, and those conversations are just getting easier because part of what we do with our model is we really try to build out the top notch operating partner, network and management in there. So it's interesting as a platform, scale and shift, you know, from us doing an initial conversations, a lot of legwork to then the [00:30:00] management team, being able to take that over themselves.And that is always really helpful because they generally bring a lot more industry expertise and the relationships are so deep within the business that he knows much more of a more known commodity for those that are in the industry. And so that's one of the things we're always looking at is how you've been on the right operating team from the start.So we can hit the ground. Right. We've been more successful doing that lately as well as we continue to. You can imagine doing our first deal. And we're trying to recruit, you know, former public company, COO or former CEO to come, you know, where if it doesn't help you? No, no, no things. You have to be kidding me.So it was a much bigger struggle to start enticing the people that come on board and build that. But now that we've had that initial success, we're able to, you know, work with and some of the best talent before you officially closed on the first deal. So that's also been really instrumental to RC. Robert Wierema: And what do you, what do you see Chris, as the future of RTC, as you guys continue to grow, obviously things are getting busier for you.You only have a certain amount of bandwidth and Tony, and we all know that Ashley actually, Ashley, Ashley's the one who actually runs the place. Chris Lee: Exactly. What is, Robert Wierema: what is the future look like for RKC? Chris Lee: Yeah, cause we also have arms and on board as our analysts. But we are now actively hiring as we're looking to grow the team, because we do want to bring in additional resources.We see not only continuing working on the four platforms we are now, but you know, getting another one launch early next year. And so we're definitely not focused on building out our internal infrastructure, but more as we look for that next phase of growth, because we don't see any reason why we can't keep on duplicating what we've been doing.I'm working on new platforms every couple of years. That's Robert Wierema: exciting, Chris. I mean, it's been [00:32:00] fun to be on the ride with you and see you guys grow over the years and kind of the iterations of the changes. Chris Lee: Yeah. There's another actually closing deals and there's fields for you to work on with us.Robert Wierema: Well, I, I did Chris. I wanted to come back to something you said, and I think we solved the world's problems back in, in early July when we were in Mexico talking after two bottles of, red wine. And then, I don't know how many bottles it's tequila. How about you kind of. Yeah. Well, and you kind of alluded to it before.You're talking about people coming from different backgrounds and cultures and what you can learn from them. I mean, maybe talk a little bit about your upbringing and some of those pieces and some of those challenges and things that you face as you continue to grow your career. Chris Lee: Yeah, no, definitely. And you know, didn't cause what we've been.We're working on now with the portfolio companies, that's really focusing on our diversity and inclusion policies and making that a priority because we've always had things like that in place, but not necessarily doing the measuring behind the background and actually tracking it and actually all the things accountable.So it doesn't light up everything that's been going on. That's been a huge push that we're really trying to formalize at the portfolio companies. No, that's always been a big, important thing of NRGC and for myself as well, just because of, you can see the different ways that people are treated, you know, does based on whether it's gender, whether it's based on that vicinity or things like that.So that's always kind of been top of mind because even growing up personally, I get it. Disappointed, you know, countless instances where it was negatively impacted, especially due to race and especially when it came to the education front, because I remember going into, you know, [00:34:00] high school was always a straight a student out.I mean, throughout all the middle school, all of that, you know, ready to go into AP classes in high school or what happened. But, you know, initially there, the. School tried to put me in the metric classes and the afterschool program for students that needed additional help. Try to explain, wait, wait, why, how is this happening?And thinking about algebra, whatever in eighth grade and all of this what's happening here. And that was just their response. It wasn't until I got my mom involved to, okay. Can you come down to the school and plead to get me to the right classes? You know, and then, then, well, you have to take a test, but none of my other friends that were in the eighth grade honors classes were taking the test.Why is that? And it's just a lot of, you know, little things that are constant throughout, you know, that when I was at target getting stopped by the police officer or hanging out with my friend outside of the bar, and he says to my friend, you know, the white guy, you know, excuse me, sir, is this man bothering you?With the flashlight and it's like, no, we're classmates at Harvard law. We'll just nod your head if there's anything wrong here. And so there's just a lot of these, you know, like that and various employers when you're confused for either, Oh, can you take this to the mail room for me? Oh, I don't actually work in the mail.None other instead instance making my copies of the books. Oh, here are any 10 copies of this by.Thanks. You're probably put it over there. I don't, you know, I'm actually an associate here or something like that, that nature. And it's just a lot of those experiences that, you know, try not to make you more defensive, but just make you a bit aware of how things can perceive now are going to impact people that this is, you know, what their [00:36:00] experiences.Or like, I mean, you know, and it's just not letting that get you down or reject you too much. And part of it is, you know, me personally, I'm saying, Hey, look, I'm not checking all the boxes. They're doing everything right. And still running into all of these things. And then, you know, these are the ideally campuses and that how much worse it actually be.Everywhere else. But yeah, I remember when I was so happy to start my job as a lawyer, too, my mom moved to dinner in downtown LA and the suit and everything. And we're walking across the street in downtown LA and then we get stopped by two motorcycle cops say, excuse me, ma'am is it isn't this man veracity?No, that's my son, but what's going on? So, you know, just a lot of things like that, that I think. Maybe sensitive to people from different backgrounds and just kind of the discrimination that is out there and kind of what exists because, you know, that's the type of things that people are going through constantly, you know, that dire life.What an impact and what kind of, you know, just a negative cloud. You're putting an actually believing that one can really succeed, you know, a couple of my personal stories, but talk to a lot of my friends, a lot of things, and it can be much worse out there. So it's just important to be cognizant of it.Even looking, you know, now in our portfolio, if somebody is, Hey, let's take a look at the, if there's any wage gaps between women and men during the same job, what about by race? What is that? And making sure that these things just kind of become latent and we're not being proactive about it. So we're constantly working on 'em.How do we do it with the biases, trying to bring some speakers in to some of the board meetings and things like that, and really getting it on the forefront of people's minds [00:38:00] to make sure that we really are building a great culture at work. Do we want everyone to be one of the, you know, employers of choice?And so what can we do that for that regard to be supportive? Well, Robert Wierema: first of all, Chris, thanks for sharing all that. I mean, we had, we had a good conversation about it when, when we talked and, you know, I said, yeah, you know, it's still just, it blows my mind that those types of things would happen. And, you know, for me, I mean, I was, you know, not that I was blind to it.Yeah. I never had that happen. And you know, when you're telling me those sayings and it just, it just makes me so upset that those types of things still happen these days. And, you know, As, you know, obviously in light of what's going on today and everything out that's happening in the world, what would you tell people that are running through some of those challenges right now?Because you, obviously, you persevered through a lot of that. Like what kept you and keeping your head down to the grindstone to keep pushing forward and, and, you know, what would you kind of give to advice of others are running as some of those challenges. Chris Lee: I mean, it was really just recognizing that those obstacles are always going to be there.It's just something else to overcome. I always found helpful with this to share my experiences with other people to help just kind of spread that awareness because a lot of times, you know, depending on where people grew up, depending on their own circumstances, It might be what you see on the news, but without having that personal connection, it can maybe sometimes lack some of the impact.And also part of it is not being afraid to really like address it head off. Right. Because it can get uncomfortable. No one wants to be in a situation within they feel embarrassed about talking it or they'll be looked down upon. So it's just really, you know, like they say, just wanting to prove, prove all the haters wrong.The ones say through the success, because that is really the best way to go about [00:40:00] it because avenues might be blocked. You might be facing kind of these negative obstacles in your path, but what else can you really do, but overcome them and push through. Michael Moore: Chris back to your studying of, and love of history though.I mean, this, this challenge, this problem has been going on for a really long time. I mean, I think it's, it's certainly heightened right now with the amount of, of social unrest that's going on across our country, your perspective, what are things that aren't being done that could be to help solve these challenges?Chris Lee: You know, it's interesting, right? Because the civil rights movement wasn't even all that long. That's all I think people like to wait or look up are we've come since then. And kind of treat that as the end all is the accomplishment, instead of focusing on what problems, you know, still exist. And I think a lot of what's been coming out now has been forcing that conversation.And one of the important things that has done is even just the. Communication and having those discussions, whether it's with friends, whether it's with family and kind of forcing that to either one friend about a conversation where someone can see what kind of changes needed or things like that. If we, to getting it out there, because I think one of the biggest themes, you know, from over the summers that that silence is complacency.Okay. Is it uncomfortable whether you're talking with friends or family about where do you feel on this? What about this? They're forcing it because unless people as a whole really care and are willing to take the steps necessary and pay attention to it. And again, the first step is, you know, acknowledging.That is there. So systemic racism that it does exist, that it's not just one or two bad policies or a few bad apples that are responsible for everything, [00:42:00] but really forcing people to confront themselves and say, Hey, how can I be better? Because no matter who you are, and not even just with regard to this every week will always be better to always improve.And so. It's just kind of getting on top of that. No. Michael Moore: I really appreciate that, Chris. I mean, that's, that's one of the reasons that Bob and I are so passionate about this podcast is to bring issues like this to light and really dive in and talk about them because we both feel like that historical.Context, right. That the civil rights movement and the grand scheme of things was a second ago in the, in the, in the history of our world. And we, you know, we, we can't act like, well, that was a long time ago and we've come a long way. It's gotta be an everyday effort. That the forefront of everybody's mind.I love the diversity and inclusion policies in your, in your companies. I mean, like everybody needs to be thinking like that or it just, it hits a pause and a blip and then it just reverts back to the way it was. Chris Lee: Right. And that's what I think kind of. Now on the corporate level where the mentorship is so important, especially when it's coming to things like diversity and inclusion, because people in the real leadership roles have to take the interest and have to make sure that it's actually happening.Some of my best experiences have been when I've been paired with the senior leader. Right. And not necessarily just based on race or anything like that, but someone that, you know, you actually emulate and want to be like taking that role and taking the mentorship seriously and not just. And just, you know, not getting lost in the haystack kind of.And so I think that's one thing that can definitely be done across the board is having the people at the real senior ship [00:44:00] levels commit to making it an attractive place to work for all people. Because, you know, at that point, that's just really to the benefit of everyone. Now we're touching on the study abroad and the different cultures and the different ideas.Getting people from different backgrounds and experiences in the room is one of the most important things you can do to actually coming out with the right outcome. Right? Why wouldn't you want a bunch of people from the same school or even the same geographic area or something like this, trying to solve a problem.That's not applicable to that group. So I think that's one of the things that's kind of underestimated when it comes to businesses. People like talking about, you know, what does a DCF show? What's the weighted average. Cost of capital, what is going to be the right investment here and all of those things.But without thinking that, how can you think about outside the box and different people can put the different things in their lives, but different approaches to solving them and overcoming them. Everyone somewhere is they're successful, but I guarantee you, everyone was successful for. Well, there's the overlap for different reasons as well.You can bring that perspective into the room and really properly. So with that in mind, you might think of a completely different approach, whether it's, as you know, it's structured the deal, whether it's talking about how you split up the purchase price, whether you're just getting people on board and making them feel bought in, you know, there's a lot of value to be had from different perspectives.Robert Wierema: I was reading something the other day. I, I want to say it was in the journal and it was talking about just the success of some organizations. And if you look at like the makeup of their board or the makeup of their leadership team, and just how much more successful those teams are when they are more diverse, I mean, To me, what you're saying just makes so much damn sense, but yet it doesn't happen, right?Like,  look at these larger organizations, but especially with [00:46:00] everything that's going around now today, and you're saying, Hey, we're going to give a bunch of this money and do all that. And they're like, yeah, that's great. But like, what are you doing internally to change that? And I just don't know how we get there.Right? Like how do we, how do we continue to push it? I mean, it's like, Exactly what you say. Like, I love your comment of just, we got to spread the word, we got to have the awareness and you got to kind of like what you're doing with your portfolio companies, a leading it in the right way. And like that's spread is going to happen.And I think it starts with a lot of the younger leaders that we have in the world Chris Lee: today. Right. Right. And again, it comes down to not necessarily forcing the conversation, but making it part of the conversation. And that's why, you know, some things like the diversity inclusion policies are important because it's actually making it a part of something that's formal is important and kind of creating those different forums for actually people to speak and feel comfortable and be aware of because, you know, to some extent there's people that are just completely unaware.There's another group of people that want to address that, but perhaps don't feel comfortable bringing it up, which I understand as well, because I can kind of be, you know, awkward. It's always, you know, funny, no one necessarily wants to be the guy that. Hey, you're a black guy. Tell me about what is it, right, right.Hey, might be curious. But that conversation is also difficult to happen. So it's very similar to same things. You have training on human rights, like human resources and why sexual harassment and all of these different things. You can also have that at the corporate level. Because we had it in Columbia business school, which I thought was really interesting.That's part of the training and the theory. There was other school. There's so many people that are from different backgrounds, right? You're literally bringing people from 30 countries together, different experiences. So it was kind of like a small [00:48:00] workshop with actors that were brought in to play it about how the same thing can be perceived differently.On who it's coming from, how, you know, a woman can say the exact same thing that the man did in the exact same tone, but be described as a bitch of the, you know, six foot former athlete can say the exact same thing and be perceived as aggressive and not that. And just kind of being aware and seeing it play out.To make sure that, you know, people are generally aware of that, the stereotypes and the roles that those can play in the workplace as well. Robert Wierema: Absolutely. Well, and I think too, Chris, like you have a lot of leaders that are just kinda like. Right now. And I've seen it in some of the things you read that are just kind of checking the box.Like they feel like they have to do this because it's right. For the perception of what their company looks like to the outside. I think the companies that are going to come out of this are the people that really adopt this and do it the right way. Like you're saying, because it is important and it is the right thing to do.Chris Lee: Yeah. And I truly believe you will achieve the better business outcomes as well. No doubt. Wall street journal or told, but I forget which of the consulting firms, diversity reports always meeting and going just across the board, the greater the diversity. There's a correlation there with the actual performance Michael Moore: outcome.Thank this, this conversation is developing a theme too. I mean, he, again, you go back to the historical aspect of it that this challenge, this problem is, is not just on, on main street or side street. It's not just business. It's it's education, it's access to education. I mean, it's just, it's a monumental.Set of challenges that can either solve it or make it worse. Right? [00:50:00] I mean, if, if you hadn't gotten to study abroad, if you didn't have an amazing mother that helped raise you, if you didn't have access to all this education, like your perspective, it would be totally different. Robert Wierema: And maybe your Michael Moore: perspective or reaction to.Some of the unfortunate situations you shared with us would have been different, but not everybody gets that. So kudos to you for your platform and your businesses and thinking through it like that, you know, our business leaders need to stop to Bob's point checking a box and grandstanding, and actually roll up their sleeves and do something about it.Robert Wierema: Yeah, I think Chris, like, you look at what you've done and yeah, you got all these platforms. You guys are doing this sound and you think about how that's going to just continue to spread, not only through those organizations, but to all the people you're touching. I mean, that's just, that's awesome. And, and like Michael said, I mean, kudos to you for what you're doing and going with what you believe in.And I love it. I mean, that's what I've always loved by you. The humble guy that you know, is very passionate about what he does. And, and you like drinking tequila with me. So that's always Chris Lee: a plus,Robert Wierema: well, Chris, we're kind of wrapping up on the hour and I'll let Michael always ends with the, the ending question. So I'll let Michael ask our, ending question to, to kind of wrap up Chris Lee: here. Michael Moore: We're developing a few of them now, Bob, but I think the one you're. The one you're referencing is that, you know, there's that historical saying, it's not who, you know, it's what you know, but we've kind of reversed that around to say, it's not what you know, it's who knows you.And so you think about the followers that we have on this podcast, you know, your internal and external networks, like what do you want people to know about Chris Lee? Chris Lee: I've always tried to focus on within the career or personal life is [00:52:00] we're realizing that isn't, this is more than just about the numbers.It's about what you can accomplish both with your group, whether it's friends and family or your career allows you to do for not only yourself, but other people as well, and not treating businesses as separate from friends, family, and kind of the impact that I want to make, you know, on the world. That's pretty much how I would put it because what I saw.Growing up was, you know, money as a way that if you want to travel, you need money. If you want to make an impact, you need money. And it was just wrapping my head around that to a certain extent that's true, but that money and that position, it can also let you do a whole lot of good that's beyond the money, but they're able to take my family on a trip, whether it's being able to do.I know a dinner with good friends. Well, there's about an April to actually put a social focus or greater vision on the portfolio companies and getting that impact there. And, you know, it's, like I mentioned on that interview question, if you like what you're doing, that you're passionate about it, then.That's your best shot at being successful and that's a business. So for me, that's always been the focus on what to do. What kind of culture do you want to build at work with the people around you? How do you want the support of your family and friends to kind of play into all of that? So when I'm waking up excited and happy every day, hopefully that enthusiasm can push through to the people that I'm working with.And it's, you know, keeping that in mind and not losing sight of that, that I think will continue to allow me and RTC to continue to be successful, continue to grow. And [00:54:00] at the end of the day, we can do that. Everyone's winning whether it's investors, the employees, and everyone kind of on the same team with that.And so it's not losing sight of that. Robert Wierema: That was perfect. Michael Moore: Phenomenal answer. And Robert Wierema: Chris, thank you so much for coming on. I mean, I knew we'd have a great conversation today. I love your passion and your enthusiasm and just like do love for life and you guys are traveling and you're, you're growing a business.It's just so great to see. And I can't wait to see what the future is going to continue to bring for you and your family, family, and the business. Chris Lee: Well you had, the wedding was supposed to be yesterday.Yesterday,but until next year, but. Robert Wierema: And Chris and his fiancé are gonna come join us in Mexico cause on ice. And I got, our wedding push. You'll get to meet Michael. Michael's gonna make his way down there. And and I already told you we're coming to Italy. I don't care if you invite us or not. Chris Lee: Yeah, no. Just throw out there that you've mentioned that.Was, I think it was like a lot of people kinda separate personal life and work, but I tend to involve of Haley my fiancé, my friends is in it a lot because just having that support network outside of it has been instrumental with knowing what's going on and I can reference, you know, a transaction, something that's happening is Oh, a part of it.And then being like, you know, that they'd look up for me. Like, Hey Chris, Can we get outside and grab a beer and then go back to having that kind of whole network is pretty cool as well. Awesome. Robert Wierema: Well, thank you again, Chris. We appreciate your time today. Thanks for joining us on the climb and, hopefully we'll have you back here soon and, be able to expand even more.Appreciate it. Michael Moore: Thank you so much, Chris Lee: Chris. Thank you both so much. Really appreciate it. [00:56:00] Thank you.Michael Moore: Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the climb. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider subscribing. And if you know someone who you would think would enjoy the podcast. Feel free to share this with them. Thanks again. And we'll see you on the next episode. . 

Connect with Michael and BobThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with David Crombiehttps://nineenergyservice.com/about/our-leadershiphttps://www.linkedin.com/company/nine-energy-service/[00:00:00] David Crombie: I'll never forget. I'll mention, there were some guys, I went over to some friends of mine. I said, Hey, you know, we got all these, well, I said, I'm just a nervous wreck. You know, we've got at the time, 18 cement pumps out and I laid down at night and I don't know what's going to happen. They said, well, your problem is you need to think about how much money you're making, not what's going to happen.Michael Moore: On today's episode of the climb. Bob and I are joined by my good friend, David Crombie, chief operating officer of nine energy from humble beginnings in Jacksboro, Texas to the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. He has definitely lived the climb. His wife used one word to describe him. And that was devoted.Listen to The Climb,David Crombie, welcome to The Climb. David Crombie: How are you? Thanks for having me, Michael Moore: Bob and I are super excited about this one as, as we launched this thing and we talk about crossroads in defining moments. I've gotten the tag along in your career, in the oil field services industry, and there's no better climb. And so, um, I'm going to go ahead and throw this out there.I got on the phone with Cara this morning. Cara is not only one of the most beautiful women you've ever seen in your life. She's put up with his shit since first grade they met in Jacksboro, Texas. Bob Wierema: So this is going to be, this is going to be good. I like it. But before we dive into that, Crombie just, we're all kind of scratching our heads. Right. I [00:02:00] mean, at the same time COVID was hitting. We get negative oil prices, which still I have and figured out the math on that, but I'm not very smart or just tell us in the industry, like, what's the sentiment what's going on?Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Does wall street come back around? What are we looking at? David Crombie: Well, what I would say is, from my standpoint, the way I view it as there's two problems, I mean, Oh, you know, we, we get very good at what we do and we, we have too much oil and that's, that's one problem. And then the Covid is another problem.That's separate from that. And so I think when we come out of COVID, we still have an old oil and gas problem. That's not solved. And it's to me, you know, I don't want to be negative, but I think it's a three, three year deal three to four years or something like that before it turns around. And it's just all supply and demand and that's, that's kind of where we're at, but I think there's some that can blame more on COVID.But to me, it's just a supply and demand situation. And I think that that's, that's where we're at. Michael Moore: And so really that's a, that's a global issue. I mean, until we can figure out independence. David Crombie: Yes. Michael Moore: And so having been overseas, we'll get into that Saudi Arabia. I mean, give us, uh, your, your global perspective on that too.David Crombie: Well, I mean, I think those guys, their economy depends solely on that. And they're going to, they're going to do whatever they can to make that be in their favor. The United States has gotten so good at what they do in the, in these shell plays that I think that basically, you know, is not what they counted on.And so I think they're doing things to make it back in their favor, every chance they get. So until it, there just has to be a correction in general, in the whole one gas industry, until there is it's going to stay the way it is. Michael Moore: And so when you think about Saudi Arabia, you think about Russia, you think about Venezuela, and then you think about the United States.Like I'm not going to say when, but how do we, how do we change the game a little bit? [00:04:00] Because we seem to repeat. This supply demand problem on a, not necessarily every five years. Like you can't plug it like that, but it's, it's a cycle that we seem to not always be able to figure out. David Crombie: Yeah. But what I would say now is you, is the shell plays have changed that again to where.Now it's a matter of turning on the tap or turn it off. So until, you know, I don't think Saudi Arabia is necessarily going to run out of oil anytime soon or Russia, but I don't think that Saudi Arabia has what they. Claim they have anymore. And I think that, uh, as soon as it starts to turn around a little bit, we're going to get, we're going to get right back after to start adding rigs.And then, you know, here you go, the problem starts to come in the next few years and it's just a matter, but if supply demand comes back and we can, we can balance that better, which I believe there's a happy medium. Michael Moore: So as, as COO of nine energy vertically integrated oil field services company, what divisions have surprised you in the way that they've done in all of this and what divisions are suffering because of this?David Crombie: Well, surprisingly my old company that, you know, mine and Cody and Cole's old company, uh, depends on drilling a hundred percent and it has, it has survived probably the best of any of them right now. Uh, and that's very surprising to me, but we also are in a class there that we're competing with the Halliburton's of the world and people like that.So I think that. While it's surprising. I think that as, as what, we've lost a lot of competitors that were not very good. And when it comes back, we're going to be in a better shape, but there's really nothing. There's no rhyme or reason as to what's going on from my competitive landscape, because it's just, you don't know who's going to the next private equity is going to put money in this company and that company is supposed to go broke.And then all of a sudden they have another. They get another laugh [00:06:00] line and here where they go and eat an anticipate they were going to be in the competitive landscape anymore. And so it's just not what you expected. So it's basically, it's, it's very hard to figure out, I would say private equity. Keeps pumping money in different different service lines.But at the same time, there's gotta be an end to that at some point where there's a moment where they just quit doing that. Michael Moore: You Bob Wierema: mentioned private equity. I know there's been a lot of involvement in the industry there lately. How is that? How do you think that's affected the industry in general? David Crombie: In some cases, I don't think it's good because there's companies that.The reality is they need to go away and you find a private equity. There's a lot of private equity money out there. Right. And so they find something like that. And then they start thinking that they're going to do better than the last guy that, that had it. And it just kind of kicks the can down the road.And I think that's bad for the industry in some ways, but at the same time, I think there's going to be a point where they just go away. I mean, there's just no, after two or three times of that, it's got to go away and then things will be better. Michael Moore: Well, there were better part of a century where oil and gas did just fine without Providence.Right. So, you know, I agree David Crombie: with you. Yeah. And to give you an idea, whenever we, whenever we started crest pumping in South Texas, which is another story, you know, it, there were 13 semen and company down there and probably. 10 of those backed by private equity. And I think there's three of us left in for the whole landscape banner.That's it? So it's pretty strange deal, but there's, there's always money out there. It seems like to get the next thing going. And, but right now, you know, I'm not sure if they keep doing it or just stop at some point and say, Hey, you know, we're not going to lose money anymore. So, Michael Moore: well, it's, it's kinda like a good analogy.Somebody told me the other day, it's like, you know, when you're playing sports in middle school or high school, like everybody thinks I can play major league baseball, but then reality hits. And you're like, you know what? I stopped growing at [00:08:00] five, nine. My fast ball won't go any faster than 87. I'm not going into the big leagues.Private equity lets you keep. Believing that dream, right? Yes, sir. Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned Cody and Cole. Yes, sir. The  family. That's a, that's where we met. I can remember the day I pulled up to the. Or tech shop in Gainesville. Bob Gainesville is a town up in cook County, right? Basically on the border of Oklahoma, you can see the red river and, uh, I see Cody standing there who I've known very well.And this, Bob Wierema: and I got, I got to imagine you're in like a real nice sport coat too. I'm just putting the whole picture together. Michael Moore: You know, I made that mistake. David Crombie: It's been a mistake Michael Moore: and almost got my ass whipped at the pub for dressing like that. Um, so no, I, uh, I think, Oh, his jeans, boots, you know, golf shirt, dress, dress like these guys.And, um, and I see this just monster of a guy standing next to Cody, which you can see. I mean, Dave is not a small man. And, uh, and I'm like, God damn, who the hell is that guy? And just this intimidating person, you should go shake his hand in your hand, just get swallowed. And he said, well, I'm David Crombie.And, uh, we're starting to submit business and I hear you're the guy I need to talk to. And that just launched, uh, not only now I was talking to care about this this morning. It's, it's rare in life when. You start out business and then friendship overtakes it, but business just gets to keep on occurring.And so I really do appreciate that about you, but that was day one, but walk us back cause this, this gets real interesting. You, you get out of high school in Jacksboro. That I think there was a little bit of a, of a college. [00:10:00] David Crombie: Yeah. Not much to speak of, Michael Moore: not much. You were learning. And then you was the first job Halliburton.David Crombie: Yes. So I guess, I think probably 1990. Four and a 93 somewhere in there, you know, I was going to a Tarleton state and the Stevenville, and it was not a very good situation because I just wasn't built for school. It didn't seem like then. Uh, so I, I basically, I remember I didn't even go take my finals. I said, you know the hell with this, um, this is not for me.And I left. And at that time, you got to remember, my, my dad had worked for Halliburton for probably at that time 20 years or 25, whatever the timing was, my father in law had to. And, uh, so I went and yeah, I thought, hell, I'll just go to work for Halliburton and see what happens. And so. I went and I applied for a job in Jacksboro where I was from, and I said, ah, you can't work with your dad, so you have to go to Abilene.So I said, all right, well, I'd never been to Abilene as crazy as that sounds. I've never been Abilene in my life at that point, I'll take the job. And, and at that time, uh, wow. I moved out there and went to work and that was in, in, I guess it was 94. So I just went to work, driving a bulk truck and. Didn't know anything about the oil and gas industry, nothing other than I needed to make money, you know, and I needed a job and I needed a career.So when I did that things, you know, at that time, you gotta understand there was not the shell plays. And there was basically, unfortunately that the gas place I took had passed away. He that's how unlikely it was to get a job at Halliburton in that, in that specific timeframe. So. I went to work and it just so happened is about the time I probably about a year after I went to work product, call it six months, things started to pick up and so I was able to move up.And at that time you had guys driving a bulk truck. I've seen that pump truck for 20 years. And here [00:12:00] I am 21 years old, you know, and it just so happened. And I had some guys mentors along the way. And in Halliburton that you know, that we took a lock on each other and they helped me out. And, and I was able to move up somewhat decently quick and I was kind of willing to go anywhere.Cause at the time I was single. And so I did that and I worked in the Permian basin a lot, you know, anywhere from Abilene to Hobbs, to down to Sonora, to, you know, almost Oklahoma. So then it took a turn and I went, I decided to go back to Jacksboro and I went there. Probably about a year and then Halliburton, I think said, Hey, we want you to come duck, duck in Oklahoma.So I went up there for probably another year or so, and, and I mean, this wasn't my favorite place to be. And so I said, look, I'm going to go back to Texas. And I, you know, whether it be with Halliburton or not, didn't know what I was going to do, if that they said no. So I went back and got back on an Abilene.Well, that was about in 97, I guess. Well things, if I don't know, if you look back, I think it was in 98, things went bad again on the oil field. So I decided at that time, Kara and I were about to get married and we, as most people know, we had a child on the way already and we decided we won't live back in Jacksboro.And so I took a job in Saudi Arabia of all places and, uh, So, Michael Moore: Hey honey. Oh yeah. But I'm going to go look at some saying, David Crombie: yeah. So I went over there and that was quite the experience, you know, and I'd always wanted to do it, but it wasn't a good situation. I actually stayed over there two and a half years.And it wasn't a very good situation as we got married and, and, you know, I was missing everything at home and I was 35 and they tell you it's 35 and 35 when he signed up for it. But by the time you get back, it's 39 and 31. So it's just a long time, you know? And so. Albeit very good experience. I did that about two and a half years and I was just done and no [00:14:00] education, no nothing.So it was basically all, uh, all I knew at that time. And so at that point probably was around 1999 and I said, Hey, I want to try it. And so my, my dad had worked off shore. And the Gulf coast. And he said, Hey, I think I can get you to help get you on down here. So he did. And I went down there and I think I went down there for training.And this, by this time you got, you know, things were still bad if, unless you were in the Gulf coast or over the middle East or somewhere international. And, uh, along that time, I was out at the Jacksborough country club of all places and a mutual, a friend of mine. And Ronnie  said, Hey, I know this guy wanting to put a cement yard in Jacksboro, Texas.And I'm like, You know about by this time I'm ready to do anything and I'd been looking and I just didn't ever find anything. And so I called him and I guess that was in probably January of 20 and he snap hell, I'm busy, but. I'll come over Saturday and visit with you. And I'm thinking all well, this, you know, this doesn't sound very formal, but I'll give him so, so he and Cody come over on Saturday and Cody had just graduated ACU and, uh, we sat down and had a glass of tea and visited and, and, uh, and, and there's a lot of funny stories, this, and, and Rania tell this.Oh me all day long, but I said, you know, he, he, we made a deal so to speak and he, but we, there was nothing, you know, I mean, we're, we're going to start this company. And I mean, when you're 25 years old and you don't, you know, it's just, there's not much I knew about doing that. And so, and, but Halliburton had shut down.So I knew there was kind of a void there to some, some point, you know, but so I said, all right, we make a deal. Well, We shake hands and we leave and I'll never forget. I asked Ronnie, I said, so what, what days off do we get around here? And he said, well, we don't have them. And I thought, well, that's interesting.I said, what? Okay, I'll go ahead. You [00:16:00] know, so anyway, I went over there and I went to, I went to work for, with him and Cody and, and at that time, Cole was still in high school and. And, you know, I get over there and you got so, so my dad, my father-in-law and myself, it was Halliburton career. And that's all you knew.And you grew up in a town where that was the employer. So people didn't really want to leave that security, although it's brought out the security, you thought it was so, so I told him, I said, well, we got a deal. So I. But I never quit my job. So I go over there and, uh, I just got cold feet and I called him.I said, look, I'm to try to back out of this deal. I made with you. I said, I'm going to go back to work at Halliburton. Cause I did. It just doesn't feel right. You know? And so the more I thought about it, you know, it was an interesting thing cause he had, he had, I don't know that he had approached anybody else, but he had talked to some other people about doing this and I had that on my mind too.And so. I went down to Louisiana and I'll never forget, I wasn't home on. They said, you, you have to go on this job or not. And, uh, so they, they dispatch me down to a flu shot, which is a port down there where, you know, everybody flies in and out of, and they said, Hey, no helicopters, you gotta ride a boat. I said, all right, well, in the Persian Gulf, I'd written a boat all the time about it, but there's a lot of difference.She knows 115 foot and you can see the rig from the land over there and all this. Well, this is for 45 minutes. They said, So I get on this boat and this turns into a four hour boat ride and I'm talking, I thought the boat was going to break in half God. If I ever get me out of here, I'm quitting this thing and I I'm done.I don't care. What Michael Moore: size, where the swells you think, Oh, David Crombie: I have no ideas, but. You know, it was so big that it turned into a four hour boat ride and we get after the rig and he said, you got one shot. And I sweet. He said, they're gonna lower that personnel basket. If you can't get on it, we're going back to shore.And I thought, there's no way I can take this boat right against the wall. [00:18:00] I don't want this person, no baskets. You know, so I did and I got up there and I finally got my, you know, my balance, my legs back, Michael Moore: bigger personnel. Now David Crombie: you've rattled outside. So she's like hanging out with her rope. You know, it's not a big deal, but yeah.So anyway, I did that and I thought, you know, I'm done. And, uh, and it was just the, it was the biggest, it was the biggest turning point in my life probably cause it was like, you know, you got to go do this because this, this isn't for you. And so the next morning they said, Hey, the job can't, we didn't even do a job.It canceled. And I said, we're going to send you in a helicopter and I'll never forget. I got no pickup. And uh, I called Ronnie and I said, Hey, you bet, deal's still on. I'm on my way back. And this was hell I don't know if it was noon or whatever during the day. And I literally drove from food Shaun and I was on a frack job with Cody.I think, I don't know if Cole, I don't remember if he was there at not the next morning and that's where it all began. And, and, and, you know, it was just, it was the craziest thing because had that not happened, I'd have probably still been at Halliburton, you know? Michael Moore: So a couple of, couple of questions on that real quick one.Had had Kenzie been born. So when you're on a damn barge, it's about to break in half. You got terrible waves as high as you can see. I mean, is it that you're living for a new purpose? It is point right. There you go. Yeah. And, uh, in talking to, to sweet care this morning, I said, Hey, give me, give me one word.You know, you've known this guy since first grade, you've been married for what? 22 David Crombie: years. Tomorrow. Michael Moore: Tomorrow. Yeah, there we go. David Crombie: Happy anniversary. Congrats. Michael Moore: I, they give me one word that describes your husband. And she said devoted and you know, I think that's, that's the absolute perfect example right there when you're looking, you know, life right in the face.And you said to hell with this I'm going with the . Another thing she told me was [00:20:00] when you told Ronnie, Hey, I'm going back to Halliburton he's he said to himself and probably to Cody to he'll be back. Oh yeah. I think he knew. So how did the Fortescue family know you? Did they heard about you in Jacksboro?How did that meeting even come together? David Crombie: Phone call. That's it. Wow. Yeah. Pretty strange deal. Really? Yeah. The one phone call, I just, you know, I was wanting to do something so bad and I had a little bit of, you know, the deal was, is as I moved on at Halliburton, I was. You know, I was making good money and I realized that I was close enough to some people I knew that had been there 20 years.And I was like, you know, hell what, what do you have to look forward to if you're that close to these guys? And they've already been there this long. And I thought, you know, worst comes to worse. Maybe they'll hire me back, you know, is what my thought process was Michael Moore: or other, you know, I mean, some of their peers or competitors or whatever, big other publicly traded companies.So, so you decided to. To branch out with your task, your family. And this was 19 David Crombie: is 2000, Michael Moore: 2000. David Crombie: February of 2000. Michael Moore: Yeah. And so job number one was what. David Crombie: Oh, gosh. Oh, I had a friend, uh, that I had worked with at Halliburton and he had Halliburton had closed. And so he had gone to work as handling some, uh, the drilling for a man named Hunter in his, so he's.Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, so he said, Hey out, you know, I'm going to let you do our work, you know? Alright, well that sounds we need it. So, so he did, he gave us the work and I never heard a Hunter in my life, you know, and, and he, at that time, there was not a lot going on and, and you got understand, this was the Barnett shale was coming, but we didn't have a clue what was coming for real.And at that time, uh, you think about the BJ's. The Halliburtons and the Lumberjacks of the world, they were it. And nobody in our area at least had ever done what Ronnie was wanting to do. And [00:22:00] so you're skeptical of that and everybody around you skeptical. So it doesn't give you much confidence to do this, but, you know, finally I've been put in situations risk.Got it. Sink or swim has got to work. And so he started, you know, Hunter. He gave us work on, I believe he had four rigs around. And then at that time that doesn't sound like much, but when there's two people doing it, it's a lot of work. So we literally, I mean, I would drive that truck out there and do the job and, and, uh, and go, you know, do what I do, everything associated with it, you know?And. And, uh, I remember I told her rusty Lawrence, which his, but recently passed away and his Memorial is tomorrow. He, uh, I said, you know what? I said, well, you call that office and tell him that you're not getting any, given us any more work. If I don't get some help, he said, yeah, I'll do that. And he did.And, and, and I'll never forget, Ron. He said, Hey, look, we need to hire a couple people. Cause we need to be able do that work over. And I said, well, that's fine. So I hired some people. And so from that point on, yeah, it was kind of where that started. And then we started to pick up more work and then we started to do more and more, and we didn't get big by any means right there at that point.But. It really, we really started to realize it was gonna be, you know, and then if you fast forward a little bit, yeah. That here comes here, comes the Barnett shale. And you know, after that it was really exploded for sure. So. Bob Wierema: When you made that change, I mean, you, you mentioned, you know, there was these three main people doing this.What made you go? I believe in this group, I believe in his, you said his name variety, right? Like this is who I want to go with, but what made you believe that David Crombie: was it? Well, I don't guess I really knew. You know, more of a leap of faith than anything. And I think, you know, there were some things that I wasn't sure about, you know, obviously, and I think there were some things that I thought, you know, surely we can figure out something and to be honest, I never, I thought, man, I can, I can get this going back to where I could kind of make a living like I was overseas and I can stay at home and, [00:24:00] and everything will be good.And then, you know, lo and behold here comes 200 and. So I'm rigs in the barn at shell Rivard of yours. And that landscape certainly changed. So I think in the beginning to answer your question, it was just a leap of faith and I hate the way we hit it off. I mean, you know, I mean, it's been, you know, ever since I'm in a good relationship, Michael Moore: so Bob, because you hadn't met him, Ronnie is especially back in the day is every bit as big as David and Evan.Every and probably way more intimidating back then. I mean, he's, he's like the John Wayne of the Barnett shell, but just like David Crombie: just salt of the earth though. Michael Moore: Unbelievable human being. So I could get that. It was probably a gut feel, a handshake, like this is a good family. Yeah. You know, Cody is didn't you mean the Apple didn't fall far from the tree, just as sharp as a whip, you know, just a serial entrepreneur mind works a million miles an hour.Like I could see you seeing that immediately, but after like two weeks, I mean, were you thinking like, what did I do? Oh, they really, there isn't a day David Crombie: off.Michael Moore: I mean, they, they, they do not. Like their day, Bob, to get together as a family, not to break bread and watch the kids play in the pool is Saturday. They all go to the office to talk about the week. I mean, there really are besides church on Sunday. There is no time off. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a work ethic that we need more of quite, quite frankly.David Crombie: Yeah, it was, uh, it was certainly, you know, but I think a lot of people wouldn't, I, I will say, I don't think people would probably not many people would would've lasted with them. Yeah. I just, you know, I don't, I don't believe that. So, Michael Moore: but, you know, but they also, [00:26:00] they could also run people off too. Right. I mean, saw, saw David Crombie: something.Michael Moore: No, no, no, but they, they saw something in you, which is we, yeah. You know, when you, when you start working with the Fortescue family and, and they don't run you off, you become David Crombie: part of the family. Right. That's right. Michael Moore: I mean, you would like, Rodney's a, a father figure kind of guy, right? David Crombie: Oh yeah, no doubt. You know, he was very instrumental and a mentor to me in many, many ways.Uh, And just on a personal level too. I mean, there's nothing, nothing better, nothing bad. I can say about anything about the family at all. I mean, it's been a wonderful experience for me. Michael Moore: See Bob. That's how this shit works in Texas, man. It's a handshake. You can join a family, pick up a dad and a couple of brothers and he'd go make a bunch of money.Bob Wierema: I'd be moving. I might be moving down then. Michael Moore: Hey, all you feed Madison. State need to stay out. There's too many. I see way too many out of state license plates right now. David Crombie: Yeah. You gotta think, you know, the guy coming from Halliburton was my deal and you know, companies like that have a hundred, the resources are just unlimited.And I remember I called Ronnie or Cody one day and I said, Hey, what about this? And he's like, I don't have, I don't know, what do you mean? I said, I don't know where to get it. And he said, well, I don't either. And I'm thinking, man, All right. So whatever it was, if some chemical we needed it. And I mean, you know, I had never ran across that.And so it just gives you a different perspective on what it's like to be an entrepreneur and, and the things that they go through, it's just totally different. And so for me, it was a transition, you know, a lot of people can't make that transition. And so he really, they really helped me through that.You know, and, and I would say that as you move on, not only in the oil and gas industry, but it's a thing to where, Hey, there's, there's resources out there, but you have to go find them and they're not going to come to you. But I just remember that specifically. It's like, we're just going to find it and we're going to [00:28:00] do it.And that's a, that's a way different perspective than a lot of people have ever run across. You know, Michael Moore: I was going to say Bob Wierema: that that whole approach is something I think that, you know, joking earlier, Mike, I mean, I think it's been lost a little bit. Michael Moore: I mean, that. Bob Wierema: That work ethic that go out and make yourself, I mean, I, I definitely feel that in a lot of respects that, you know, in our society today, that's being lost.Michael Moore: You know, or if it's done with back breaking 18 hour days, it's hotter than shit. Your Dodge and rattlesnakes. I mean, it's not like inventing an app and then it goes IPOs for $200 million and you're rich as you can file. It is. Back breaking work. David Crombie: Yeah. Bob Wierema: I thought that's what we're doing with this podcast, Michael, just talking to people and we're going to sell for a couple hundred million and be done.Michael Moore: Yeah, that happens. I'll give you half David Crombie: and there we go. Michael Moore: Okay. I gotta go back to this for a second back to take care of. When, when did she get on the radar and you thought, okay, man, David Crombie: well, hell I made it. She and I went through a phase. We were good friends, you know, and I think that's one very positive thing, but I think we went back and forth to where seemed like that Tommy Neverland up, she may like me and I might like her for a little while.And then, you know, you're doing other, you know, the things when you're that age. And then, you know, as time went on, it just kind of lined up. And I think, you know, she's been a good. You know, a good partner and that's how that, you know, we've been, I can tell you that, you know, when you think about things, I couldn't do half of what I do without her.I mean, that's just, that's just what I feel. So Michael Moore: now, if you, you know, if you don't have that, that home base, like we were talking about earlier, And that, that true North, right? I mean, we talked about this on another one of our podcasts, like our wives [00:30:00] or fiancés and in Bob's case ability to just call our own bullshit, you know, and you've, you've worked.Through some deal and you run it by her and she slices it like Swiss cheese. And you're just like, how in the world do they know us well? David Crombie: Yeah. And Fox, you know, our CEO nine, she and I both joked because her, we feel you are her, her husband and my wife hear so much about nine that we feel like she can.Like, you know, one or the other could run it. She knows something happened to us because it's just, if you don't have that support, you're not going to, it's just not going to be good. Michael Moore: You know? Yeah. That's exactly right. So, okay. So things are taken off in the Barnett shale there's light at the end of the tunnel money, starting to come in, companies grow.This is, this is pump co at the time. Okay. And so then you're in charge of the cement division, you that, right? That's right. Okay. And so kind of walk us through how that all went down and then how you ultimately ended up splitting off to run. Correct. David Crombie: Okay. So the Barnett shale took off and, you know, we started out with them.One same at bump is that's how, you know, pump go got going in that timeframe there. And so as the Barnett shell grew, I believe, and I, you know, somebody listening to this might be correct me, but as time went on and we really realized where we were at and what was going on, you know, we really started putting some Siemens pumps out and we.There were, I believe there was 226 rigs running probably in the Barnett or something like that. And we service 95 of those. And we did that probably with half the people, what people were servicing 40 with and that's the market share. Yeah. And it was just an amazing thing. And I mean, I can remember. Just people getting through with jobs, not say stay right there, because I know that, you know, there's a drilling rig I'm out on the road, probably the needs, you and we'll we'll, we'll get you over there.And [00:32:00] it, so it was the craziest thing and we never dreamed we would have that market share and, and it just took off. And, and by then, you know, we had already done started, we'd already started the frack side of things and, and Cody was running that, and that was crazy. I mean, That you just can't imagine.Because at that time we had a boat plan and people that know a lot about the same at Bennettsville appreciate this, but the boat plan was in Gainesville. We were in Jacksboro and the rigs were in Fort worth, basically call it Fort worth. And so Ronnie and Cody would actually, they would work on seam or frack pumps all day long, trying to get those running.Then they'd be trying to load semen all night because we just that's just how we were doing things. And finally, we got a boat plan in Jacksboro and that, that helped things out. And so. We did that. And I think probably around, let me see 2005, I believe we became part of SCF partners out of Houston and then a call it, you know, they added a few frat crews and we kept rocking along and semen and a product called it another eight, 12 to 18 months.We, we got bought by complete production services. So. At that time, you know, we just kept moving along. And I mean, I think, and Cody went off and did you know, this, the water transfer deal and, and Ronnie Nash stayed there. And I think so as time went on by 2011 or 10 or 12, 10 or 11, we had about 14 frack crews running across the U S and so quite a big operation, you know, we see cement and overgrew, and that was one of my deals is I was a seaman guy.I mean, I understood fracking. And worked in that. And, but I just, you know, through and through, it was a cement guy. And so as time went on, I realized that there was an opportunity to do that. And they were not, they weren't interested in that cause they had their hands trying to grow the frac business and, you know, looking back that was the right thing for them at the time at the time when they wouldn't grow the same at business, I was, I was pretty pissed off.Cause I thought, you know, Hey. They're just [00:34:00] market out here we could be doing. And so I think around in 2000 thousand and 11, I know in 2011, I went down to a customer's office and uh, they said, Hey, we want to, we want you to go to semen and South Texas and Asha. Alright. So I left there and I went back and I, you know, we had the president of complete, I talked to him about and he said, we're not interested.Michael Moore: Why not? David Crombie: That was my question. I think he said, we're not. And I said, you know, I told Ronnie, I said, well, I'm interested in it. And, uh, So along about June of 2011, you know, we kind of had already figured out that we were going to, you know, Cody and Cole and I were going to go on the same, any business. And, and so I told, you know, Funko or we're, um, I'm going to leave, you know, and so, but I didn't leave till the following February, she got her member, he said, you know, we're not interested going South Texas.So, and I mean, the numbers were big and this was the place to be. And so about the time we got up. Several million dollars of equipment down there. I understood why he didn't want to go to South Texas. Cause it was a, it was a hard, same at market and it was just, it was just not something that everybody could do.And I mean, this, I was actually scared and I got in there cause it was just not what actually. Right. So, so anyway, we started crashed and gone down there and put it in the yard in Pleasanton and we're starting to work and we had the art in Jacksboro. And in the end, about two months into it, you know, these, these jobs down there are very.Very very technical. And so I told Cody, I said, we got it, we got it. This is a real deal. We got to hire an engineering. And in lab, you know, we have lab techs and all this kind of stuff. So we did, and we were very successful there, but it was a big surprise to me because I'd been working with Lauren at show and was a different market.And it was just a total new ball game. But what it did do is make us better. And so from there, I mean, so 2012, [00:36:00] I think February one, We started Chris and you were there. We added stuff daily. Oh God, you remember this? Michael Moore: The spreadsheet was, I think it blew up on my laptop 19 times. David Crombie: Yeah. And so every morning when you got up, I mean, I don't think that the, a general person could understand what's going on there.I mean, it's, you know, it's. We went from, well, we had 40 employees when we started, we went from that to probably 329, I believe in 29 months kid. Michael Moore: Yeah. David Crombie: Wow. And it was rocking and rolling then. So, you know, in my mind I knew that we had a, we had a certain timeframe to get this done and we intended to sell the company.But we didn't intend to set it and dump it. I mean, that was never my intention. I wanted it to be a good company as it is today. And so we did, but we, we put out a same at pump every month for free 20 something months. I mean, it was just insane. And so it was, there was a lot going on, but we had a lot of good people and you gotta understand.I mean, I have people that I went to the first grade with also that work with me and so a great team, everybody devoted and here we went and that's how we did it. Michael Moore: Bob, you know how with our, with our clients, especially during the onboarding process, we'll set up like open items calls, and they might, depending on the complexity of the risk and they might be once a week or once a month, we were on the phone like four times a day.David Crombie: Yeah. Michael Moore: Just making sure, making sure that no balls had been dropped. It was on David Crombie: believable. Yeah. You were adding stuff every day. I mean, it was crazy. So Bob Wierema: during that, I mean, rapid growth in that time, what were some of your biggest challenges you ran across in managing that growth? David Crombie: You know, for me, I was focused and I mean, that was, you had it to do.I mean, that's, that's the way I felt about it. And some of the biggest challenges always are [00:38:00] people. Uh, but we had that kind of figured out because I started with a team of people that we'd been together for quite a while. And they, they wanted to do the same thing. And so I think as time went on, you know, as you grew and you grew out of those people and you start to get different people along the way, I mean, we have some people who have joined that team that are, you know, still what's today in phenomenal people that I know that I want to continue to have on my team, but I think it was more of a people and just getting things, equipment and getting things built and getting the work.I mean, Doc in South Texas. And I keep talking about that, but one of the things that hurt us there was there's a lot of companies that went there and they said, we're going to do this, this and this. And then they did this and they were gone and they didn't do it. And we really went down there, said, Hey, we're going to do this and this.And we're going to have this many trucks and we did it. And so it took a while for people to the customer to say, Hey, these guys are for real, and they're already going to do what they say, Michael Moore: but you know, you go look at these yards. And I remember going down to, to pleasant and just South of San Antonio, uh, Kind of when you'd said, Hey, you need to come check this out.Andyeah. I mean, you know, everybody talks about the border being a Laredo, but it's really San Antonio. I mean, all billboards go to Spanish, all your radio stations go Spanish. It's, it's, it's a different world and what blew me away. And I want you to talk about this. Cause I think it's, it's something that doesn't get.Talked about enough in the oil field service space was not just the infrastructure. Cause that was impressive. But when you go in to the lab, I mean, there, there is a lot of science around the makeup and the complexity and the purity of summit. Right. So I'll walk into this lab and I mean, it's like, Yeah, David Crombie: you look like, Michael Moore: I mean, they're all [00:40:00] in lab coats, but they all look like they could either be working for you or, you know, working for the cartel.Yeah. I mean, it was just this mind blowing, like, Oh my God. And they're walking around with beakers and I mean, yeah. And I'm going, what in the heck? I thought we were just making some cement down here. So talk about that. David Crombie: That was, was about like, you're probably because I've been the same any business, but I'd never, I'd never, I just knew we, you know, Halliburton had a lab and they just sent a sheet of paper and said, here's what's going on.And so we get this lab in a box and I tell this, we hired this lab tech. Who's been still this day, but he, he comes to work from Halliburton too. And I said, here's our lab. And he's locked. Okay. I said, you know, it's, we're out in a trailer. I said, we'll put it together. He said, well, I don't know how to put it together.So lo and behold, he started, he's sleeping up there and he gets again. Then, you know, he gets it all together. And that, that was before. And then we got the yard bill in the lab. You saw, you know, it, it was just, if you think about the complexity of it, you go down to South Texas and you're call it 350 degrees down hole.And so you, you have. Have that. And so we were fortunate. We hired the guys that, that really knew that area and knew a lot about it. And they knew how to set that up. And now the joke is it's almost like we go set up a new lab in the yard. It's like opening a new McDonald's or something. I just know what they do and they go do it.And that's, that's how they, you know, how we. How we move in, you know, but it is just, it's a very complex thing. And it's something that you have to have that if you don't, you're not, you're not going to make it. I mean, it's that simple. Bob Wierema: Was that not being in the world that you guys live in there? You know, is that what you were saying earlier?The difference between where you were doing it and then going down to South Texas, is that it it's just more challenging, more engineering David Crombie: to it. Technical. I mean, you got to have, I mean, not to say you don't, you [00:42:00] do lab tests and other areas, but it's just not as critical to where I may not. I'll never forget up.I'll mention something. There were some guys, I went over friends of mine. I said, Hey, you know, we got all these, well, I said, I'm just a nervous wreck, you know? We've got at the time 18 c-MET pumps out and are laid down at night and I don't know what's going to happen. And they said, well, your problem is, is you need lay down at night.Think about how much money you're making, not what's going to happen. Good perspective.Michael Moore: Bob when, when things were really humming, I mean, I'm talking like growth that you just can't, you can't even really wrap your arms around how fast this thing was growing. And, you know, we weren't having three or four calls a day. It had stabilized a little bit, at least on my end. And, and I called, called David up and I said, Hey, you know, it's been two weeks since we talked, how you doing?Yeah. You know, man, I'm pretty stressed out. I said, I can hear it in your voice. I mean, tell me what's going on. He said, my ears David Crombie: were ringing. I mean, Michael Moore: have been real that you can't live 40 plus years on this planet and not have some really stressed out moments. I'm not. So sure though that my ears have actually ever wronged.I mean, talk about managing that stress. David Crombie: Well, I mean, for me, summary, I handle stress pretty good. Now, you know, certain people might be listening. It would just kind of, I mean, what I would say is I handle it well, but I don't stop thinking, you know? I mean, it's like, Bad problem, you know, it just racing. So, but at the same time, I think that's what helped you handle stress because you're kind of prepared for what's going to happen, you know, in my opinion.But to me that I just knew that we had to get that to a certain point. And I did, I felt like there was a time limit [00:44:00] to work. I I'm not saying I could predict the oil fields going, you know, the oil and gas industry was going to go South. Like it did in 15 to some degree, not like it did now, but I just knew that we had to get ourselves to a finish line and get our company with someone.They also had a different financial structure the most, not to say there was going to be problems, but it just was going to be a better situation. And. There are sometimes in these companies that, and Cody would tell you this and I Ronnie and co, but every time you get to there, you run out of running room.You know, you run out of there's a certain time you get there where you gotta do something different. And that doesn't mean. Anything negative, but if you're going to take it to the next level, we either got to, it's a whole new arena and things change, or, or you need to sell the company and, and get with somebody who, you know, I've learned through the years.Is there certain people that can start coming as certainly with their private equity buy and there's people that can take them public there's, you know, all those things that go with it. And I think we were just at that point to where we needed to do that and it got that way and yeah, managing that stress is terrible.I mean, you know, I, I don't know. But it's is something that I always felt like it was temporary. It would get you to the next spot. And then it's. Okay. Michael Moore: So, you know, for our listeners, I mean, again, managing stress is a big part of either success or failure. What did you do to manage it? I mean, was it. Was it working out spirituality?Was it, David Crombie: I mean, I religiously work out and I mean, I think that's because, you know, at that time I was hooked up with some trainer and I mean, you're working, you're trying not to die and your workout, you know, so you forget about it, you know? So that gets it off your mind. But, you know, I mean, I think once I'm home, I kind of, I will leave it at the office, so to speak for the most part.And, you know, as you're well aware, you know, during that time Cody and I talk. 300 times a day. Uh, you know, he, you know, or whoever it might be, I talked to my wife a lot, but I think [00:46:00] once you let somebody, if you just get that off your chest and somebody else is listening to that, and you have a different perspective, it helps, but you know, there's, there's, at some point, some stress is just going to be there.You know, it's just, that's just the way it is for everyone. Bob Wierema: When, when you made that decision of Michael Moore: it's time for us Bob Wierema: to go to that next level, like. I feel like there's a lot of times that people may have too much pride to do that. They say, Hey, we started this. We grew it to here. We can keep going. What made you say, say, you know what, I'm going to, that's some of that pride aside, I'm going to go do this.I mean, was that at all in your David Crombie: mind? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, there are several things there, you know, one of them financially, it's, it's a good thing to do. And the next thing is, I mean, you know, a lot of people you see, and this is something that I've seen in the oil field and I've been, I've experienced.It is, is you, you see these guys that start companies and they sell them and they just kind of start flagging off. And that's just never been, you know, I learned that from the word task. I mean, you know, let's stay hooked here and let's, let's make, you know, this is the next deal, you know? And so my deal was is I just wanted to get it somewhere where I could continue to do it, but that burden of, you know, the financial burden we had was not the same.It's still there. You need, you still need to perform, but if you could do that and then, you know, I mean, and that's, that's what led us in the nine and that's, that's, uh, that's how that worked, you know? Michael Moore: No, I like that. I mean, you know, back to the role of private equity and, and the role of, and I want to hear don't, let me forget.I want to hear what it felt like to stand up there and watch the bill be wrong. Cause that, I mean, not many people get to experience that, but in today's environment now, With wall street, kind of turning their back private equity, scratching their head going we've we dumped a bunch of money into this.Where's it going if David Crombie today? Is talking to David Crombie. That was [00:48:00] saying, okay, I don't want to be on this boat anymore. I want to go work for the, or task is I want to do it. The, the entrepreneurial family, grassroots money out, you know, the private equity is what's in your wallet. What would you tell somebody today?That's contemplating David Crombie: getting in. Oh, right now, you know, it's tough. And I think it's changed. Yeah, I think it depend on what business they were getting, obviously. Uh, but I do think that, you know, somebody, people, you know, the oil field for instance, Oh, it's easy. You can go make quick money. Well, you just can't throw a bunch of stuff together and expect it to be worth anything.I mean, and I think there's a misconception of that sometimes. And so what I would say is, I mean, if you're planning to do that, you need to have your homework done and be really good at what you do because you see so many people with private equity. They're not, they, you know, they convinced some private equity group.I I'm good at this. Well then, I mean, there's not. And every different service line. There's not what a handful of good companies out there. And, and if you're one of those, how do you get after it? But if you're, if you're not that kind of operator, I would say that I would probably stay on the sidelines. So that would be my thoughts.I mean, I don't, but there's always somebody there and you know, if you're. What I would call, if you continue to stay in the oil field, there's always somebody there that has that. And they're nagging at you and that's who can bring good companies down. If you're not careful, you know, cause they're lower price and there are no quality in it, but you have to match that price a lot of times, you know?So it's not a good situation sometimes. Michael Moore: No, I think, I mean, that's, yeah, that's just a lot to contemplate because there is this, this notion, right? I mean, there's been so many books written about it and, and, and, you know, movies made that, you know, if you're willing to take on a bunch of risks, you can make a bunch of money and all the gas business, and, you know, for every.Crest, right. There's 109. Yeah. You know, David Crombie: cause it's not easy. No, at all. All Michael Moore: right. So you replaced the ringing in your [00:50:00] ears with the ringing of the bell in New York. Talk about that and how it, David Crombie: well, I mean, if you back up, I think, I think it's, so when we, we did the deal with nine, we had. Several companies. I mean, at that time, things were good.I mean, yeah. We could have done a lot different things. And, and so for me, I mean, with support of the task is, I mean, it, it kind of felt like home to me to do that with them. Uh, and I liked what they were doing there. And so, you know, if you, if you go through all that, you know, I met Anne Fox and, uh, you know, you meet certain people and, and my deal was like, I don't know, Oh, this is going to work out.Cause you know, in my experience you go from one, you have your own company, you're going to work for somebody, you know, you go back and forth and all that kind of stuff. And she, she and I already hit it off and I don't want to say that it was just perfectly in the beginning, but because I didn't know.And I think she didn't know. And so. At, by that, by the time we had had gone to New York and were able to go public, I was able to be involved in some of other service bonds, which, and, and that really helped, you know, understand more about nine and what we're trying to do. But along the way, I mean, there was times we were going to do that.And then we withdrew that and cause a market was bad. And, and when we did that, that was pretty, it was pretty neat. I mean, you know, I mean, you think about. I would have never dreamed that I'd be up there doing that, you know, in a million years, I never would've thought of it, you know, and there would even cross my mind.I mean, if you'd asked me when I was 21, you're going to ring the bell at the New York Starks. And I was like, hell, I don't even know what that is. I mean, so I mean to, to go do that squat, the experience and, you know, and. And it's probably something that, you know, at the time there's, I think there's 2,800 companies on the stock exchange.And so, yeah, I mean, I can't say enough. It was, it was pretty unique and a really neat, so pretty, pretty cool deal. Michael Moore: Yeah, we talked about this earlier and Bob and I spent a lot of time just thinking about this. Like, [00:52:00] you know, whether it's COVID-19 or just, you know, the time for the next thing, you've got a moment in time, that's creating an old economy and a new economy.And so you think about New York stock exchange. I mean, it was this week that. Salesforce is replacing Exxon, like talk to me about David Crombie: that. Well, I mean, I think that it's just, you know, I'm no, I'm no stock market expert, but I just think we're in different times. That will we we've never seen any. We won't see again.And I think that the, that the world is changing, but I also think the world goes back to normal to some degree more than, uh, I think, you know, commercial real estate probably changes a little bit, but we're probably going to still be interacting in the oil and gas like we always have. But I, you know, I think when you think about Exxon or some of these people, their world changing too.And I think though they're going to be a reset. Button hit, you know, in a moment where they figure it back out. And I mean, I have no doubt and ex autumn and my gosh, it's Exxon. So, so some of these other companies, I think they they've also benefited, you know, I mean, you know, you'd think about Amazon or some of these guys.I mean, my gosh, the sky's the limit with everybody getting everything delivered at home and all that kind of stuff. So it's just changed the whole landscape of the world in my opinion. But I do think there's a normalcy that we come back to because this is not the end of the world. Michael Moore: Yeah. I mean the, the entrepreneurial spirit is not going away.We, we live and die by it David Crombie: for sure, but it is very, very uncertain times and very hard times. Oh, as you, Bob Wierema: you know, talking even about some of the times now, how have you dealt? You know, it's been interesting talking to some of our people. Have you dealt with kind of the time for going through and Michael Moore: you know, not only Bob Wierema: with your, your company, but you know, family and all that stuff as David Crombie: well?Well, with a company, we know our office has been closed since our corporate offices, since March the field off the field offices, we've had to continue on just. Pretty much like normal and monitor and [00:54:00] test over it closely. But what it's done is it made you realize how to do we need all this real estate.And if, if we, you know, what we do need the, you know, things are probably different and you structure things different to where, you know, do you need this many offices versus this many, and can you save as much money? And I think that that's a big deal for us not. So I think that's one thing that does change there and that's, and for us, I mean, we've operated fine.I mean, we've not. Seeing anything, Oh my gosh, this, this is not working cause we can't go to the office. I mean, so I think in my opinion, when it comes back, I think maybe offices are reconfigured. We have more meeting rooms and you go to a meeting w the face to face, play stuff over with, and everybody goes on about their business, you know, in our industry, because this is not.We don't punch the time clock and sit there from eight to five anyway, to start with. So it's really not mandatory that we sit in office, you know, so, but from a family perspective, you know, we're fortunate we have a place out in the country and I'm not sure that they know. How things are, you know, the city versus the country or what is way different.And so we've been spending all our time out there and at the Lake. And so it's, it's been actually, it's been a good reset for me. And I've had a pretty good time since, since March. So I enjoyed it. I've never had, I don't want to call it time off. Cause you know, you're on the phone all the time, but it's been a nice change for a Bob Wierema: while.Yeah. It's been, it's been interesting to hear how people are, you know, Michael Moore: At home, Bob Wierema: spending more time with their kids and Michael Moore: their families and, and Bob Wierema: seeing that they can still get things done. And it's, it's strengthened in some relationships, which I think is David Crombie: great. Michael Moore: Yeah. Bob Wierema: Yeah. We, we, we, I was telling, uh, Dell, Michael, we got a new dog and.I mean now I'm just finding ways to escape and go back to the office. My honey, I gotta go. I just, I don't know what's going on and we got, I gotta be in the office. She's like, I thought David Crombie: you guys are close. Yeah,Michael Moore: no, [00:56:00] because she's listening. Y'all been open for a while up there in Chicago. Haven't you Bob? David Crombie: No.Bob Wierema: And we're, you know, listen to you, you saying we're in it, you're in it. We're in the country place and I'm, I'm sitting in a little, two bedroom condo here in Chicago. You know, they're not a lot of room to get away in there. Michael Moore: So going back to, um, you know, your rock, right? Yep. Cara you anniversary tomorrow.One of the things that she said this morning when I was picking her brain, was that you're the only guy that ever told her. No. David Crombie: Yeah.Michael Moore: Which I find pretty astounding because you know, not that Jacksboro, isn't an amazing place to grow up and be, but I'm not. Thinking that there were just 200 carrots, David Crombie: demographics are a little different. I would say that no, you know, I think, you know, probably that came from us growing up together and I just, you know, she's always had a way of getting her way, but, you know, I think maybe I was putting on a little bit of show telling her no, and she probably got her way anyway, but you know, she's, she's great.You know, and you know, I mean, you got understand, she was. Kara was a phenomenal basketball player and had a lot of good things going on whenever we were young. And she was kind of the athlete of the high school and all that good stuff, which is great. And I think whenever we got together and I was like, you know, I just, probably at that time was, I don't know.I mean, I was worried about trying to go find a career and do stuff. And so I probably did tell her no or something and it probably sit wrong with her and made her probably wanna. They me more, I guess, at that time, but you know, it worked out, that's all, that's all it matters. Michael Moore: Hey man, you know, it's like, whether it's work or relationships, you gotta be willing to lay it on the [00:58:00] line.David Crombie: You gotta take a little risk every now and then Michael Moore: was she had a great quote this morning that I think just symbolizes y'alls relationship and your approach to life and how sweet you've been to me and my family. She said, God opens doors that need to be open. And it closes, he closes doors that need to be closed.And I just think that that sums it up so well, he all's approach to life the way you've raised your daughter, the way you've approached business, your relationship with the Ortowskis. It's just, it's been fun to watch. David Crombie: Yeah. Michael Moore: It's going to be a part of, so thank David Crombie: you for a minute. Good. Yeah. Michael Moore: She's just got an amazing amount of respect for how hard you work and how well you support your family.So the world needs more David Crombies.Bob Wierema: Well, I think at one of the, one of the things we always Michael Moore: ask Bob Wierema: them, the guests we have on is, you know, if you, you think about your passions in life and what you're doing numbers one and two. A lot of people are saying it's family. And then, you know, your career and your pursuits there, what would you say?Number three and four are for you? David Crombie: Oh man. You know, I'm a pretty boring guy, so that's pretty cool. I would say is, I mean, I, if I'm not spending time with them or work and that's, that's the, you know, I like to go with a like, and I like to do that kind of stuff, but I, I just. Yeah, but you know, if you think back, you know, Oh, we've done this work for 20 years.So once you get to do it right, you know, you lose any, there's nothing else to go, dude. You know? And so, so I, you know, I enjoy a lot, you know, spending time off family a lot, but I. You know, as far as that I've just never had hobbies or anything like that at all. I mean, that's never been something I did. So it's kind of a tough one for me.I don't, I don't have, I don't say, well, I have to go play golf. Cause I may not. I'd seen him go sit in an office all day where I would play golf. I mean, it'd be a turn [01:00:00] for me. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that sounds crazy, but I just don't, it doesn't appeal to me. Michael Moore: No, but Bob, a perfect example of that was, um, you know, David and I had gotten to know each other pretty good.And he said, Hey, you need to come, just check out Jacksboro and where I grew up, come up here for the day. And there was somebody else I was calling on up there to find out what they were doing. And then they had. They invited me to play golf at the, at the expert coach club. Hey, David, let's just go play some golf.And he said he would go play all fall. You want to, I'll see you when you're done. I'm going to the Lake. I thought, well, you know, okay, let's go. Yeah. I mean, you go have fun. I'll see you I'll see you afterwards. And I said, no, no, no. I'll go to the Lake with you. And, you know, growing up in central Texas, I mean, obviously we had Lake Travis and like Austin, that was much more of a ski boat kind of like, and so we start walking down the Marina and David's boat is like, Something you'd see in Tampa.I mean, I was like, that's a boat. Okay. Fuck man. To hell with golf. And we went out on this thing can have more fun. Yeah. And ended up back at the Jacksborough country club. David Crombie: That's right. Michael Moore: Oh, it was a very long day, but now you got, you got to grow up in a neat and a really neat town. Oh yeah. David Crombie: There's a good people there.Michael Moore: Absolutely. So one other question we like to ask on this podcast is the, you know, there's the saying, it's not what you know, it's who, you know, you probably heard that. And then yeah, I heard the other saying is it's not, it's not who, you know, it's who knows you. So if you're delivering a message and another conversation we have a lot is like, you know, if you're thinking forward and you're, you know, You're 85 you've gone to heaven and somebody reading your eulogy, like what do you want people to know about [01:02:00] you?David Crombie: One thing that's probably not known about me is, is, you know, I enjoy developing people and helping them more than anything else. You know what I mean? That's just something that I've been able to. I do. And I've had a lot of, a lot of it I've been able to do it a lot, had a lot of success at that tomorrow and my career and, and brought people to some places that.I don't know that they, they, you know, you can't say they might not have been there and all that cause they don't owe me anything and that's not the deal. But in, in my career, I just think that, y

Connect with Michael and BobThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with Greg Gordon and Richie GrethWebsite: https://www.gordonhighlander.com/Greg Gordon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-gordon-aa55945/Richie Greth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-greth-992b9a3/[00:00:00] Greg Gordon: I felt the temptation to make kind of a monolithic statement. I just feel like I'm trying to like, be right about my statement and put it in a way that it works, you know? And I'm like, Oh wait, this is just, this is just really complicated. Brian Thompson is one of my project managers. He's the guy that I feel.Fortunate to get to work with he's wise and kind he's a deep spiritually. And so instead of making a statement, we just had a conversation and I want to grow. I feel like. I have biases and I don't really know where they are and sometimes I don't even want to see him. And when they're revealed, they're usually pretty ugly and I try to cover them up with the good deeds I do.Brian has just made it real safe for me to kind of open up. Yeah, we just had a wonderful conversation. I know that, I shared with him first, you know, I, I went in this whole thing, got started and it was years ago. I just, I just felt like all lives mattered. You know, that, that was part of my calling, but I just didn't really understand the context and what you mean.It was being shared and it had to be revealed to me. I had to learn. But it took me kind of realizing that I didn't get something about it. And I wanted to avoid the temptation of being right about my opinion. And I just was actively seeking and asking Michael Moore: on this episode of the climb, we tell the story of Gordon Highlander, which has become the largest industrial finish out contractor in the metroplex.We're joined by Greg Gordon and Richard Greth. Two really good friends of mine. This episode goes deep. We laugh a lot. We talk about golf, family, politics. This is one you're going to listen to more than once. Enjoy the climb.[00:02:00] welcome to the climb. I'm your cohost, Michael Moore joined by my Partner in crime, Bob Wierema and we couldn't be more excited today. You're going to get two for the price of one. As we've got two really good friends of mine, great business minds, and Greg Gordon and Richard Greth. Richie and I have known each other since 1995.When I was on my way up to the university of Colorado, I stopped off in Lubbock. And he was my best friend from high school, his roommate. And it's been a unbelievable friendship since then. And then through Richie, I got to meet Greg Gordon, founder of Gordon Highlander. And so gentlemen, thank you for joining us, Bob.Thanks for coming back from Mexico for this and with that, Greg, I'll turn it over to you. Give us a little background on yourself and then Richie, you can follow him. Greg Gordon: I think just the quick disclaimer for the audience. you know, when, when, when guys like us know each other this well, there's, there's just going to be a lot of inside jokes, probably that people won't get. but, happy to be here. Thanks for the wonderful introduction. You guys, Gordon Highlander is a commercial construction company. We started in 2007 with a passion for serving other people and a commitment to excellence. And so I am humbled to be a founder and leader. And, we have had a lot of success in growing our business and, and I'm sure we will get to talk about that a little bit more in the, in the webinar, or, Podcast, what are we calling it? Bob Wierema: Podcast, too many webinars these days. Richie Greth: Yeah. Greg Gordon: What's the future state of the office. Bob Wierema: Yeah, exactly. [00:04:00] Richard. Richie Greth: Yes. Well, my name is Richard Greth and, yeah, I'm, I'm very fortunate to know Michael and, in Gordo for. For quite some time, they've both been great fans to great friends and trusted advocates throughout this crazy journey of law.But yes, on my, I grew up in Midland, Texas. I've been living in Dallas since about 2000 graduate of The Texas tech university, you know, been in construction. My dad was a general contractor, so grew up around it swore I would never do it to the log cabin from awful after a college and got into it. It just never turned back and really blessed to be in.Such a great industry. And, one that I never thought would be considered an essential service. So, but it's been one hell of a ride and I'm just blessed and, sound like a victory speech at the Oscars, but I just, you know, so many people have helped me along the way. So she's very blessed. Michael Moore: Well, Bob, why I wanted to bring these two guys on.Hey, cause it's going to be a whole lot of fun. But when we think about our mission in telling stories and defining moments and crossroads, they get you somewhere. I just found it incredible that there can be this, this friendship that it can be thicker than blood. And these two guys. Knew each other, they were clients of each other.And then eventually over time as things play out, now they're working together. I want to highlight that. And maybe guys, you can talk about how that all came together. Richie Greth: Yeah, I can take the first part of that. It was, probably mid 2001 of mutual friend of ours named Meredith. Gladys basically had introduced us.I was a young project manager at Trammell Crow and Gordo was a project manager at commercial interior space guy was doing industrial TEI and that [00:06:00] was kind of Gordo's forte for the business he was working with. We started working together and doing a lot of jobs and quickly found out that, that we enjoyed each other's company and a shared like ideals and, you know, more than anything knew how to kind of execute some of the promises that were being made on the brokerage.And I mean, one of my favorite quotes from a mutual friend of ours, Chris Jackson, he, my first started Trammell Crow. He, I asked him what the. Internal relationship was with between the project manager and the broker. And he says, it's very simple. I sell the dream and you live the nightmare and, and no truer words were ever spoken and Gordo helped live that nightmare with me.And, it's been a great. Greg Gordon: Kind Richie Greth: of partnership ever since we've done tons of work together over the years, our lives have paralleled each other and some of the ups and downs and ins and outs, so to speak. And we could probably spend a podcast on those parallels, but at the end of the day, we, we've always kind of had the same focus and the same mindset, which has kept.Kind of our planets in orbit, so to speak and campus together. And, it's really been a great partnership. And, you know, when Gordo went out on his own, I was fortunate enough. a bunch of his good friends were kind of racing to be the first one to give. Gordon Highlander, their first job and Gordo finally admitted during a recent round to another person who was trying to claim that, that, that I truly was the one who gave Gordon Highlander, their first job, you know, I've been invested in when Gordon Highlander since day one, just because of my love for my friend, Greg.And, you know, I've been to parties, you know, I mean, a bunch of the guys are probably new 50% of the staff before I even started, just because of my involvement and, just through different activities, et cetera. So Greg Gordon: that's a little bit Richie Greth: of a brief synopsis of how Greg and I came together and, you know, it's funny.He had, he had mentioned a few [00:08:00] times and I had mentioned about. You know, working with Gordo and it's funny, I think over a couple rounds ago and planets aligning and, it just worked out right. It's funny. I was at a point working for myself that the Greg, we were talking about needing, wanting to grow his business.And I'm probably a better promise or the executioner or executor's excuse me. So maybe that's 40 and slipped there. Anyway, Greg Gordon: Richie, don't take out all our competition. Richie Greth: Exactly. But anyway, so it's just been a blessing. I mean, getting to work with one of your best friends and, and for an organization like that, it's just been an incredible Greg Gordon: blessing.I love what you guys are doing. there's this famous quote, Eugene Peterson wrote, an interpretation of the Bible called the message and Eugene says. That storytelling is the language of the heart Richie. And I have shared our lives together in a, in a lot of different ways and friendship and, and the client contractor relationship and the partner relationship, and really just in brotherhood and, and, I will tell you that.I knew I had Richie support before I started Gordon Highlander. And there was this story that was being formed and it wasn't just mine. It was all the people that really were the ambassadors for the, for the business. And for me, And I think there's real mad. I think that people intellectually can wrap their mind around that, but really leaders actually do it.And we just have been really lucky with attracting the greatest people to the organization. I will tell you professionally, I think Richie joining Gordon Highlander is probably one of the [00:10:00] fastest. Literally, I can tell you it was G Oh seven one Oh one was the number of the first job that Gordon Islander over dead and Richie gave it to us.And then for us to figure out how he could become a part of our story, any RD was just in a different way, how to weave those together and how rich. How incredibly rich that story is it's, it's really unique. I think what Michael didn't say is that Richie is a unicorn. That's my term for someone that's really hard to find the key, go do anything they wanted to in the world.He could go do anything he wanted to. And the fact that he came to join Gordon Highlander is just, it's incredible. Bob Wierema: What I love is that you two actually like each other, unlike Michael and I Michael Moore: sure. Never spoken Bob Wierema: it's so cool to hear. I mean, you can see it in your guys, you know, inheriting your voices and the friendship that you have.And that's, it's so great to see. So maybe, maybe to one of the things I was thinking about when you were talking was, so you started the company in 2007, at what point? Richie, did you join the business? And like, how did that all kind of come about? At what point were you guys ready to start together? Richie Greth: Well, you know, it's funny.My, my official relationship with Gordon Highlander has just been a little over a year. my unofficial relationship with Gordon Highlander, like I said, has been from the, from the beginning, always trying to promote his brand, from the positions that, that I was in, et cetera. And then I'm trying to.You know, just different things. Like I said, going to his different functions, et cetera, but really, I think it's kind of a funny anniversary, but very appropriate for April 1st, 2019 is when I started, Michael Moore: I thought you would have said April [00:12:00] 20th. Richie Greth: Yeah. Well that was the end of my probation. Greg Gordon: You know, I think we probably remember it differently.I will tell you that. W I remember us Cedar crest golf course. I was really struggling and I was just dealing with some personal issues and I had some pain and I was unpacking that for Richie. And then Richie kind of said, you know, I'm struggling a little bit too. Like, I don't really love my home office.I've always been an athlete. I've always been a part of the team and I really. And then all of what Gordon Highlanders done. And I was like, dude, let's just get a business card, then we'll put your name on it. Like, well, fuck, we'll figure this out. You know, like, I don't know, like let's go on business, you know, and really we didn't know.And I will tell you that I have seen this theme in my life a lot, where in a way, God kind of puts things together. Or provides, I think I'm supposed to go a certain way and I get real focused on doing my part, but then God takes me in the other way. And then I ended up in a better spot than I ever thought I was going to be at, to begin with.And the funniest thing happened. I was pursuing a big tenant rep broker in JLL. The next week. And I was in the early stages of learning my relationship and he said, Gordo, I don't know, man. I just love you enough that I want to tell you. So, and I go what's that? He goes, dude, you need to, I have a business development person.If you're going to continue to grow Gordon Highlander. I like teed my ball up. I hit it and I just thought, thank you, man. I put a sign, you know, and I go, Hey, actually, I've been talking to this guy. I got somebody. And he [00:14:00] goes, no, I have the person that you need to talk to. I go once. And so he's like, yeah, you should talk to Emily.And so well, I started talking to Emily at the same time. I'm telling Emily about Richie and Emily's real confused about what the hell? yeah. It's, it's crazy. I have two sets of twins. You guys have two sets of twin boys. I managed to do that with two different women. And I refer to Richie and Emily is my third sentence wins.They started on the same day. Michael Moore: That's amazing. Greg Gordon: Yeah. Michael Moore: You know that, that defines it right there. I mean, that doesn't happen by accident and Gordo. I appreciate your. Your thoughts around your faith in that, and that, you know, we're all on a path. It's just our job to stay on it and pay attention to those signs along the way.And it's all gonna work out just because I'm a huge history guy backing up a little bit. Give us kind of the four, one, one on the name. You know, you being a third generation builder, like give us the background on Gordon Highlander. Cause it's a good one. Greg Gordon: Yeah, thank you so much for that. There's a, so I'm originally from the East coast, Baltimore, Maryland.my dad was the history teacher and ended up getting, his architecture degree. He worked for his father and my grandmother worked at the Maryland historical society and she had done a lot of research about our family lineage. So this would have been you guys in the seventies. Before the internet and probably a harder search to navigate than it is now.And so I was just born into this historical perspective when I was a little kid, I thought. I had an army in my family, [00:16:00] in the Gordon, Highlanders are regimented of the Scottish army. They were formed in the late 17 hundreds. And they're like the special forces to the United States army, a Winston Churchill, his famous quote about the Gordon Highlanders is that they're the greatest regiment that there ever was.And so they have. Rich history. I just learned about it as a kid. I thought there was an army in my family somehow. I didn't know how I was connected to it. And so this really cool thing happened when I felt the calling to step up my own. My dad was, is always been kind of Homebase and my strategic advisor and he was saying, son, we already have a brand.We were born into it. It's our family name and it has a tartan and it has its battle cry. Yeah. Yeah. It's all these things that a lot of, a lot of other companies, without a story or a history are trying to event, they're trying to invent it from scratch. And so it was just really cool. We, we pulled a lot of the principles of the army.Sayings end of the business. We pulled the Gordon tartan down onto the business and we brought all those things that had proceeded me into the business naming. And so the other thing is I, I, I did choose to put my name on the business too, and I think that that's important. Bob Wierema: And you, you mentioned you had this calling to step out on your own and I can't pass that one up in the theme of this.So what was the calling? How did that come to you? What made you make that leap and say, okay, I'm ready to do this. Greg Gordon: Yeah, just this, this hunch, this real instinct, I was just young and learning. The business was really about relationships. And I work for someone that I have a lot of respect for. They were a great technician at what they did, but.The relationship management part of that business, I felt like I [00:18:00] was doing most of it and that people weren't really attached to the business or the brand. They were attached to my relationship and the trust that I had formed. And so I wanted ownership and I was tired of being an employee. I thought I knew what that meant, putting my money back into the business somehow to get equity.But I, I really didn't know. What that was all about. That was just kind of over my head at the time. And, and, and so I asked for ownership, but I felt like I knew that the answer would be no. And I was prepared to go at, already set up my company. And, it happened very fast. It happened faster than I even thought it was going to.We, we had an incredible first year and really, we haven't looked back. We've had a couple of years where. Revenue was flat, but profits were up and we just have continued to reinvest in the business. And, we're actually believe it or not. I hate to sound tone deaf because I know things are rough in the world right now, but we're, we could have as much as 400% growth in 2020 with less people.Michael Moore: And one really good to really good twin business development people. Greg Gordon: Wow. Exactly. Well, I will tell you, I'm a whoop on the, at the top of the chart. Woo. When it comes to Strength Finders, I'm like all influence and Richie's woo. Number two, number one. He's positivity. It's he's just such a wonderful guy to be around.I don't know how to explain it. It's just Richie brings out the best in everybody. He's just. He is amazing. And so there's no doubt that he is a key part of our success. Richie Greth: I'm going to give you about five minutes to stop that.No, I appreciate it. Gordo, man, you know, it's a, [00:20:00] you know, all the love goes right back to you. I mean, what you've been able to do over the last, you know, 13 or so years is, is unbelievable. And, and, and Gordo hit the key there. I mean, really understanding relationship and understanding that it's not about the job.It, it, you know, it's, it's not about what's in front of you. It's, what's down the road more than anything and, you know, thinking, and that's one of the things I've always been so impressed with Greg Gordon: him is. Richie Greth: Taking long term, more than, than short term. We're really trying to invest back into his business, bringing in experts to help strengthen his leadership team, et cetera.I mean, he's just the way he's approached his businesses has been ferocious and directed and the results are results are obvious. Michael Moore: Through friendship. I mean, especially spanning as long as all of ours does together. If you add them all up, I mean, I've known Bob for 14 years. You just get to really know the true people.Couple of things to reflect on that. One of my first fondest memories of Gordo and there were, there were other ones, but this one is just sticking out right now. Maybe it's cause I'm looking at him was, At Richie's wedding and we're at the reception and I look over and the only white boy dancing, harder, white boy and sweating more than me is Gordo.And I'm like, That guy's awesome. And my wife is going who's that guy, he is having a better time than we are. Like, let's go hang out with him. And it's just been this, this triangle of friendship, you know, that comes in and out. Everybody gets busy, people have kids and, but you can always come back to it.And then, you know, shortly after. I started at Lockton was in when Richie decided to join up with you. So we were due for a big catch up and it didn't even have to be in person. I could just tell in his tone of voice, like he was reenergized, [00:22:00] he was fired up. He was, he was missing that culture that you've created at Gordon Highlander.So I think it was just, it was just a matter of time before y'all joined up and it's going to be so much fun to see where it heads next. I Bob Wierema: will say, Michael, the first memory I can think about you is in Nashville, Texas, and I'm pretty sure you were drinking and had a few too many cocktails when we were down at that training program down there.Michael Moore: Oh yeah. Nashville, Tennessee. Get your geography. Right. But Greg Gordon: what Richie Greth: did I say, Nashville? Michael Moore: I Bob Wierema: don't know. It's all, it's all South Illinois, South of Chicago. What's it's all the same. Michael Moore: Kind of transitioned into something I want to hit on next. Cause you know, Bob's got a perspective being in Chicago, he works with a lot of construction firms and real estate.You know, I see a wide breadth of business from oil and gas to real estate to construction to you name it. We're a little more insulated maybe in, in North, Texas than say our. East coast brethren or West coast, but Bob and I have spent a lot of time on our podcast. Kind of talking about this concept of what's occurred in the last 90 to a hundred days has created an old economy and a new economy.And so from y'alls perspective in the construction world and finish out and, and just in life in faith and family, like maybe take a few minutes to comment on that. Richie Greth: I'll add more to expand on the business side, the one kind of life side that, you know, I love how kids do the things that they can say sometimes can really just cut through some of the BS.And I remember my, my daughter, Georgia, she asked me, she said, dad, what, Greg Gordon: what Richie Greth: was Krone like when you were a kid? You know, something about that just resonated with me where I just looked at and I said, [00:24:00] baby, this, this is all new to all of us. I mean, we are all learning on the fly here. We didn't have this kids.So, you know, I think it's, it's great perspective. Think that, you know, never before have we felt maybe more connected to. More people globally, because we're all going through kind of one thing at the same time, but yeah, this is, this is something, I mean, I remember as a kid, the trivia question was who won the 1918 Stanley cup, you know, and it was no one because they shut it down for the Spanish flu.I mean, it was such kind of a little weird snapshot in time and we're right in the middle of this weird snapshot in time. And, to kind of get with your. You know what you were talking about. Faith early. One of my favorite kind of anecdotes is, you know, how do you make God laugh? You tell him your plans.You know? I mean it's, and I think no time has ever been sure than right now, but I'll let go to take the other part Greg Gordon: of that. There's something crazy about being a builder where you take other people's vision and. Make it come to life. So I think we're training really well to deal with obstacles. And these are just really big obstacles that we're going to figure out.Fortunately for us, there's been this wonderful confluence of the way we've built our business and how the market has come together. And so those two are crossing each other right now. And that's, it's kinda like a double up, Oh my gosh, I'm drawing a blank on the. It's everyone does surfing now.Wakeboarding, sorry. Whoa. Double up. It's when they cross the boat back and they make the wave go twice as high as it normally does. Right. Right. So just right away, I was fortunate enough to get plugged into some. [00:26:00] Calls where there was 15,000 people around the world through CBRS global investment platform.And those guys have economists and people that are way smarter than me that surround their business. And the industrial asset class has been growing and doing really well. And there's just a lot of data. Now that points towards. Continued expansion because of crown of IRS and industry. True Buddhist. No, that, inventory used to be a bad word.You know, everything was always Justin. And so everyone personally got to see how that got interrupted. And no one wants to deal with that again. And so they're saying 3% more inventory equals 500 million square feet speed of additional industrial development. And, the onboarding of manufacturing, you know, Trump's been talking about it for a while about getting it back from China.And I don't know how well he's been doing with it, but coronavirus really adds to his cause I think people can really now realize and see like, Hey, I don't want my coronavirus tests to come. From China. I want it to be made right here in my backyard. And people were actually kind of getting their mind around why having manufacturing near the business hubs make sense.And then you multiply that with eCommerce. And so the most fascinating part of it is e-commerce for whatever groups that it didn't reach prior to coronavirus, I'm telling everyone it doesn't matter what sex would. What color, what ethnicity, what socioeconomic group e-commerce is now like the United States postal service it's here to stay and some economists are suggesting 2 billion square feet, 2 billion, B billion square feet.Dallas Fort [00:28:00] worth is 850 million. And so we're just in this. Cross hairs where we've built our business in Dallas, Fort worth Dallas is the largest industrial development community in the country. Gordon Highlander is the biggest interior finished out contractor and industrial finish out. And so that gives us a lot of credibility.We've had a lot of swings. We've got great people and great processes. And the Mark is just producing a ton of work for us right now. So we just feel super-duper fortunate. Bob Wierema: You see Michael Moore: looking outside of Bob Wierema: the Dallas Fort worth area. Are you looking Michael Moore: at Bob Wierema: geography? You think there's a good focus there to continue and grow in that area and expand.Greg Gordon: We have been talking about that for a long time. And I will tell you that for me, when I experience a lot of growth, my temptation that I watch my hands, it's like, Oh, a lot of money that this snow on my hands. If I don't direct them the right way, they're going to want to put their hands on things. And I want to live my life with my hands open, like this.And when you have extra profits, I think that creates clarity on how you would go attack other markets. And so we're in the early stages of considering where the needs are greatest, where are the various barriers of entry are the easiest and how we could focus on really profitable offerings that match up with what we feel like is the value that we bring.Richie Greth: And at the end of the day, we felt very blessed to be an industrial construction in Dallas, Fort worth. Greg Gordon: He had it. The other thing with growth is we want to continue to grow at all water, the garden. That's already planning and plant more gardens and other places not get my OPIC or get too [00:30:00] proud. We want to be humble servants.And we just feel like we have a lot to offer people. I will tell you too, on the personal side, I'm predicting kind of this collision where we've been highly effective with being able to run our business without opening our office. You guys that's on the backs. It's clearly on the backs of the subs and the superintendents that work for Warren Highlander.So we're kind of a house divided where. You know, more than half of our company is learning this wonderful efficiency from being able to work at home while the other half is on the frontline, actually doing all the work. Not that we're not doing the work too, but you know what I mean? You see what I'm trying to illustrate.It's very different. Richie Greth: It is going to be fascinating to come out the other side of this and almost to have the Freakonomics mindset, to see some of the changes that will happen. I mean, you know, it's a great question to ask people how they work from home and you, you know, I've talked out. You know, architect, friends of mine, who said, man, I've never had so much uninterrupted time in my life.And then other people that have said I'm going absolutely stir crazy. I, I, I just, can't, I'm missing talking to people. So, you know, the, the different opportunities and the asterisk that is going to be over this year, you know, that people can put, you know, in, in some instances is. That's going to be fascinating to look at 2022, 2023 and just see mindsets, attitudes, behavior, and just some of the data that comes out of this and see what changes that's.That's what I'm really curious about Greg Gordon: too. I think about how we started the business Richie about relationships and know how powerful the human connection is. And I think the [00:32:00] efficiencies are great because they're a way to deal with the obstacles, but I don't see them as being long lasting. Yeah. And I also, I worry, you know what?I'm kind of in my beautiful mind state and we're drawing on the board and the EEQ and the conversation is real high and we're really grinding and getting vulnerable and really challenging each other around strategy. I think you gotta have that and you can't, you can't do that. Quite the same over a zoom call.Richie Greth: Yeah. Greg Gordon: So I'm, I'm just real curious to see, I know the pressure is building around me. I just am ready for coronavirus to be over. I'm starting to feel like, well, the serious, like baby Greg is showing up in the marriage, like he's just tired of wearing a mask. Michael Moore: Yeah. Amen, Richie Greth: man. What an incredible time though, to have grown of our story, have the abilities to have this one on one interaction and our, our kids aren't stuck with, you know, three rocks and a stick, you know, I mean, it's, it's pretty incredible.The time and the opportunity that we have in the outlets. I mean, it's a, I was watching the original total recall the other day and seeing people and faces and, you know, the video conference calls. And it was just kind of funny seeing some of those older movies trying to project the future, but it is interesting that, you know, Greg Gordon: Thank Richie Greth: goodness for technology thanking us for still able to see, I mean, you've experienced in some of our meetings.I mean, having this tool to be able to see your client's reactions, to be able to, to have that conversation. I mean, over a phone is almost like email. You can interpret it, thought four or five different ways. Being able to see someone's face is an incredible [00:34:00] advantage. So I mean, the four of us getting to sit here and have a conversation almost like we're sitting around the same table together, not to get too prophetic, but you know, it's just, it's amazing.Bob Wierema: Michael. And I have noticed that too, with doing, doing even this podcast and some of the other connections we've made throughout doing this is, you know, the, a bit like what I've met. Yeah. The opportunity to have the conversation with, with you guys without kind of this opportunity. Well, maybe, maybe not, you know, would mix, I have pursued this that we've talked about doing for a year now.Yeah. I don't know. It's cool. Richie Greth: It's all right. Ma you know, necessity is the mother of all invention, right? Michael Moore: Exactly. You know, I think it's probably a common theme that we all share that. You know, whether it's, it's being the old bull sitting on the Hill now instead of the young one, Richie Greth: are Michael Moore: we see a, you know, you, you, you just, you, you get a, as you get a little bit older too, to analyze things and, you know, Greg, a conversation we were having a week or so ago, kind of leading up to this podcast, if you feel like sharing, I just, I loved how you.You saw this movement of, of, you know, civil unrest going on and hashtag black lives matter, just popping up everywhere. And you're like, you know what? I need to understand this better. So can you, can you share a little bit about how you went about diving into that? Greg Gordon: Yeah. You know, it's funny, we've been trying to build the brand during the coronavirus with webinars and podcasts, getting out there.I just want say, man, I just felt this temptation to make it and no, not that there's anything wrong with statements, but. When you make them on the social media outlets, you just get ripped apart. [00:36:00] And I felt the temptation to make kind of a monolithic statement. I just feel like I'm trying to like, be right about my statement and put it in a way that it works, you know?And I'm like, Oh wait, this is just. This is just really complicated. And so I don't know if you've seen it that went out last week, but, Brian Thompson is one of my project managers is the guy that I feel fortunate to get to work with he's wise and kind he's a deep spiritually. And so instead of making a statement, we just had a conversation.And I want to grow. I feel like I have biases and I don't really know where they are and sometimes I don't even want to see them. And when they're revealed, they're usually pretty ugly and I try to cover them up with the good deeds I do. Brian has just made it real safe for me to kind of open up and, yeah, we just had a wonderful conversation.I know that, I shared with him first, you know, I, I, when this whole thing got started and it was years ago, I just, I just felt like all lives mattered. You know, that, that was part of my calling, but I just didn't really understand the context and what you was being shared. And it had to be revealed to me.I had to learn, but it took me kind of realizing that I didn't get something about it. And I wanted to avoid the temptation of being right about my opinion. And I just was actively seeking and asking, and my wife helped me out. You know, she just said, babe, could you imagine if we were struggling? I know we've been there before and I came to you and I said, babe, you know, do you love me?Can you tell me that you love me? And you said, Oh babe, I love everybody. And so there wasn't until I humanized it, that I could understand it a little bit more, but [00:38:00] also too, I'm not, I don't know anything really about the organization and I'm not trying to make a global statement about protests or any of that stuff.Just the very simple concept in which it was formed and how to be allied out there and just reveal my ignorance and love my friend, Brian. Well, Michael Moore: And so, after the conversation, I mean, are there things now that you're routinely working on or thinking about, did it fundamentally change or did it just shed light on kind of an idea and a, an ideology that you already had, or give us a little more insight?Greg Gordon: One of the questions that I asked Brian is I said, where do you think our biases come from? And he just paused and he goes, Wow, because I don't really know it. I will tell you that. I want to be captivated by the wow. And not the, how I always want to jump to the how, but I never stay right there. You know, I've never, I never stay on the wow.And I go, I think it's the really good questions that get you stimulated that are the things that form you and that matter. And. It's not so much about the answers I don't know about you, but coronavirus has been one of the most humbling things for me because every time I think I could get it figured out, it sets me back two steps.It's like one step forward, two steps back. It feels like it's the most disorienting thing. And then there's this imaginary line where everyone kind of draws in judges. And Richie Greth: it's a great point. It's like our, a mutual friend Dan lap and said right. Asking the right questions. That's a great question. What are those biases come from?Bob Wierema: Oh, boy, you got, how did you guys know? [00:40:00] Richie Greth: Gordo introduced us to them. Greg Gordon: Richie dated him in high school.Okay. Richie Greth: And then Gordo's stolen from me. Michael Moore: Dan, Dan was doing one of his workshops, in, in Dallas. And I just thought, yeah, Gordon Highlanders, doing so much work around, expanding in their brand and knew that. That the twins and the BD department were really ramping up, getting out there and, and. Shaking the trees.And so I thought they would benefit from knowing Dan. Now, if there's a side romance going on, we'll have to ask Nan about that. But Richie Greth: yeah. You know, and I will tell you that's another great thing. you know, being in that workshop and getting to do that was a lot of fun. And I think, A great thing of Gordo's character is he's never afraid to ask questions.And I remember, Dan and it was great, you know, it was great presentation and I thought he had some excellent things to say, and we were actually had him signed up to come down here, but. Chronic kind of sideline that, but, you know, he had a deal called the elite mindset, which you're aware of. I remember Gordo questioning the word elite and I, you know, at first I kind of crawled my toes a little bit and I was like, Oh no.And then I was like, I love it. You know, I go, the guy's just, he's not taking status quo. And I think that's a great example of Gordo. Just always asking questions and from whether it's. You know, getting involved in an investment deal and want to know exactly how, you know, what a cap rate is to, what do you mean by elite mindset?And it's been a great, it's been a great example for me to follow, to always ask questions and not just, you know, if something ruffles your feathers a little bit or makes you pause, poke at it for it. Greg Gordon: I Michael Moore: think, Bob Wierema: I think what's great about that is one of the things that's always resonated with me that actually [00:42:00] by executive yeah.Coach tells me all the time he's he says seek to understand, not to be understood. So ask more questions, do more listening than trying to make your point and like the Gordo's point of earlier and just having that ability to. Ask the questions and understand and put your bias aside or what you may have been taught in the past.And just ask questions to understand, instead of stating your point and sticking from there. It's, it's interesting how the conversations go and the relationships get built. Richie Greth: Right, man, Michael Moore: you know, along that same go, go ahead and go to. Greg Gordon: It's like a God gave you two ears and one mouth Bob Wierema: exactly. Michael Moore: To, to echo that Gordo.I mean my executive coach, we talk a lot about identity and reputation, and I think in our twenties and thirties, you know, where we're real focused and maybe even a little bit worried about our reputation, like that's what you're trying to build, but in reality, It's your identity. I mean, that's been there the whole time.And so if you just truly focus on. You and who you are and being the best you, your reputation, and you don't worry about it. It's going to be there because you're being yourself. Bob Wierema: Michael. I just do want to point out real quick that I am still in my thirties just to rub that in with you a little bit. Greg Gordon: Well, Michael Moore: we'll always be older than you, Bob.Greg Gordon: Really early Michael Moore: two sets of twins will do that Greg Gordon: to you. Richie Greth: I have a car that's in its thirties.Greg Gordon: we, I would love to share our mission statement with you guys. Michael Moore: Please do, Greg Gordon: to build a legacy of helping others reach their God, given potential. You know, I'm doing coaching right now to, Zig Ziglar coaching. And Zig, you [00:44:00] know, he's got, he's got all these nuggets, man. He's just got tons and tons of nuggets, but he.I just think very few people map actually can take all those beautiful things in their mind and disability Strait them in ways that are really easy to understand. And Zig says that legacy is where success and significance come together. And so, I don't know, Michael, your years were identity and reputation.And I feel like I I'm experiencing success. I want to be able to navigate that without becoming a part of it. I'm really interested in significance now. And I think that's part of what happens as you age or you're humbled that wisdom sets in and you realize you don't know it all. Yeah. I just think the, the why or the significance to that's the thing that I think Richie and I get to live out for everybody, just this idea of how important relationships are and what they mean, what they look like.I Richie Greth: do have a funny story real quick about Zig Ziglar. And, it pops in my head when, and Gordo talking about it. But one time we were playing golf in Dallas and we happened to run into leach. Ravinia. And Lee was he's a, if you've ever run into him or ever had a one on Greg Gordon: one, he, he Richie Greth: loves to talk and he loves to tell stories and he just started, he just pulled up and started talking about someone's stock socks and went into a couple stories and was just talking and Gordo interjected with a funny story about Zig Ziglar, talking about, cooking in a pan and, And it was really funny and leach Ravinia looked at Gordon and he says, yeah, I sit next to her on a plane one time.And a Zig Ziglar told me it helped me with my golf game. And I says, well, what do you shoot? He says, well, high eighties. I go, you can't help me with my golf [00:46:00] game.Greg Gordon: Okay. Richie Greth: So I thought that was pretty funny. I'm a huge fan of Zig Ziglar, but I thought that was. Funny how different people take different advice. Michael Moore: Well, you just never know who you're going to walk up on the tee box and play with. Remember when we played with Mark Cuban's mom. Richie Greth: That's right. And we, we, we didn't even believe her.Michael and I, this would have been 2002, maybe. 2002, 2000 2003, the great Stevens park and Kessler Dallas area. Michael and I are on number one T and it's just a twosome about three o'clock and we're ready for the fairway to clear. And we see this little old lady pushing a push cart, like, Oh God, please hurry, please.Fairly clear. And she comes hobbling up and says your mom. And we're like, yeah, sure. So. That's the third hole. She starts, she goes, you boys basketball fans. And we says, yes, we are. She's a little, my son is Mark. And I started thinking, what basketball player his name was? Mark. And it was Mark Cuban's mom.And, it was pretty funny at Steven's park right there. And we didn't believe her until she hopped in the Cadillac at the turn. Then we thought, well, maybe it is her. I'll be darn sure it was her. Michael Moore: And I'm pretty sure her, her nine whole front was a better score than ours, but Greg Gordon: we had more fun, way more. Bob Wierema: I'm just trying to understand how much golf you've been playing.I think most of the stories have been surrounded with golf so far, Richie Greth: man. Greg Gordon: know Richie Greth: not to tell another one, but another one of my favorites is, early on in Gordo and I's friendship. Gordo's dad who he referred to. Incredible guy. He was a leader, Trammell Crow when I was there and he had come down to visit a friend of his and we played at a golf course.It's not even there anymore. Great Southwest. And, in Arlington and about the third [00:48:00] hole Gordo's dad looked at me and said, boy, I will fire your ass. If you worked for me, the way you play golf, you obviously don't work.Greg Gordon: That was actually, my dad was coming down from Chicago. He ran the Midwest for Trammell Crow, then. Oh, okay. I love Chicago, man. It's one of my favorite cities Bob Wierema: we just want, we just want it to get back to normal here. I, I love it as well. And it's, it's hard scene with everything that you don't talking about when we were talking earlier to seeing the way the city is right now, everything's shut down.It's sad. Greg Gordon: Yeah. Michael Moore: It's a tough spot. We're in one other, a theme we like to hit on in this podcast guys is, you know, there's, we're kind of talking, this almost sounds like a. Something Zig Ziglar would say, it's, it's not what you know, it's who, you know, but I heard another one the other day that it's, it's not what you know, it's who knows you.And so, as you think about our audience of this podcast and letting people know who you are and what you stand for and what Gordon Highlander is and where it's headed, what would you want to tell him? Greg Gordon: That's a softball, right? Michael Moore: Lobbing Greg Gordon: it up, baby lob that went up to us, huh? Well, I will tell you, you know, the dress for success.I like to tell people now dress from success. Words Michael Moore: matter Greg Gordon: words matter, man. And what order you put them in? Do you know? Oh my gosh. That's so awesome. Well, hopefully the audience has listened if you haven't, you should go back because there's a lot of good nuggets in here, but if you're just catching this part, keep it up as out for Gordon Highlander.I don't know. I think there's big things on the horizon for us. I think we can be a national force. I'm excited about having a growth mindset. Just trying to help everyone in the organization, get to where they're supposed to be and [00:50:00] get the organization where it's supposed to be. So if you're in Dallas, Fort worth, we love you.We're not going anywhere. If you're in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and you need a good general contractor really close by. If there's a lot of industrial development in your future. We're more than just contractors. We understand the whole constellation around the deal, what it, what it, what it means to buy the land and build the building.We just think that because we know. What our customer goes through. That really helps us be the best general contractor out there. Who, again, if you want to play golf at Dallas national, you call RichieMichael Moore: that's Greg Gordon: perfect. Richie Greth: It's amazing to play golf and call it air quotes work Michael Moore: well with, with, with Jeff Bezos being one of our. Biggest podcast supporters will tell them to keep sending the work to Gordo. Greg Gordon: Yeah. Yeah. We signed an NDA, but we're not building his $10 billion clock or watch in the middle of the mountain over there or whatever the hell he's doing.But Richie Greth: thousand year clock, Greg Gordon: someone told me about that today. I don't even understand, but we'll build the warehouse all day long.What about you guys? How would you, how would you want your audience to know what you provide? How would you tell Gordon Highlander Michael Moore: from the standpoint of our podcast or how we make a living doing the podcast? Greg Gordon: Does the podcast point to your business or Michael Moore: no, that's not why we're doing this. I mean, it going back to.You know, the world essentially stopping for a minute and everybody resetting that's when Bob and I really started spending a lot of time on the phone, just looking for a creative outlet [00:52:00] and realizing that in our very own neighborhoods, whether it's in Chicago or Fort worth families, we're getting together again in the backyards and telling stories.And it was like, where did that go? I mean, Richie's been down to. My family's ranches. I don't even know how many times in the amount of stories that he's heard from my dad and my grandfather and times that I've spent with his dad. I mean, it's just that passage of knowledge is something that that's going away and we felt just motivated.Just say, no, stop that we're not letting it go away. We're going to get great people on our podcast with really interesting backgrounds. Defining moments and crossroads, and just bring those stories to life again. Greg Gordon: Do you know Donald Miller or D do you follow Story Brand at all? Michael Moore: I'm familiar with it, but I don't know it.Greg Gordon: I think we should invite him to Dallas national. All right. Let's all get our, our, desires together and let's, let's get someone on this podcast. It's out of our reach. Bob Wierema: Michael. And I've been talking about that. That's the goal. There's a couple, there's a couple ones out there that, you know, you, you think about it, it's like trying to get that reach out.And I said, I joked around with my buddies the other day about, they said, well, what are you going to do with this? Like, who are you trying to get on? I said, well, we've been wanting to hear all these. Stories, but we always kind of joke about, like I love talking to people like you guys cause it's relatable people.Right. And I said, but like at the end of the day, I said, the guy who like I've always loved and followed is Joe Rogan. I said, I'll hang it up. When I get Joe Rogan on the podcast, this he's the master of this. Right. Richie Greth: But that would be great. That would be great. Greg Gordon: Well, would it be cheating? We paid him. Bob Wierema: I don't think, I don't think we could do it enough after that big Spotify contract.Richie Greth: Right. Is he on cameo, Virginia?[00:54:00] Michael Moore: It needs a little pro bono work in his life now, you know, to give back, Bob Wierema: I mean, he's a big outdoors man. Like me. Maybe you can talk a little bow hunting on there, you know, just the Chicago boy that likes to bow hunt. I mean, come on. Greg Gordon: Wow. Michael Moore: Elk meat recipes. I mean, the guy's just, he's a Greg Gordon: beast. Dude. And he doesn't, Richie Greth: that's gotta be a narrow demographic from Chicago.Bob Wierema: There, there are not a lot. And, you know, you talk about, you know, these like funny stories. So when I met, when I met my now fiancé, if you could have only seen the face, the look on her face when I said yes, so I like to go hunting. She's like, well, what does that mean? I said, well, I. I bow hunt. She's like, well, what do you shoot?Michael Moore: It's Greg Gordon: like Bob Wierema: elk and deer. And she was just like, who is sky? Like what, what event is this in Chicago? I mean, you just don't have it here at all. There's, there's not a lot of people that are outdoors men here. And I live six blocks from my office right in the smack, a middle of downtown. And it's just been a huge passion of mine since I was a little kid.And you know, it's always be a part of my life. Richie Greth: Well, you need to get down to a, when the Miguelito's ranches, Sandy or Cedar Creek and go, go do some pig hunting nits. There there's some special places down there. Bob Wierema: And that's always interesting. I always look out for those invites and my phone never seems to fricking ring Michael Moore: well, you know, she's going to kind of see how this podcast goes and if it's successful, you know, we'll have a reunion down there.No, you never go. The invite is always out there. You know that, but go back to your question. I mean, I think, you know, what we want people to know is that this is just something we're doing from our hearts and we believe in it, it's important to us. We're having so much fun doing it, you know, and as it relates to what we do, I mean, a big part of, of Bob and I's job is, is the InsureTech [00:56:00] movement out there.I mean, you see the lemonade stock. Flying through the roof. You know, there's a lot of, of things that are trying to commoditize the insurance market. And, you know, our strong belief is that it's still a relationship people business. And so we're all about relationships we care Greg Gordon: and Michael Moore: this podcast, I mean, you've, you've gotta be in the moment for, you know, we're going on an hour plus now of really listening and being able to find that next question and to keep.The conversation going and taking it to maybe, you know, we've had several that have, we had one guy that got all teared up. I mean, you just don't know where the conversation's going to go, but if you're in the moment paying attention and giving a shit, it produces some amazing content. Richie Greth: For the record. I'm, I'm impressed.Gordo. Hasn't teared up. And I know he, I know he mentioned that, but that's part of his, you know, what tendencies, but, you know, I just gotta say, I love what you guys are doing. I love the storytelling aspect ever since you told me about it and hearing what you sent over. I think it's awesome. I mean, you know, storytellers and that.It's becoming a little bit of a loss brand then, and, and the lost touch with, with connecting with people. I mean, many years ago, I mean the most revered people in the tribe or the storytellers, you know, I mean, the people who gave the oral history and were able to relate, you know, the old, moral, the stories, et cetera.I think it's great what you guys were doing and very thankful to be a part of it. Michael Moore: I'm laughing because Bob Wierema: you talk about storytelling. Might this tell my dad the other day he goes, Oh yeah, that makes sense for you to go. He's like, you've been full of shit your whole life. Of course, you're going to do a plot.Yes. He's like, you got plenty of stories to share. Greg Gordon: Right? The other, the other connection that Richie and I [00:58:00] have is we love, I think one of the things that just marks really high up there. Our ability to laugh, learn our sense of humor and just having a good time together. And I see this connection, man. I don't know I'm going to do a good job my case here, but I think of joke telling is storytelling in a way.Absolutely. We kind of set up this story and then you like the way it are pulling the tablecloth out from underneath the table, you just let it, everyone know that it was actually rearranged a different way, and then you let them realize it, you know, And so Richie and I, I mean, dude, the other day, he, I think my dad called him to tell him a joke or he called my dad to tell my dad a joke.And then my dad told Richie that I never answer his phone calls anymore. So we made Richie call in on a three-way from Richie's phone and I answered the phone. And then I see my dad and tell him this.And then he was just like, I'll just leave it right there. Click you, hang out. Hey, hangs up the phone. And so, Yeah. I think our love of storytelling is it seems like it might be genetic. I haven't met Michael's dad, but I've heard lots and lots of stories. I think it's cool. If your dad can pants, you say that you were full of shit.That means. And he's probably a good storyteller too. Bob Wierema: He is, Greg Gordon: he definitely is. Richie's dad is a little bit like Lee Trevino. Like he comes right out with the story too. He's got them flying out. No Richie Greth: filter, no filter. The Bob Wierema: funny thing is I said to my dad the other day, I said, man, if you've gotten older though, like there's some stories here that were here and I'm not sure if they're real anymore.And he's telling one the other day and my [01:00:00] mom's looking at him. And she's like, I've never heard this story in 30 something years, you know? And she's like, I don't know where this is coming from. Richie Greth: You know, one thing my dad has a, has a propensity to do now is to merge like two or three Greg Gordon: stores. Richie Greth: And so it's like a hodgepodge it's like, you can just put it in my cocktail and hit the blender button.It's hilarious. Michael Moore: Well, I think that's just a sign of having so many good times. They just start all blending together. You Greg Gordon: know, Michael Moore: he's lived an amazing life. Well guys, you know, we're, we're coming on up over a little bit of an hour here. I can't. Thank you guys enough. And. We'd love to have you guys on again, see where Gordon Highlander creates total global domination.You know, again, Gordo, thank you for sharing the, the quote about storytelling is the language of the heart. Cause that's what this is all about, and we appreciate y'all telling your story today. Richie Greth: So is this first intermission or is this over? Michael Moore: We got Bob Wierema: to fill up our drinks. Greg Gordon: Yeah, it's actually my second set of twins an all day long Waterslide birthday party today.Wow. And so I am going to go change into my bathing suit. Well, Bob Wierema: there you go. Greg Gordon: I'll show you guys. I think this is the modern work attire, right? It's a dress shirt. Bob Wierema: Oh yeah. Greg Gordon: It was shorts. Bob Wierema: I thought you were going to show us the bathing suit. Greg Gordon: Yeah. Richie Greth: I just have dental flaws below the waist. There Michael Moore: you go.Newscasters have been doing it for years. Greg Gordon: Well, we appreciate you guys. I dunno, Michael, I'm happy for your success and. Great to meet you. Rich. Absolute love you [01:02:00] Richie Greth: guys. That was a blast. Michael Moore: Absolutely. Bob Wierema: Ton of fun. I'll hit you guys up for that Dallas Nashville invite. Don't worry. Probably coming here in August.Richie Greth: Okay, come on. Second half of August. We're shut down. First half and second half Bob Wierema: I'll play it. I'll plan it. I'll plan it a mic. Richie Greth: Yeah, you get to watch Bryson hit 400 yard drives on the practice. Tee. It's kind of fun. Bob Wierema: We'll make it happenfor sure.Michael Moore: We're all in. Thank you guys so much. Bob Wierema: You guys take care.Michael Moore: Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the climb. If you enjoyed the episode. Please consider subscribing. And if you know someone who you would think would enjoy the podcast, feel free to share this with them. Thanks again. And we'll see you on the next episode. . 

Connect with Michael and BobThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with Tim SwindleTwitter: https://twitter.com/timswindlePornaments: https://www.pornaments.com/The Climb is Produced by Straight Up Podcasts[00:00:00] Tim Swindle: [00:00:00] Hey, you know, do we think that there's other people like us that would enjoy this and then, you know, there is some element of like going around and can you share the idea before you start spending a lot of money? You know, you can go kind of just test your thesis. And so you share the idea with people and you can just tell, like, is it clicking?[00:00:19] Do they like it? Are they laughing? Are they like stupid? This is dumb. You know? So everybody just was like, that sounds like a really funny, except for a game. And. It convinced us to keep going. And then as you keep going, and as you build momentum, you just start to feel more confident and the confidence builds and you're willing to take more risks, et cetera.[00:00:42]but you don't have to start out, you know, you don't have to go all in out of the gate. Like you can take baby steps to start. [00:00:50] Bob wierema: [00:00:50] All right. Today on the climb, we had a good friend of mine joined Michael and myself that, Share some of the success that he's had as an entrepreneur talks about how he makes a shift from call it corporate America and entrepreneurship in a number of different venues and really how his whole focus is on his lifestyle and the quality light that he's going to live with him and his family.[00:01:16] And it's just a great conversation. Thrilled to have Tim swindle join Michael and myself today.[00:01:31] Tim. Welcome to the climb podcast. Thanks for joining us today. [00:01:36] Tim Swindle: [00:01:36] Thanks for having me. [00:01:38] Bob wierema: [00:01:38] Absolutely. Well, I think to get started for the benefit of all the listeners. Can you give us a little background on, on who Tim is and you know, where you started and kind of where you sit today?[00:01:50]Tim Swindle: [00:01:50] Sure. Tim swindle, I live on the North side of Chicago.[00:01:55] I'm married with a 10 month old as of today and a dog. I went to [00:02:00] university of Illinois and I've started a couple of businesses and recently exited a few of them and Mon to a new ventures as we speak, [00:02:10] Bob wierema: [00:02:10] maybe start with, I think your story where you came, you know, in school, I know you had an awesome time doing some travel abroad and then kind of bring us up to speed of where are you, where are you?[00:02:21] Took that from what you learned from that?[00:02:24]Tim Swindle: [00:02:24]  Sure. So, my junior year at university was able to fortunate enough to be able to go over to Sylvia Spain for my second semester of junior year. And, it was, I think looking back on it even today, was probably the best three months stretch of my life. I've I peaked when I was 21 years old.[00:02:50]so we did it a little different, you know, a lot of folks that study abroad, they, they would kind of go on this journey, this solo journey and meet new friends and things like that. And ours was a little different where we just uprooted like eight to 10 of our best friends and just moved us over to, to Spain for a semester.[00:03:10] And, it was, it was just an incredible experience to kind of be, you know, off on our own truly, you know, no parents that could drive down and show up at our dorm or anything like that. you know, we obviously were going to school, but it was, it was designed to. To get out and see Spain too, you know, your Monday to Thursday classes.[00:03:28] And then we would go visit different spots in Spain on the weekends and things like that. So lived with a Spanish family, which was also a really cool experience and, no new new Avalon spaniel. So that was[00:03:42] not really knowing a lick of Spanish. I know a few phrases. [00:03:50] Michael Moore: [00:03:50] you know,That gets you through like two or three months in Spain, right there called me a few other things and you're all right. Yeah cause Tim, if, [00:04:00] if you would've told me that, that you were fluent in Spanish, I would have been answering some tough questions at home with my fiancé to why my Spanish is not as good as it should be after six and a half years, [00:04:13] Tim Swindle: [00:04:13] you need to, you need to get on that.[00:04:17] Bob wierema: [00:04:17] And so I think go into like, How you found a job after that and all that. I think that story is really interesting. Cause you know, as we were talking the other day, how that's even shaped you to kind of where you are today and there's some, some of those, as we talked about the crossroads to find moments in, in those experiences, [00:04:36] Tim Swindle: [00:04:36] So as I was studying abroad in Spain, I was having a really good time and I happened to talk to my dad and just mentioned to them, listen, like I'm having a really good time over here.[00:04:48] I would prefer not to come back to the States for summer. This is summer going into senior year. And she was like, all right, let me, let me see what I can do. And he happened to right after I got off the call with him, ran into our neighbor at the time who was a partner at a trading firm. they're based in Chicago, but they had an office in London and he mentioned to him how he just, you know, talked to Tim and Tim in Spain and was looking for an internship.[00:05:11] Do you guys have anything? So he put a call. This is all without me, knowing this puts a call on to partner over in London. And so a couple of hours later, I got a call from this guy in London. That's like, Hey, I'm Dave with Marquette partners. You know, we're going to fly you over here for an interview to London and think about, you know, have you moved here for the summer?[00:05:29] And I'm just like, who's this I've been drunk for the past three months. Yeah. and so it worked out that I did fly over there and interviewed with the firm and. I ended up just going straight from, Spain over to London for the summer. And then that worked out well and they ended up hiring me basically right out of that program.[00:05:53]so it was nice to kind of go into senior year, being stressed about, you know, finding a job. And I had one lined up for the [00:06:00] backend and ended up going, you know, moving back to London after graduation. [00:06:04] Michael Moore: [00:06:04] That's awesome. [00:06:05] Bob wierema: [00:06:05] And you, [00:06:06] you loved London.[00:06:08]Tim Swindle: [00:06:08] I do. I did. I do. I  hope to go back there to spend some time, some significant time with my family.[00:06:16]that's definitely a goal of mine. I just think there's just so much that I owe. To travel and we can get into a little bit later, but I've done a few stints of extensive travel. And I think has really shaped my view on the world and it's opened my eyes and I think hopefully made me a much better person and a more interesting person.[00:06:36] And I would love to share that, you know, with my kids, hopefully one day, [00:06:41] Michael Moore: [00:06:41] you know, Tim and, in visiting with you. Prior to the podcast, kind of getting up to date, getting to know each other. Since that time I've just been on this memory lane of my semester abroad in Granada, just a couple of years before you.[00:06:54] And you know, the impact that that had. I mean, it just changed everything. The whole world got a lot bigger. You mean, there's, there's more than Texas Michael. I mean, we all do everything bigger in Texas, but it's okay. It takes a while to get out of the border. But when you do it's, it's, it's a big world out there and I'm stumbling around the streets of the all by scene are going up to the alarm, bruh, and thinking about and learning about the history.[00:07:25] And you know, that being the, I mean, it's one of the eight wonders of the world, the last Maura stronghold, and then Isabella Cattolica and King Ferdinand come in and establish Catholicism down there. It was just like, this is so much older than anything in Texas or the United States for that matter. It just completely changed my mindset.[00:07:45] Tim Swindle: [00:07:45] Yeah. I mean, you're walking down streets that are older than our country. Right. I mean, it just, yeah. It's, it's a eye-opening experience for sure. [00:07:56] Michael Moore: [00:07:56] Yeah. It's, it's certainly changed the way I [00:08:00] viewed things and then talking about the opportunity to go back. So last spring, which marked 20 years, since my semester abroad, I took my wife and kids.[00:08:11] And we went and sat in my old classroom and by the old apartment that I lived in, and of course I couldn't show my 14 year old and 12 year old daughters, everything that I experienced in Granada, but we had a really good time going down memory lane and, and just showing them that. And we went over to Sylvia and had an amazing time up to Madrid.[00:08:30] It was. I think carrying forward, I want to make sure that you know, that my girls continue to understand that they're a little bit is one thing. but the world is a whole another thing and it's fun to explore. [00:08:45] Tim Swindle: [00:08:45] Yeah, it's something I definitely am going to encourage, you know, my daughter and if we have additional kids and then anybody I speak to you, right?[00:08:53] Yeah. I am very close with my high school still. I went to high school here in Chicago at San Ignatius college prep and they invited me back. to speak to the senior class. I don't know why they did it. And, I'm still confused as to why I was invited, but I, I took it very seriously and it was a huge honor as they were starting to kind of explore their path, going to college and what they wanted to do, et cetera.[00:09:20] And my speech essentially, or I'm studying abroad and I just encouraged all of them as they're kind of going off on yeah. You know, onto adulthood that it's something that if they have the opportunity to that, it's the best decision that I've ever made. And I think what happens is when you're here in college and you've got your group, good group of friends, or if you're in a fraternity or sorority and you just kinda like become obsessed with this little world that you're.[00:09:49] A bit fish in a small pond about, and it's like, Oh, you know, you have either the big borrowers, right. So it's like, you're going to miss another Saturday night at cams.[00:09:58]Bob wierema: [00:09:58] Right. It's the exact same as [00:10:00] the one before it, right? [00:10:01] Tim Swindle: [00:10:01] Yup. Exactly. And I had friends, you know that  unfortunately they, they have the opportunity to leave, but they were.[00:10:08] Too sure that that life for cams right. Was, was all they needed. And I think it's sad to be honest. And so anyway, I just tried to share that little bit of a, of advice with these, with these seniors. [00:10:21] Bob wierema: [00:10:21] Well, Tim we're, I mean, we're on the topic and instead of coming back, like, let's talk, I mean, you have, you mentioned it.[00:10:27] You have done some extensive travel to help us understand what that was like, what it means to you, how we shaped who you are and who Tim is. [00:10:36] Tim Swindle: [00:10:36] Yeah. So, so I started off outside of that. this kind of leads into a little bit of, you know, Tim later in life. And, I was a partner at a software company that we ended up selling to LinkedIn.[00:10:50] And at the same time I had also started. A board game company called utter nonsense and with the acquisition of LinkedIn acquiring the software company, and then with having things in a good place with the board game company that I kind of intentionally set up to be a. Kind of a lifestyle business where I overhead outsourced a lot of things.[00:11:15] Basically I had one employee, which was my sister and it allowed me to, I basically said, you know, I've been grinding for the past 15 years between, you know, all through my twenties. And then once I kind of jumped into entrepreneurship when I was 30 and I just said, you know, I need a break. And at the time I was pretty serious with my girlfriend.[00:11:36] I probably knew that. You're getting engaged with somewhere in our future. So I just said, let's do it. And so we picked up and, and went and traveled kind of the Southern hemisphere for about six months. So he did like New Zealand, Austria, Southeast Asia, China, Japan, and then finished in Hawaii for three weeks.[00:11:55] So it was a pretty incredible trip. [00:11:58] Bob wierema: [00:11:58] That's great. What was your [00:12:00] favorite part of that? Is there a piece that like six out of place or? [00:12:04]Tim Swindle: [00:12:04] well, I mean, if I better, if I don't say this I'm gonna be sleeping on the couch. cause we had engaged in Bali and that was, so [00:12:14] Bob wierema: [00:12:14] that was the best part. That's all you need to say,[00:12:19] Tim Swindle: [00:12:19] but I think, I think Japan would, I would say was. You know, the favorite as far as just places that we've visited. I dunno what it is. I've even before going there, I have kind of had this. Romantic obsession kind of with Japan, I just felt like this weird kindred spirit. And I don't necessarily believe in like, what is it?[00:12:41] My wife's Indian. And so  I'm butchering this, but, where it's like, you're your rebirth? Right? And I was like, cause I Japanese in a bass in a past life because it just felt like I was at home. Just the people, the culture, the food. Just the energy, the vibe, you know, it was just, it just felt good.[00:12:59] So I really enjoy Japan [00:13:03] Michael Moore: [00:13:03] while we're on the topic of you racking up some brownie points. Like, I mean, how did you know that she was the one. [00:13:12] Tim Swindle: [00:13:12] Deep here, Michael, [00:13:15] Michael Moore: [00:13:15] we're not all surface level in Texas, man. I mean, there's a philosophical side to us, you know? [00:13:22]Tim Swindle: [00:13:22] so for me, I, So I'm, I just turned 40 and at the time I was, I think, 36.[00:13:30] And so I think compared to the majority of my friends who had already been married and most had kids, it was a little later, you know, as far as, Settling down if you will. And I think for me it was a timing thing. So I'll say, and I'll say this to her too. I think she knows this is that it's not like the one type of thing for me.[00:13:52] It's like, Hey, timing's right. I had gotten to a place kind of professionally where I wasn't going to be. [00:14:00] Working 80 hours a week at that point. And I could put in the time to something else. So I kind of committed to, I guess, selfishly, you know, I've been selfish if you will, for the first kind of 14 years post-graduation.[00:14:12] And a lot of that was focused around career and having fun, I guess, to call it what it is. And so I think at that point I just was, was ready and. there like a little bit of a funny kind of backstory to us meeting. we had met basically like 10 years prior when she was actually interning at a job in Chicago and she went to the mutual party and she's a couple years younger than I am.[00:14:39] And so she was still in college. I was like 24, 25. I just remember seeing her. And I was like, wow, who is this? You know, Duffle Indian barrel and that was it. And, but I kind of never forgot her. And then 10 years later, we happened to run into each other at Lollapalooza here in Chicago. And, kind of just timing was right.[00:15:00] Hit it off and just get engaged in Bali and have a kid and a dog and living up in Lakeview and life comes at you fast. [00:15:09] Michael Moore: [00:15:09] No, that's great. That's awesome perspective.[00:15:12]Bob wierema: [00:15:12] You mentioned the word, like being selfish with yourself.  Right. And I think a lot of people think about that and think about that when that comes to their careers, you think of that in a bad way, in a good way.[00:15:23] In that time that you were, you know, quote unquote selfish, [00:15:27] Tim Swindle: [00:15:27] I think it been in a good way. I think I used that opportunity to get some stuff out of my system, personally, just having fun. And then also, like I said, professionally, I was able to take some risks that I think would have been difficult to do.[00:15:42] Had I had a kid with, or had a wife with kids and all these responsibilities. And, you know, I made the leap into entrepreneurship when I was 30. And I think there was something about turning 30 that really made me want to do that. I, I always had the itch and I hadn't [00:16:00] had different entrepreneurial kind of activities when I was younger, but I never had kind of pursued it as my, my only form of living and income, et cetera.[00:16:09] So I think had I had, you know, not been selfish, and choose to go that route. I don't know that I could have gone on this path of bunch of partnership. I mean, I don't want to say it's impossible, but it just be, it be a hell of a lot harder. So in that regard, like I don't look at it as a negative. I look at it as, you know, I think it's about, so [00:16:29] Michael Moore: [00:16:29] if you take life like that, like I have to do this.[00:16:32] And I think it's important for our listeners to think about this. Like there's buckets, right? You've got. Your professional life. You've got your home life and your wife, you've got maybe a spirituality bucket may be, an exercise or hobbies bucket. Like I loved your little slogan on LinkedIn and said just a squirrel, trying to find a nut.[00:16:53] I mean, it sounds like you've found a bunch of them, you know, but how do you, how do you segment those buckets now and keep them all kind of  harmonious?[00:17:03]Tim Swindle: [00:17:03] Well, I, as you can tell them, I then buy that LinkedIn profile. I definitely am not someone that takes life too seriously. And again, this is something that, that was part of the growth journey for me.[00:17:15] I think I was probably a little. Stiffer. If you had known me in my twenties and early thirties, very, again, just kind of career focused, success focused and, you know, had some humbling experiences and have grown to appreciate just. You know, finding the humor and most things, you know, you can be a, a business person and have a fun.[00:17:43] And so that's something that I try to do and have a good balance of quality of life too. So, you know, for me, for me personally, again, I I've really felt just on quality of life at this point in my career. And [00:18:00] I think that it's also. It's ironically, or I should say it's ironic. That's I've also, you know, I guess achieved the most success I've had financially.[00:18:09] And I don't think that's an accident. I think that I've become kind of more of a whole well rounded person. It's made me. I don't know. I think I'm more passionate about the things I'm working on when I'm working on them and, you know, touching on some of the, other aspects that you, that you just mentioned.[00:18:27] So, you know, being physically in shape, I work out, you know, five to six days a week, obviously married now with a kid that those require a lot of time. And so I think that you. Have, you know, those buckets that you talked about and you can be, you need to be a little more disciplined. And so that when I'm focused on work, I'm very focused on work.[00:18:50] And if I think you're only working all the time that. You're not going to be as productive. I don't know. I mean, I just, I think it's hard to use, you know, and so I think for me, was kind of the schedule that I have now I'm more productive than I, than I ever was because I'm more focused and I'm enjoying also a key part of it, enjoying what I'm doing.[00:19:13] Bob wierema: [00:19:13] I want to come back to the quality of life. You said, talk about you're focused on lifestyle. So maybe go back to that point when you were 30 and then bring us back to here. So you said I wanted to go be an entrepreneur. It was time to make that change at 30. So talk about that change and then what that man and how some of those entrepreneurial businesses came about.[00:19:35] Tim Swindle: [00:19:35] Sure. So was working kind of in commercial real estate and country production space. The closest thing I would say to kind of a corporate job that I've had working in office, you know, dressing up every day and CBS reports, right. Those types of things. And I had, you know, it sort of dabbling a little bit in investing and I invested in a company with guys that I went to college [00:20:00] with that had started a software company, a sales software company.[00:20:04] And, you know, I think there was just something about my life at that point where I just said, you know, I'm not happy with what I'm doing and this isn't the kind of the path that I want to be on for the rest of my life. And, Decided to, you know, talk to those guys and, and jumped on board to help, grow that company.[00:20:21] And, that was a, that was a grind. You know, you go in kind of bright eyed and bushy tailed, you know, left kind of like a very good. You know, secure job to go jump into this, this software startup that had like one client at the time and just, you know, really no idea what, what I was doing for sure. I don't know if any of us did and it, you know, what you think, Oh, you know, we're going to, we're going to raise capital.[00:20:50] We're going to grow this thing or an exit for some huge number in two or three years in life. And we're sipping margaritas and, You know, like most entrepreneurial stories go, that just was not the case. And so with the business that we had started, we ended up pivoting it. It was initially I'll get into the details, but we kind of pivoted it to more of a sales software from a data room solution.[00:21:12] And that was where we, you know, achieved kind of a different trajectory, but that was, you know, already three years into it, which was, you know, a grind of three years of. You know, not wondering, not knowing if we're going to make payroll, that type of thing. You know, fortunately you kind of hit our stride and things just kind of worked out at the right time where LinkedIn was a big client of ours.[00:21:33] They had success with their salespeople, you know, using the product and, you know, wanting to talk about, you know, integrating our company with theirs. [00:21:42] Bob wierema: [00:21:42] Tim, when you, when you guys, you know, as we talk like crossroads, right. And you were just saying, Hey, we, we were going down this road and we had to go over here.[00:21:51] How hard was it to make that change? That like fundamental change in the business at that point you're three years in, I mean, was that a [00:22:00] part of the business at that point? Or was that like entirely shifting focus? [00:22:04] Tim Swindle: [00:22:04] It was entirely shifting focus. Yeah. It was like, we basically kind of stalled out essentially, and we had not achieved the kind of growth trajectory that you need to, at that point, we'd raised significant capital.[00:22:19] And so it was just like, Hey, we've got to do something. And we. Picked on a particular piece of the software that we felt like it was really kind of like the secret sauce. So we were designed for one thing, but we found that customers were using it differently. Like it was meant to be more of like a, just a kind of very vanilla sharing of, of secure documents.[00:22:42] But we saw that how we were solving the problem that people were using it more of like a sales approach where things that we did, like it put their brand front and center and they really liked that. And so. so anyway, so we just kind of homed in on some of those really core. Concepts that, that we were using, but really then designed it to be a sales solution for how salespeople were sharing content with their clients.[00:23:06] And, and then gave some really valuable analytics back to the sales rep to understand what the client was doing. And so we, again, just kind of focused on those core elements and made it very scalable. So the original software was. not very scalable. She said it was kind of a heavy lifting process to sign on new clients.[00:23:25] And this was meant more, just go to the website, sign up, et cetera. And so those were massive decisions. I mean, rebranded the company, whole new software was completely new and, convinced fortunately that. we convince our investors that this was the right move. They continued to support us. And, so it ended up having, you know, I have the ending, but, there was definitely times there where you're like, are we doing the right thing?[00:23:50] I mean, constantly dope until the end up until the sale. You just don't know. But, fortunately it all worked out. [00:23:58] Michael Moore: [00:23:58] Did that pivot with [00:24:00] your investors? Did it, did it require like a capital call or anything? Along that line or did you have enough? [00:24:07] Tim Swindle: [00:24:07] Sort of, yeah, that's it. I mean, we definitely, we did, we needed more money to, to make this move.[00:24:14] We also elevated our staff. You know, I think we had realize that if you're going to be a technology company, then you should probably have all that in house. Whereas previously we had outsourced most of that to abroad. And so to hire engineers in house, you know, in the States is expensive, but we just figured that was the right move.[00:24:34] And so. We were still fortunate in the sense that like our legacy products, we were continuing to service it and have recurring revenue. So we had, you know, we still had it. We just realized that that wasn't going to take us to the promised land. So that provided kind of like keep on the lights type of capital.[00:24:54]but then we were able to convince existing and new investors that, you know, we needed to kind of. Do this pivot to hopefully take us to the next level. So we're fortunate that almost everybody was on board with us on that decision. [00:25:10] Bob wierema: [00:25:10] Was it, Tim, was it a, a group of investors? I mean, you say investors, is it, did you have five or did get 75?[00:25:17] Tim Swindle: [00:25:17] We read a lot. Yeah. It was more not, I mean, again, you know, this was a, you know, it starts out with family and friends. Yeah. Because the thing is, once you take capital, you're kind of always capital raising with their startup. It just, it kind of never seems like it ends and you know, so early on, you're just kind of getting whatever checks you can get.[00:25:39] And then we did get a little bit more institutional, as time went on, but it was a pretty thick cap table. [00:25:47] Bob wierema: [00:25:47] So, if you look back on that and kind of how that always structured, where you have done it differently, or that's just kind of the way it was. So, you know, talking about, you know, an entrepreneur now looking at the same type of [00:26:00] decision, any recommendations or advice you'd give, [00:26:04] Tim Swindle: [00:26:04] I'd say the biggest thing would to be, to kind of make that pivot sooner.[00:26:07] Right? I think we kind of held on. Too long giants and make something that wasn't working work. And I think that's looking back on it, you know, we should have done that a year or two sooner. [00:26:22] Michael Moore: [00:26:22] Got it. Yeah. I mean, we all have instances in whatever profession you're in. Were there certain things or conversations that are  its 20 X, a hundred X harder than anything else that you have to do.[00:26:37] And I got to imagine the. The capital call back to the basis is certainly falls in that category.[00:26:44]Tim Swindle: [00:26:44] It does. And not only do we need more money, but yeah, we're basically spinning up an entirely new business.[00:26:53] So, but I mean, I, I, I learned so much through that experience. I kind of look at that as my MBA. And, you know, just feet to the fire. it certainly has shaped me and, you know, future businesses that now I've launched myself. And, I'm still very active. I'm very, but I'm, I'm, I'm active in, like the angel investment community.[00:27:18] So. Can I keep my eye foot and one foot in the air water with the high tech software startups, just by investing, not something that I want to run personally. And then I've gone decidedly, you know, very low tech with, you know, my current businesses that I'm, that I'm running. So, you know, especially, I still love it.[00:27:40] I just, you know, it's not something that, that whole, you know, raising tons of capital. Burning cash, the hiring a big team and things like that. Those are just it's. It's not for everyone. It's not for me. I've decided that, you know, my style is more kind of the solo preneur, if you will. And [00:28:00] that just provides a better quality of life for what I'm looking for right now.[00:28:04]Bob wierema: [00:28:04] So maybe talk, talk about that, transition into that, your next with utter nonsense and what that was, and then kind of the same what's beginning to kind of end in that story. [00:28:17] Tim Swindle: [00:28:17] Yeah. So, so as we're building point drive the software company, and again, you know, kind of not knowing if we were gonna make it, but also, you know, just having the entrepreneurial itch still.[00:28:28] I have this idea with a buddy to create a, a car game, like a physical board games, like a party game, akin to like the cards against humanity and. We had read this article in ink magazine that kind of described how cards against humanity. He brought their game to life and it just seemed like it was kind of a blueprint.[00:28:48] I was reading this. I was like, wait a second, like this, this, this is doable. And we, yeah, I'm going to have to happen having to have a. A game that we'd been playing for years at like friends, Lake houses and just, you know, stupid drinking game basically. but we have that and we were like, I think that we can take that and turn it into a real product.[00:29:09] And so we kind of moved very quickly and, brought that thing to life. You know, hire comedians to help write content, hired a graphic designer to design the packaging. And, you know, coming up with the name did a little Kickstarter just to bring it to life or, you know, bring it to the market. And nothing had been, you know, much of a success that's to that point, but we released.[00:29:31] I, we, we, we put ourselves out there and you guys, one of the big lessons I've learned is that sometimes, you know, the universe comes back to you when you put yourself out there. And, basically the target buyer had come across our, our little. Project. And, all of a sudden, you know, two months after launching, we were going to be brought into all 1800 target stores and then, you know, all major, a lot of major retailers after that, you know, [00:30:00] came in, came in line because of the, kind of the validation that we got from target and, so much different experience, right.[00:30:05] From what we had with the, with a software company, this was very bootstrapped, very lean. And it's kind of outsourced everything that we needed and, you know, but it did, it did finally, or fortunately kind of caught fire pretty quickly, which is, which is unusual.[00:30:22]Bob wierema: [00:30:22] Yeah, well, you kind of ruined it for me because I thought I was just imagining you sitting in the basement, you know, drink and wine or whiskey or something right now, these cards.[00:30:32] But now you're telling me content creators too. [00:30:37] Tim Swindle: [00:30:37] I mean, we tried and we got into it and we're like, We're not that funny. Well, I think you just need to be honest with yourself about your skillset. And, I think, you know, we realize that there's, there's better people out there that are good with, writing content.[00:30:57] And so we initially, yeah, we reached out to just start our network. You know, we had some friends that were comedians at second city. A friend that I grew up with was writing for one of the big, late night shows out in LA and another guy was in Hollywood writing movie script. So it was just like, Hey, you want to have some fun with, you know, stupid side project.[00:31:15] And so it worked out for everyone [00:31:19] Bob wierema: [00:31:19] that tells me that I didn't, my phone didn't rang. So I'm not funny enough,[00:31:25]Michael Moore: [00:31:25] Bob. We may,  we may have to have like a, the climb podcast, alumni group. Come back on and do a whole podcast where we just play the game. I've played it many a time. It is good. That could be a lot of fun.[00:31:42] We might get in a little trouble, but [00:31:45] we have a good time. [00:31:46] Tim Swindle: [00:31:46] So, yeah. So there's still kind of the finishing story that is so, so launched that while we were building the software company shortly after the software company end up getting acquired. And the game had kind of, you [00:32:00] know, really hit its stride.[00:32:02] And that was about when I decided to take off and go travel for that six months. As soon as I got back, we had launched a second version of the game. The original is kind of a radar and adult version. And then we came up with a, kid friendly family friendly version based on just customer feedback and like, Hey, we love your game.[00:32:23] But take out half the deck. Yeah. Yeah. So we, we heard enough of that, where we thought, you know, the opportunity was there to do a family version. And so, you know, at that point, showing that kind of the concept was, was repeatable and had different variations that could come to life because, you know, from it.[00:32:46] I just started to get some attention from a few of the bigger kind of towing game folks that are in the industry. And there was a group in particular killer that, had a, had a strong affinity for it. And, ended up acquiring that, Hmm. In 2018, I believe in 2000 end of 2017, I'm so sold that sold that company at the end of 2017, early 18.[00:33:12] Bob wierema: [00:33:12] One of the things I thought was really cool. You mentioned is you took this blueprint from cards against humanity is you said, like we read this article. We had this idea. Yeah. I think, you know, is we've talked to other peoples, there's this like, fear of, well, how are we going to do it? Better than what they already did.[00:33:29] Like, how is this gonna work? Right. Michael and I talked about it when we talked about, even the idea of the podcast is there's millions of podcasts out there. Like what made you guys go? This is going to work. Like we got this, like, this is gonna, or were you just like, Hey, we can give it a shot. And if we don't work, it doesn't work.[00:33:48] Tim Swindle: [00:33:48] I think the early indicator for us was that we personally were users of the product. Right. And we hadn't created it. We didn't, it wasn't a [00:34:00] finished form, but kind of the idea, the concept we had been essentially playing for years. And so we had this. Validation, I would say through our, through our friend group.[00:34:13] And so then it's just a matter of, Hey, you know, do we think that there's other people like us that would enjoy this and, and then, you know, there is some element of like going around and getting, you know, you share the idea before you start spending a lot of money. You know, you can go kind of just test your thesis.[00:34:31] And so you share the idea with people and you can just tell, like, is it clicking? Are they how they're responding? Do they like it? Are they laughing? Are they like stupid? This is dumb. You know? So, I think just with some basic research on our, on our end, just really talking to family and friends about the concept that everybody just was like, that sounds like a really funny.[00:34:53] Concept for a game and just, it convinced us to keep going. And then as you keep going, and as you build momentum things just, I can start falling in place. You know, the name, I thought it was a big one. the packaging, you know, it was just, you just start to feel more confident and the confidence builds and you're willing to take more risks, et cetera.[00:35:15]but you don't have to start out, you know, Going after, you know, doing a big, you don't have to go all in out of the gate, but you can take baby steps. [00:35:25] Michael Moore: [00:35:25] Yeah. Tim, one of the things I thought was interesting, you kinda hit on yesterday. Maybe we can take a deep dive in for our listeners is, you know, sort of looking at it two different avenues, right?[00:35:38] You have the high growth cash burning, private equity routes. You can go for the bootstrap. You know, on the ground route, which seems to be more the route that you go. And you mentioned yesterday, that's a lot more fun. Like give us a little color around that. [00:35:54] Tim Swindle: [00:35:54] Yeah. So I think there's something about in today's [00:36:00] environment where.[00:36:01] These startups are romantic, you know, something very romantic about starting a startup, right. And funded. I personally having been through it and seeing kind of both sides that, you know, I think there's something kind of nice about going slow. And not, you know, raising outside capital if you don't need it.[00:36:24] And, you know, I say that with a, with a bit of hypocrisy. Cause as I mentioned, you know, I am an active angel investor, and some, some businesses do require it. Right? So the software in particular, you generally speaking, are having to hire engineers who are expensive and you know, your overhead is just going to be something that, you know, most of you.[00:36:45] I don't know, coming from money that you probably can't afford to get it off the ground. It is. So I saw, I realized that there's, you know, there's different, that's the businesses that have different needs in terms of at least from a capital perspective to start. but for me personally, again, you know, kind of done that and again, for some people, that's what they want and they want the high growth, super-fast paced.[00:37:09] They want to manage a big team, you know, they. They enjoy the process of raising capital and working with investors, that group of investors, and, you know, and they might just be very tech savvy and they like the technology side of things, et cetera. So there could be a number of reasons that, you know, it's a better fit for folks that want to go that route.[00:37:30] Or, you know, again, me personally, I, I kind of stumbled across this physical product CPG. Doing things on my own approach. And it just, it's a, it's a better fit, you know, for, for me personally, I mean, there's things you have to adjust to. I mean, for instance, I'm, you know, working from home most days, you're not interacting with, you know, at least.[00:37:51] In person, you know, a big team all the time, which nobody is these days. Anyway. So this whole transition was not a big [00:38:00] deal for me. It's like I got to work from home and not see people. That's okay. So yeah, I mean, I just, and again, like the quality of life, there's just, you know, I've maybe wake up on a certain day and be like, Hey, I want to go.[00:38:12] I ride my bike or take the dog for an hour and a half walk. Right. I mean, it's just, there's not some meeting that I have to be at, you know, so it's not a matter of not working hard. I probably work harder actually now than I have. So I think that's kind of the misconception is that you don't, you know, you don't work hard going this path.[00:38:31] It's not, it's not at all what I'm saying. It's just a, it's a little bit more on my own terms, I guess is the difference. And, that's just a. The place that I am happy being right now. And if I'm lucky enough to I'll, I'll continue down this path. So [00:38:46] Bob wierema: [00:38:46] Tim, when you, when you're working on your own, like where do you go for advice, counsel, mentorship, bouncing ideas off, things like that.[00:38:56] Like, do you have a, a group or do you go outside or, you know, what's, what's that Avenue for you when you need that, that extra support [00:39:06] Tim Swindle: [00:39:06] Twitter. [00:39:08] Bob wierema: [00:39:08] Okay.[00:39:16]Tim Swindle: [00:39:16] so I do enjoy Twitter. I'd say that's kind of my, my drug of choice when it comes to social media and I get a lot of value from it. So I follow. Other entrepreneurs that I just respect and they help just give me bits of wisdom and encouraged me, you know, in ways that, that I need just to kind of keep going, et cetera.[00:39:41] And then currently working out is like a big thing for me. because I look at it as kinda like met my meditation time. It's just, it's this. Quiet peaceful, turn off the radio or turn off the cell phone and think so. I called Tim time and I just get a lot of Tim time for, you know, [00:40:00] 45 minutes to an hour where.[00:40:02] You know, you're just able to think through problems. And it's been, [00:40:06] Bob wierema: [00:40:06] there's been rumors of you on the Peloton being quite the Peloton athlete.[00:40:14] Tim Swindle: [00:40:14] I do. I am a big fan. I mean, they don't need any, help these days with where their stock is at, but I will say that I am a  of, of the Peloton, big family. And also I do, I mean, today I did there. I did a yoga session. I do their kind of strength claim, clock classes. And I just think they've got a they've executed very well from the technology, the actual.[00:40:41] Physical product, the bike I've been, you know, in my case had the bike, is just so well done. the trainers, you know, the talent that they have is fantastic. So I think just from top to bottom on the top, that they've just done a really nice job. [00:40:54] Michael Moore: [00:40:54] Yeah. No, that visualization that they created, where, you know, whether it's a live class or whatever, and you're, you can see where you're.[00:41:03] Ranked. I mean, it's, it's genius. [00:41:05] Tim Swindle: [00:41:05] Yeah. Competitive juices flowing. You know, you always want to beat your personal record or sometimes, you know, match up against a buddy or something. Yeah. [00:41:16] Michael Moore: [00:41:16] I think the first time, you know, outside of like organized sports, you would have played in, in high school or whatever that really hit me.[00:41:24] It was obviously way pre Peloton, but it was the first sprint triathlon I ever did. And, you know, it's age banded and your, you know, your relative, you know, I mean, there was like a low end and a high end and had gotten through the swim, which was definitely the biggest struggle. I mean, I was kind of built to sank, not built to swim and, and then I get on the bike and I'm feeling pretty good. And this lady comes flying past me, who you know, is [00:41:53] built twice as wide as I am. And there's a 43 on her calf. So she's [00:42:00] probably good eight years older than me and just goes flying past me. And I'm like, Oh, hell with that. I think, you know, and I was on a, like a, Oh, I can't remember what you call them. It's called a 29 or, but it's a, it's a mountain bike and a road bike kinda mixed together.  And I think I averaged like 23 miles an hour, which was way faster than I had ever gone. And it just pissed me [00:42:23] off. Exactly. That process works[00:42:27]Tim Swindle: [00:42:27] I'm with you on the, I'm going to try Alphonse, I think, you know, for former athletes, if we can call ourselves that, you know, you miss that.[00:42:37] And that was something that, for me, it was a bill. It was a way to kind of get some of those competitive juices back. So I'm a big fan of, you know, the triathlon and hope to get back out there. So [00:42:51] what's, what's next for Tim Swindell what do you got going now? What is, you know, what's, you got some ideas on the docket, you know, of your next venture.[00:43:02] Yeah. So I, after selling the, the board game, Just had a lot of fun with it, quite frankly. And I was like, you know, I'm going to devote the rest of my career. So doing things that make me happy, that I find fun basically, and that provide hopefully fun other people. And so that's, I'd say like one kind of overarching theme of, of, you know, my professional life at this point is that.[00:43:32] I will only pursue projects personally, that I'm going to, let's say run for, have to be fun. And so with that, obviously games qualify. And so I've, I've teamed up with, another, another guy and actually to two different guys, to launch a, Toy and game company. And we have a couple new ones out there.[00:43:56] We are coming out with a new one later this year. [00:44:00] And, so that's been a blast and, you know, still early on in, in this latest venture, but, you know, It's going, it's going well so far so excited about that. And then do was fun. I can say it without laughing is, it's a, adult themed ornament company called Pornaments and [00:44:19] Michael Moore: [00:44:19] nice.[00:44:23] That's great. [00:44:26] Tim Swindle: [00:44:26] So it's something that's like most good ideas. Was a, conversation over drinks with a buddy a couple of years ago. And we just thought it'd be hilarious to come out with, you know,  ornaments and call them Pornaments. That was it. That was the conversation, but it just, it never left my brain.[00:44:45] And, you know, being an entrepreneur, there's always ideas that pop in that I think are going to be the next big thing. And. They typically turn out to be the dumbest idea ever. And what was I thinking? But parliaments, believe it or not, I just couldn't shake it. And I looked at, I looked into it kind of right away a couple of years ago, and basically someone would beat us to it.[00:45:05] So somebody who had acquired the IP and trademarks and the domain for Pornaments dot com and this was something, you know, most businesses, I would say the name could be whatever, but this is just kind of felt too perfect. And. So I was like, it needs to be that. So I just looked into it some more and realize that they had acquired the IP, but they hadn't really done too much with it.[00:45:29] Like they, I think attempted at one point, but they weren't actively selling them. So I kind of figured that this was going to fall by the wayside and they were going to relinquish it at some point and I was be there to scoop it up fast forward three or four years. And I would just kind of check down there periodically.[00:45:43] And again, just the idea, just never, and I'd mentioned against kind of similar thing with the game where I've mentioned it to people and people just would die laughing when I would explain the concept and they've even come back to me around Christmas time, be like, you know, I'm looking for like a gag gift.[00:45:58] Like, did you ever do that? Ornaments [00:46:00] thing. And so I was just like, I have to figure this out. So I really tracked down the company that, that had initially tried it and was maintaining, you know, the IP. And I, it turns out that they're a, they're the largest glass ornament manufacturer in the country. And, and this was coming up like a fun little side project that, and basically.[00:46:23] Just didn't work out for them. They had a very different approach than I have. So I got in touch with the CEO and told him a little bit about my background, heard it's a woman CEO and her, and I just hit it off and she let me basically acquire the IP and we are not partners. And so they've become my manufacturer and I relaunched the brand late last year.[00:46:44] And just to kind of, again, test the waters to see if this was something that, you know, anybody else would find interesting or funny or whatever. And it's, basically I sold out of them almost a month and a half, and I'm going to be doubling down. Not in Dublin, I'm going big this year. So hopefully, it continues to go in the right direction.[00:47:06] Bob wierema: [00:47:06] That's so good. That is so good. How does the distribution channel work on that? Are you in retail stores or is it all online or how does that work? [00:47:17] Tim Swindle: [00:47:17] So I'm figuring that out is the short answer, but no. So the previous company, they, they have, as their business model, they have a retail only strategy. And, you know, as you could imagine for a porn moment, not many retailers are probably gonna take that on.[00:47:37] Michael Moore: [00:47:37] Yeah. It's not in Target. [00:47:39] Tim Swindle: [00:47:39] No, no, they're not a good, not a good fit the brand. And I will say, you know, as much as it's silly and all these things, like there's some very real business reasons for why I wanted to do this business. I, you know, I still work with retailers and I love retailers, but I am, I'm fascinated by the [00:48:00] rise of the direct to consumer movement.[00:48:02] And. I, I feel like, you know, that's just the business that I've wanted to try. And I felt like this is the perfect business to do direct to consumer because there's not gonna be the many retailers that would take it anyway. Know. So. So that was it. And so, so yeah, they had retailers and again, like, you know, there's going to be the small kind of like weird gag gift shops or whatever, but, you know, you're not going to get the big target Walmart order and that's more of their bread and butter is working with kind of major retailers.[00:48:37]and then in general, we're going through this shift right now to eCommerce. And so that's kind of hopefully skating to where the puck is going to have a thing that. You know, I want to be on board with, and so, yeah, so for me, it's, it's largely, e-commerce, I've got a website, you know, this year I'll be spinning up Amazon, maybe an Etsy site, but it's going to be all through basically my own channels and.[00:49:01] I was hoping to rely on social media as a big distribution channel for at least from a marketing perspective, that was the original thesis, but it turns out that they have rules against, you know, the kind of the rated R nature of theme, of, of things with, with our supplements and products in general.[00:49:19] So, so anyway, so, so I'm still figuring that piece out as far as just raising awareness, et cetera, you know, working with. We'll just say kind of on-brand type companies. Let's say like the chive or something like that. Barstool sports, right? Those could be opportunities for distribution for me. that I'm currently working on.[00:49:39] Bob wierema: [00:49:39] I have like so many questions that probably are not appropriate for this podcast that I want to ask. [00:49:44] Tim Swindle: [00:49:44] I will say sometimes people's like, when I say the name, they go to like porn stars, like as ornaments and I, that's not it. And it's really meant to be more. [00:49:53] Michael Moore: [00:49:53] Thanks for answering that question. [00:49:55] Tim Swindle: [00:49:55] It's it's Santa's like in his underwear [00:50:00] was going after a gingerbread people going after it.[00:50:04] You know, there's some stuff, a little more risqué, but it's really bad to be just stupid, funny, you know, Christmas care jurors in positions and things that, you know, wearing things that you wouldn't normally see them wearing. I love it. That's so good. Actually. That's why I mentioned that before we got on the side.[00:50:24] I just got, you know, so, so last year we launched with just kind of their old inventory. So that was part of going through the process. They had some excess inventory. I was like, just give that to me. I'll see if this, you know, it's something that is still relevant. So we have a bunch of new ones coming out this year.[00:50:40] And I'm super excited because I just, I just, they just arrived and, I just teased them on my Instagram feed. so [00:50:47] Bob wierema: [00:50:47] all right. I'm, I'm pulling it up right now. I mean, I gotta, I gotta look on Instagram right now. That's great. [00:50:54]Tim Swindle: [00:50:54] I'll be sharing later on this year. That will, hopefully it'll try to think of a way to say it without ruining it.[00:51:01] But what's this they're safe, including our president is I'll just leave it at that. So good. I don't know how Michael feels about that down in Texas, but [00:51:12] Michael Moore: [00:51:12] I think he looks, I mean, if you're in public office, you bet you better be ready right now. You know, Bob, we were talking about gifts for all of our[00:51:23] Podcasts guests. I mean, we may have just come up with a, a home. [00:51:28] Tim Swindle: [00:51:28] Yeah, there you go. [00:51:31] Michael Moore: [00:51:31] Where can everybody find, find them [00:51:33] at the show notes for everybody? Put them in stock? Yeah. [00:51:40] Bob wierema: [00:51:40] Tim is you. We've had a lot of conversation with some of our guests, our own mentors, influential people in their life. I mean, do you have a couple, two or three or one that stick out to you that have just been an inspiration for you or kind of that rock to lean on when you need him or her?[00:51:59] Tim Swindle: [00:51:59] I would [00:52:00] say that one of the guys that I worked for my, in my twenties, after I finished trading, I moved into real estate and construction industry. And, worked for dive that I'd kind of grown up, being very close with and he had built a, you know, let's start it out as, you know, a fairly small operation into, one of the largest in the country.[00:52:25] And so that was someone that I was close with growing up and looked up to, and then had the opportunity to work directly for him. And, you know, so I'd say that definitely was one. No, but outside of that, I think. The most of mine come from books. I really enjoy reading books about entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs.[00:52:49] One that I didn't, I don't know if it's, I want to say, you know, these like really deep philosophical books, but, and so some of them are cliche, but I really enjoyed shoe dog. the film that film I did and bought his building of, of Nike, I think it's, it's just a very entertaining, but a great, you know, tons of lessons, that are filled in, in the book with the story of entrepreneurship.[00:53:16] And so that one in particular sticks out as, you know, one that I enjoyed and found inspiration [00:53:23] Michael Moore: [00:53:23] sidebar on that one. Did you see and watch the last dance on ESPN? [00:53:28] Tim Swindle: [00:53:28] Yes. Love with Jordan. [00:53:31] Michael Moore: [00:53:31] I love that piece where he's like, didn't even want to go to Nike. Didn't want to do anything there. And then, I mean, look, what, what happens from there?[00:53:40] I mean, there's got, I'm guessing that's a big part of the book, right? [00:53:43] Tim Swindle: [00:53:43] It was, yeah, that was a huge score. And that took them from, you know, this track and field, you know, kind of niche shoe, into, I think they'd done some tennis stuff maybe at that time. I'm into very much mainstream basketball and took taking over converse.[00:54:01] [00:54:00] So yeah, just the fabric. It's a fascinating story. And to build it into this kind of global iconic brands, you know, in our lifetime too, right. I mean, guys, Alive. I mean, this isn't been around forever, you know? And then is it just cause you brought it up? I mean, especially as a kid from Chicago though with the Michael Jordan story, where's the thing, all of that from our childhood and getting to see how that guy just had.[00:54:25] I mean, man, would you not want to be against him? [00:54:29] Michael Moore: [00:54:29] Oh my God. Well I loved, I mean, it was one in his mama that said you're getting on that plane. I mean, she convinced him to go out and see Nike. Yeah, that was such a great how all of that came together with the timing of COVID-19 and everybody being pinup at home with nothing to watch.[00:54:47] And then that gets released as a 10 part series. That was just unbelievable. [00:54:53] Tim Swindle: [00:54:53] Yeah, that, yeah. I don't like to see me as anymore. Hell you. I mean, it's like the guy, you know, I think right on the bottle is the Bobcat's he's got his, you know, Jordan brand or et cetera. And then the timing of this was, was, was great.[00:55:11] But yeah, I mean, that was just, I thought it was a really done documentary and it was kind of fun to get a behind the scenes, look at how he lives his life. And, and one of the lines that I loved from him, I mean, so clearly. Him just being this outrageous competitor. And, it will stop at nothing type of thing.[00:55:27] And, but they were giving him crap about his gambling and like, listen, he's like, I don't have a gambling problem. I have a competitiveness, Bravo[00:55:41] Michael Moore: [00:55:41] attitude of just winning was, was [00:55:44] Tim Swindle: [00:55:44] incredible. [00:55:45] Michael Moore: [00:55:45] All he wanted all counts. [00:55:47] Tim Swindle: [00:55:47] Yeah. It doesn't matter who you got to run over the piss off, you know, and maybe they'll send them. He's not the most loved guy. Right. but that's not what he's trying to be, you know, he's trying to win. [00:56:00] So definitely, I mean, you talked about inspiration.[00:56:02] I mean, Michael Jordan. Sure. Yeah. [00:56:04] Michael Moore: [00:56:04] I love too. How, I mean with decades behind. Them actually competing on the floor. Like there is no love lost with him and Isaiah Thomas. I mean, it is still alive and well it's like, you guys are just never going to stop, but, you know, I mean, obviously just watching it all and thinking about watching those games with my dad or my brother or whatever, growing up, how they, one thing I really took away is that, you know, it can be lonely at the top.[00:56:35] And his, because of the choices that he made, I mean, he was a pretty isolated guy in order to be able to do what he did, but, wow. Just fantastic. [00:56:46] Tim Swindle: [00:56:46] Who was your sports hero growing up, Michael? [00:56:50] Michael Moore: [00:56:50] No, I'd have to put Nolan Ryan up there being from Texas, you know, don't, don't come try to charge the mound on that guy.[00:56:59] He's gonna hook you like a, like a steer and tell you who's boss. you know, exactly, exactly right. Big sports family. We grew up watching. I mean, you got to go back to like, You know, one of my dad's favorite and then I was a catcher was Roy Campanella and just how he played the game at that time. that would have been a big one.[00:57:25] Tim Swindle: [00:57:25] There's another [00:57:26] Michael Moore: [00:57:26] awesome, awesome catcher. [00:57:28] Tim Swindle: [00:57:28] You know, that's the, [00:57:29] Michael Moore: [00:57:29] that's the quarterback of the field, man, [00:57:31] Tim Swindle: [00:57:31] right? It is. [00:57:33] Michael Moore: [00:57:33] Hardest job. I would say we were having this conversation last night. I was with a couple of buddies and, we're I don't know how we got to this. We're actually, we're talking about the last dance too, and, and said, well, who and somebody said, well, Walter Payton, I said, I loved Walter Peyton.[00:57:48] And then I said, but after I remember growing up and how much I loved Bo Jackson, I mean, Bo and Bo knows and that whole thing. And I mean, the guy was [00:58:00] playing baseball, football, you know, the guy ran so hard. He dislocated his hip. I mean, combined the guy, he was just, he was an animal physical specimen [00:58:11] reminiscent of myself in high school a little bit, you know?[00:58:19] Bob wierema: [00:58:19] Well, Tim work, [00:58:20] we're coming up on an hour. As we kind of wrap things up. What, what would you, you know, in, in, in Mike Hallie's like, say like at the end we like to ask, what, what would you like people to know more about Tim? You know, as we end things here, you know, what, what, you know, like, what's your saying?[00:58:40] You like to always say, well, it's, it's not what you know, it's who knows you.[00:58:51] So, what would you like everybody to kind of know about, about Tim? [00:58:56]Tim Swindle: [00:58:56] just cause he threw out a quote. I was gonna throw out one of, one of my favorites and it's, live a life that makes a story worth telling. [00:59:04] Michael Moore: [00:59:04] Tim you couldn't.  Oh, put it, [00:59:06] put a bow on it, better with you talking about success, focus versus you being lifestyle focused.[00:59:13] And I mean, I could just see the passion and I know you well enough to know, like you guys are just living life and happy and all that, and it's just so great to see. So thank you so much for sharing everything today and being open with us and spending the hour with us today. [00:59:29] Tim Swindle: [00:59:29] My pleasure guys. Thank you for having me and good luck and continued success with both of your careers and this podcast, and you know, excited to see where this goes.[00:59:40] Michael Moore: [00:59:40] Absolutely. Thank you so much, Tim. Thanks Tim. [00:59:44] Tim Swindle: [00:59:44] Take care.[00:59:56] Michael Moore: [00:59:56] thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the climb. If [01:00:00] you enjoyed the episode. Please consider subscribing. And if you know someone who you would think would enjoy the podcast, feel free to share this with them. Thanks again. And we'll see you on the next [01:00:10] Tim Swindle: [01:00:10] episode. . 

Connect with Michael and BobThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/More on ConchoConcho's blog post that dives deep into the specifics of the Billy Bob's fiasco: https://www.ulterre.com/blog/lessons-from-the-honky-tonk/Connect with Concho: https://www.linkedin.com/in/concho-minick-62916910/[00:00:00] Concho: [00:00:00] You know, he found himself wanting to align with the people who wanted to develop the stock yards without any sort of historical context. Right. And that was an economic opportunity, I think, in his mind. But what I didn't know at the time is that to my other partners were offering him real incentives to align, but I learned that later and.[00:00:28] You know, there was, there was also some conflict occurred just prior with me, my stepmother and my dad, you know, through that whole process of the transition of me coming into the business and they hadn't gotten over it, you know, there were some imposter syndrome kind of things going on there. And you know, there's a whole lot to talk about.[00:00:47] They're given time that I, it really it's probably worthwhile talking about, but they couldn't let go of not being in control of Billy Bob's anymore. And I think they felt that was. My fault in some ways that I was now the president, no, I'm the president. I gotta be the precedent, but they weren't supposed to be working there.[00:01:07] And, you know, they were just about transitioned out and gone at the time we went through that whole real estate conflict. And, does that push them into a camp opposite of me? You know, I stood up in front of city council and argued for form basis and know some sort of developmental guidelines in control, but the stockyards, which would not have occurred had Philip benign, many other people not done that.[00:01:33] But I guess to get back to your question, Michael, and an answer, it is, I just can't imagine this. Anything other than just someone making their best economic. Right. And he made a bet against family at the same time [00:01:51] Michael Moore: [00:01:51] today, the climb Bob and I are joined by Concho Minnick. Hold on for a fascinating ride, deep into the world of honkytonks politics and legal maneuvers.[00:02:01] From growing up in Fort worth to attending Gale, to building Billy Bob's globally to now running a real estate firm. This episode is chocked full of life lessons. Enjoy the climb.[00:02:27] gotcha. Minute. Welcome to the client. [00:02:30] Concho: [00:02:30] Thank you. It's great to be here, [00:02:32] Michael Moore: [00:02:32] Bob and I are really excited to cohost you today. Bob always laughed at always say everything's bigger in Texas, but, nothing rings truer than Billy Bob's largest honky tonk in the world. certainly a big part of Fort worth history, big part of Texas history.[00:02:49] And under your guidance, a big part of the world's music scene. [00:02:53] Bob Wierema: [00:02:53] Now [00:02:54] Michael, hold on, hold on. I gotta interrupt because you know, from us Chicago boys, now I know what a hockey tuck is, but like let's, let's let for our other listeners, like what, what does that even mean? What is it?[00:03:07]Concho: [00:03:07] Good point. So you're the resident an error, you know, Billy Bob's is a hundred thousand square foot entertainment venue.[00:03:18] It's, you know, [00:03:20] driven really around. You know, live music is originally a barn that was built in, I think it was 1908 or so, and came to life as a music venue in 1981. And really, you know, I would say that it's more of a, kind of a Western culture entertainment complex, and this is the way we started thinking about it because we, you know, did bull riding and food and private parties.[00:03:45] And. Music festivals. And then we were starting to do music festivals around the world and the United States. And so, you know, it's really a, this big sprawling music video that whole 5,000 people. It shows every single day, just about closed one day a year, you know, with food and live bull, riding inside, believe it or not, inside of the bar.[00:04:07] And it's just, you know, it doesn't really look like a music venue. It looks like a barn that might fall in on you at any moment. You know, the ceiling's awkwardly low and in big columns in your way, depending on what kind of seat you have. But. That's Billy buzzes. It sits in the historic dish, the Fort worth historic district, which, you know, kind of sets the stage more, you know, authentic Western culture.[00:04:33] Which is kind of how, you know, Billy Bob's is that it's authentic. It's, they're presenting Western culture through music, food experience, rodeo, you know, that's, that's Billy bouts [00:04:46] Michael Moore: [00:04:46] and don't forget Willie's picnic. [00:04:48] Concho: [00:04:48] That's right. [00:04:49] Michael Moore: [00:04:49] Yeah. That was huge. He had attended a lot of [00:04:52] Concho: [00:04:52] that. I think we, I get how many Willie's picnics, Billy Bob's is hosted, but I ha I, I put on four w during my tenure there.[00:05:00] Michael Moore: [00:05:00] So before we jump into that though, because that is going to be the bulk of the conversation today, let's step back and just talk about  how you grew up things that shaped and defined you college, ultimately, president of Billy Bob's and now CEO of Christie's Altair here in Fort worth, Texas. [00:05:23] Concho: [00:05:23] How much time do I have,[00:05:27] you know, I grew up right here, Texas and, out by Eagle mountain Lake and which was just. It was the country back then, you know, it was, it was just typical suburbia in some ways, but it was just wide open living. You know, the bite, your bicycle is the most important piece of equipment. You could own country club on one end rec center and the Lake on the other end and, you know, just tons of open space.[00:05:53] And it was just. You know, it was good living out there. We were re in a, you know, my, my parents, divorced and remarried. Right. And so, you know, some of my earliest memories, I remember life briefly with my father, but, you know, once those families combined, there was six kids. So. You know, my two brother, my three, my two brothers, my sister was four and then two stepbrothers.[00:06:22] Then life really grabbed me around the head and I was like, Oh Jesus, okay. This is what it's all about. This was first grade or so when we put our families together and. We, we had moved. And I remember the story I tell a lot is, it was all happening so [00:06:40] fast. I didn't even know where I lived. Cause we, I went to Eagle mountain elementary.[00:06:43] The first day of school, I came home on the bus and I didn't know where to get off the bus. I was like, where the fuck? You know, I don't even know the name of my street. And so the bus driver drove me around the whole subdivision until I could recognize that house, which luckily I did, but, you know, I think that's, I think, growing up on the Lake almost every day, certainly influenced me.[00:07:03] I, I love the water and, I would learn to scuba dive and be on the ocean. I mean, I love, I love the mountains just as much, but I just, I really, it was some good introduction. To nature on a daily day basis being out there, you know, and I wasn't really adventurous. I went to TCU, you know, largely because it was right in my backyard and I didn't know anything about schools, you know?[00:07:25] I mean, yeah, it wasn't. Yeah. You know, I was a good, I was a wonderful student, a decent test scores, but I just went to TCU. I just didn't really know what I was getting into. And it was, I was lucky. I was lucky because it had an incredible business school, which I would find out later when I got to Yale, how good of an education I got at TCU and, met my wife at TCU and, you know, really just started establishing my professional career.[00:07:48] After that. I did have the backup a little bit though and say that, you know, part of my life experience was, you know, kind of shaping me was my mother's family is from North Dakota. And just about every summer, We would load up the suburban and drive there. And my parents might not stay there the whole time or my stepdad at least, but I would be there for at least a month.[00:08:12] And we were on the Western edge of North Dakota, a little town called Madora. which is still thriving today, but as a historic place where theater Roosevelt spent a lot of time ranching and hunting, and it's in the Badlands of North Dakota, which are just stunning. Beautiful. Right. And so it was, it was a couple of things.[00:08:32] I mean, it was just unspoiled nature and I would recommend going there to anyone that goes into theater Roosevelt national park is, is worth it. Yeah. So I got a lot of, just this feeling of the natural environment I needed to be involved, you know, and I need to, there's a, something about that experience that, that impacted me and I, you know, it just, it still does kind of show, [00:08:55] Michael Moore: [00:08:55] how far is that [00:08:56] Concho: [00:08:56] from Williston North Dakota?[00:08:58] I think it's about two hours. [00:09:01] Michael Moore: [00:09:01] Yeah. I've had a. Way too many vodka tonics that the Willis country love. If you can even call it that [00:09:08] Concho: [00:09:08] it's a wild place. [00:09:10] Michael Moore: [00:09:10] A really wild place. [00:09:11] Concho: [00:09:11] Yeah. If it weren't for oil, like they've been registered Wellston right in my mind for, you know, the first three quarters of my life.[00:09:18] But. But yeah, and you know, my grandfather who really bought all the property around the door and revitalize that whole historic town, he invented it. Bubble and another project product called snowy bleach. He had come and go gold seal. And so, you know, I got a lot of my entrepreneurial drive and vigor and excitement from him, from his journey from being just destitute young man to.[00:09:47] You know, growing that company and selling it in the eighties, there was us a lot of privilege for being there. Right, right. and I don't know that that was, you know, my favorite part of it or not, but really, I just had a button. They put [00:10:00] on me that said something, you know, and it, it was all wide open. It was like country club, any store, any restaurant trail rides.[00:10:10] Music, all this kind of, it was, I guess I was spoiled in some ways, but, [00:10:15] without knowing it, which is the difference. [00:10:18] Yeah. I didn't know it. I didn't, I knew it was a lot of fun up there and that really was every single summer of my life until, you know, I was late teens or something like that. So that's, before I skipped to.[00:10:32] College or grad school or first big jobs or any of that. I've got to mention that one. And I've been a lifelong theater Roosevelt fan since [00:10:40] Michael Moore: [00:10:40] it's good friends call him Teddy.[00:10:45]no, I mean, I think a lot of us can look back on how we were brought up and maybe we didn't know it at the time, but I mean, I think back to little dripping Springs, Texas, that you know, has produced. The guys that founded Yeti coolers, the guys that founded Diablo, paddle sports, we all grew up in the outdoors.[00:11:05] We didn't, I remember begging for an attender and playing it for like two days and like having dreams about super Mario brothers. And I was like, fuck this [00:11:16] Nintendo stuff. [00:11:17] Like I would rather be outside playing with my friends, building something, fishing, hunting. I mean, that's just, it, it, it defined us right.[00:11:26] Whether we knew it or not. [00:11:28] Concho: [00:11:28] Yeah. I haven't been able to let that one go. I didn't have it in television. Oh, did you have one of those? [00:11:34] Michael Moore: [00:11:34] No, but [00:11:35] it'll be some older than you. Right? So that was a little, maybe a few years, but yeah, but I had the same, same thing, you know, so many great opportunities to be outside where I was growing up and it's thank God.[00:11:47] You know, it doesn't happen these days that way. [00:11:49] So then you're at TC you and. Somehow a more global or at least regional bug hits you. Right. Because you do pick a graduate school, not in Texas. So make that leap for us. [00:12:08] Concho: [00:12:08] Yeah. I think it goes something like this, you know, I was a finance undergrad and just kind of.[00:12:14] Dark and around and a few different things, the equitable, and, you know, you can imagine how successful you would be selling mutual funds and insurance and life insurance and things like that. As at age 21, right. It sounds like a real promising career. And. I didn't really take finance that seriously. I was very interested in it, but I just didn't know.[00:12:34] I was just uneducated, you know, and not doing so well. And, and just trying to think about things that were really inspiring to me and that were meaningful to me. And I'd read a few books, this one biophilia hypothesis, which I want to take you down that path, but then I had this vacation and. Greece with a good buddy of mine, Matt tout.[00:12:55] And then I was, I can remember the moment pretty specifically, we were driving on a bus, go in town to town and it just hit me. I was like, I just, I I've never had that sort of definitive like aha ever in my life, but it hit me on that bus ride that I had to do something that was natural science related.[00:13:16] Right. And it just seemed like the most important thing in my [00:13:20] life, but the time I had to do so, you know, I went through this big process of, you know, being a finance undergrad and trying to get accepted to the Yale school of forestry. Right. And, the reason why I was doing that is because there's about three programs in the United States at the time that had combined degrees that had combined MBA.[00:13:43] And master's in environmental science, juries a knew if I could get into the forestry, the component at Yale, I could. Probably qualify again in the MBA school, but I had to have some science street creds. So I went through this whole process of, you know, taking chemistry classes and doing all sorts of things like getting certified.[00:14:04] I was a red cross canoe guide. I lived on this little Island and beliefs for two weeks on some of the scientific study thing and just everything it could to look like a credible, someone who actually cared about science, right. With a finance degree from TCU. Oh, I spent a, I was an intern at the biosphere for three months, right before I went to jail.[00:14:24] Okay. [00:14:27] Michael Moore: [00:14:27] Pre Pauly shore. [00:14:29] Concho: [00:14:29] Right. I think they might've, the poly shore that might've been, I might've been the target for that. I might've inspired that, but no, it's, you know, our connection to the biosphere. This are the basses from Fort worth right at, which was, that was a big. A big credibility may of getting an internship there.[00:14:46]I got accepted to all three of those graduate programs, unbelievably, and I picked Yale because it was the most, I imagined it to be the most unlike Fort worth. Right. And I didn't hate Fort worth, but it was just a, you know, I could have gone to. Wherever Duke. I forget where Duke but town that is, it doesn't matter, university of Michigan.[00:15:08] And I was like, you know, new Haven, Connecticut. It's gotta be the biggest stretch here. Right? it will be close to New York city. That's how I picked it. And, we were off to the races. W [00:15:19] Michael Moore: [00:15:19] was there anything particular in that, with that you said, you know, that forestry piece, you went into the environmental science piece.[00:15:25] Is there anything that was like particular of interest there to you that you wanted to pursue that for? Or was just pale? I want to go pursue this and then we'll figure out what the after is. [00:15:34] Concho: [00:15:34] Yeah. I just, I had to figure out what the after was. You know, I knew that I just had to inject science somehow into what I was going to do every day.[00:15:45] It's called the Yale school of forestry, but it has really everything from true forestry practice to like corporate environmental health and safety stuff to, you know, all kinds of stuff. But it's the oldest forestry program in the United States. Yale on its own is just a, it's a magical place to be. So yeah, I had to, it was a really figuring out where my career would take me as I was there, you know, kind of like a very late version of undergrad.[00:16:12] Michael Moore: [00:16:12] Right. We all bloom at different times. I just, I was asking just cause I think it's really interesting, you know, you, I feel like a lot of people Tuesday go into those and like when I did my MBA, I wasn't sure what was going to come [00:16:27] out that, [00:16:28] but like, if you're going out with them, the end goal, I just wonder if you kind of have those blinders on.[00:16:32] That's why I asked you. I know somebody, people go in with the open mind, but then people are like, I mean, I go to this, I'm going to get my finance. I'm [00:16:40] going to go back to school and I'm going to go into it. Private equity. Right. And it's such a defined path. And I think you can lose some things in that track.[00:16:48] Concho: [00:16:48] Yeah, no, I think you're right. What did I know? You know, redneck from forward Texas going to new Haven, Connecticut, it was, you know, it, it was, I wouldn't trade for anything. The breadth of people that I met, I mean, different groups of people in the forestry program. And then in the MBA school where, you know, 30% of my.[00:17:09] Class and the MBA programs from China. Right. And it was a, you know, 30% of them were wanting to go to wall street and be investment bankers, you know, or consultants. But, so I had a lot to learn it. I was, you know, what a better place to be. While I was there. I interned at S tobacco my first summer, which is headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, just little train ride, which is just a mindblower wonderful thing.[00:17:38] And then the next summer I was at a United technologies, Sikorsky helicopter, and both of these were sort of environmental. Yeah, corporate environmental type assignments, where you can imagine big companies that have this environmental health and safety kind of component to them in that part of the work.[00:17:56] You know, I decided that's a definite no, for sure. And it's one thing, you know, if my mother hadn't always been telling me Contra, it's fine to learn what you don't want to do. You know, that I would have probably been really panicky. I'm going to be in a little panicky anyway, but what fortunately, what was happening at that time was the national power business was deregulating.[00:18:24] And, there's a little company in Houston, Texas called Enron that. All my classmates wanted to get to work for sure. Right? So it's, that was the hot sector to go with. Right? If you weren't going to be an ibanker or a consultant, you wanted to go into that hour. And gosh, I would say, you know, we had 12 dual, dual degree students.[00:18:49] You know, I think half of them went into power. Wow. Four of them went to Enron, which I really, really wanted to go to work. Fran, Ron, I was so pissed off. They didn't hire me, turned out okay. [00:19:01] Michael Moore: [00:19:01] For you [00:19:02] Concho: [00:19:02] later was a big blessing. but yeah, so, you know, long story, I got a chance to interview at Southern energy in Atlanta, which was a subsidiary of Southern company, which at the time was the largest utility United States.[00:19:15] Southern energy was their unregulated subsidiary. That was just on a tear. And I got offered a job doing M and a there and, in the North America finance group, to me, it was, is a wonderful intersection of science and are already, you know, well, I guess what I've learned more about myself over time is the finance and.[00:19:39] Analytic, you know, that I still had that started TCU, I guess. And then just, it hadn't left me, you know, and plus, you know, there's some admission that, Hey, this is an easier way to make a living than being like the environmental health and safety coordinator for us tobacco. Right? Sure. But anyway, we've got an offer to, to [00:20:00] come to Atlanta and work in their M and a group, and which was.[00:20:05] Just a mind blowing career opportunity that I could talk about for a long time too. But that's where Yale led me. It did, you know, bring me, allow me to combine finance and environmental science, if you will, or science. And, this, it's a great place to be energy is, is full of brilliant competitive people, you know, from all different kind of disciplines.[00:20:30] It's a. It's a, it's a great place to be start post MBA for sure. [00:20:35] Michael Moore: [00:20:35] No, I think that's great perspective for a lot of our young listeners. You know, if you're a fear religious person, you could say that, you know, your, your path has already created for you. It's just your job and influences in your life job to keep you on that path.[00:20:51]but I think, you know, so many young people coming out of school are so worried about their career in, in, in reality, it's like, College and post-college is the time to figure out what you don't want to do. [00:21:04] Concho: [00:21:04] Yeah. You know? Yeah. That saying from my mother, it's okay to learn. What you don't want to do is a thought about that a lot in my life, you know, and it's, it's right.[00:21:15] It's, it's good to win a couple bets and make a few good decisions along the way. Yeah. Saves you time and heartache. But, no, I appreciate all the, all the I've known all the dumb little environmental science jobs I had along the way and finance. Stuff too, you know, but stayed open to it and continues to this day.[00:21:34] Michael Moore: [00:21:34] And so you, you were in Atlanta. What eventually brought you back to Texas? How long were you at Southern? For [00:21:41] Concho: [00:21:41] a, I was in Atlanta for five years, you know, as that Southern energy, which became Mirant. so we spun that company out to get public it branded his mirror and I was there. Three and a half years or something like that.[00:21:55] Like I couldn't ask for it better introduction to advance business and finance and running companies, public and private. And through that experience, you know, I stayed there all the way up until they were about to file bankruptcy after Enron filed bankruptcy and we were all big trading counterparties are, we had a foreign person trading floor in Atlanta.[00:22:16] And the whole sector was about to go down. And so I left, I was a CFO of a startup. Oh, you're fine. So before I, I just decided, Hey, I want to be back in Fort worth. You know, I had to, my kids were born in Atlanta, so I had two little boys and I was like, Hey, if I'm, if I can figure this out, how to. You know, established my career back in Fort worth.[00:22:40] And that's what I want to do, raise them around my family. And so that's, family's really what brought me back, you know, Fort worth, Texas is fine. Yeah, for sure. [00:22:52] Michael Moore: [00:22:52] So is your, is your mind and thought process was being expanded at Yale and your, your different early careers? Billy Bob's was operating 364 days a year down here.[00:23:07] So walk us through the transition that brought you back and, and then start telling us about your time [00:23:14] there, [00:23:15] Concho: [00:23:15] Billy, about didn't bring me back, right. I, I went to work for, cash America [00:23:20] and, which, which wasn't a great fit for me. You know, I ended up. Finding myself back in energy. M and a really quick after that.[00:23:28] Yeah. Right. So, I worked for a company called Optum energy, which was joint venture between PNM resources, the New Mexico power company and cascade, which was bill Gates, right. Private equity. That was a fascinating adventure too. And I love that great time. In fact, some of the people I worked with there have hired to work at Christie's right.[00:23:52] You know, I just, I had this thing going on. It was, kind of a deeper search for, for meaning and what I wanted to do in my career, you know, had, at that point, I'd done a lot of energy, M and a, and never imagined. I would be anywhere, remotely involved in Billy Ball, you know, I mean, at that point, you know, it's like, man, I, you know, I like country music, you know, and I like Stevie Ray Vaughan a little bit more.[00:24:21] Right. You know, and, you too and Pearl jam, but, it just didn't really, it took time. For me to, to get what it was and the Maura was here. You know, I started to enjoy it a little bit and through a really odd set of circumstances, I had this opportunity to go to Beijing, China, and look at ability buds deal.[00:24:46] So the, the owner's ability Bob's at the time they knew me, they thought I was reasonably smart human. I'd been around the world with energy business. So I could. You know, I had good footing to travel and, and all that sort of thing. And, we went over there to analyze a deal, to put inability Bob's in Beijing ahead of the Olympics.[00:25:06] It's 2000, 2008 was the Beijing Olympics. And so I spent two weeks in Beijing thinking about really hard. And we looked at real estate, we went to a bunch of. Ranches and country Western things. And then we went to about every bar in live music venue. We could get our hands on, would go to three or four or five and night for almost two weeks.[00:25:32] And just trying to get our heads around what this meant. And is it possible? My partner in crime was Phillip Murren on that trip, which a man that's probably worth a whole nother podcast to review that. But no, the Beijing trip will be expanded upon in the book for sure. But you know, it really struck me.[00:25:53] We did all these things from going to like symphony type things and the great hall of the people to these little bitty, nowhere bars in Beijing and what. Kind of blew my head off was, you know, you go into these little holes in Beijing and you know, you're just, you're two white guys and you kind of stand out anyway and they're like, Hey, why are you guys here?[00:26:17] You know, we would get that question. And we say, well, we're, we're here with Billy. Bob's we're thinking about. But an ability Bob's here. And every single time, nowhere, Beijing people would say Billy bombs, Billy Bob's, Texas, and things like that. And you know, it just the brand, you know, and it, it was, it was more than a bird, [00:26:40] you know, that was like, Hey, our brand is recognized around the world, but it was, it was what it meant to me.[00:26:46] The opportunity. I'll tell you the opportunity unfolded for me to take over, but for me, what it meant was a way to kind of export Fort worth to the world. You know, I love our lifestyle here. I love the culture and for the people, the entrepreneurial-ism, you know, it's a good place to be. You know, I know you, and I've talked about that.[00:27:09] We it's good stuff. So the idea of being a part of Billy Bob's and seeing what we could do with it worldwide, it felt like a, it was very possible. Like if the, if the dive bars Beijing knew about it, there was something right. And at the same time it had meaning for me, it's like, here's our, here's our hometown, it's Western culture.[00:27:31] It's all these cool things. It just seemed to intersect. And something that was meaningful to me, [00:27:37] Michael Moore: [00:27:37] you know, that's definitely a defining moment, [00:27:40] Concho: [00:27:40] I'd say so. Yeah. So yeah, that was the intro. We ended up not doing that deal, which was. Was, I think it was the right call and, you know, it was through all of that work that have developed a relationship with the owners while I was still at Optim energy, I launched, an offer to buy the whole company, Billy Bob's while I was as a side job, that offer was rejected.[00:28:05] Okay. It got hung up on real estate, which is part of the. Subsequent story, but they locked me up and said, Hey, you know, your dad's going to retire once you retire, why don't you just come run this thing? You know, that coupled with my vision of really taking the brand around the world, I was so, yeah, let's do it.[00:28:22] Michael Moore: [00:28:22] And what year was that?[00:28:24]Concho: [00:28:24] 2011. [00:28:25] Michael Moore: [00:28:25] Okay. So your family's back and Fort worth is 2011. You're running Billy Bob's. From the outsider looking in, it's like gotta be the coolest job in Fort worth to have, you know, growing up in, in Austin. Obviously I was a huge live music fan and I was always so appreciative that as Fort worth was maturing culturally in a lot of other areas, right.[00:28:52] Any night of the week, I could go see a great [00:28:55] show at Billy Bob's now has appreciated that. [00:28:59] So now you're running, you're running the ship. Things are going well, you're expanding the brand globally. And then what happens? [00:29:08] Concho: [00:29:08] Yeah, we're skipping over a lot. Yeah. But, yeah, you know, the, to give the proper sort of diagnostic for, you know, why we, this lawsuit exploded in 2017, we gotta go back just a little bit and I'll try to do this quickly to 2013, 2014, we were at the time.[00:29:31] When the owners were still sort of more together and somewhat United, I guess, negotiating with majestic Realty for a master deal in the belly of, and in the stockyards. So in Billy Bob's is included in that and all our properties are included in that. And, and I was leading that negotiation and it got high centered, it got high centered on this idea of Western heritage.[00:29:59] You [00:30:00] know, to some extent, I don't want to say historic preservation because that's sometimes puts the wrong connotation to it, you know, kind of history kind of overdone in that fashion. But, you know, stockyards is about Western culture presentation, you know, and there's a lot of authenticity to the stockyards based on the past.[00:30:19] And so these ideas came up if, you know, majestic wanted to come in and develop the stockyards and. Now develop all these businesses. So like, okay, how are we going to keep this from being Disneyland? And that's what killed the unity on the first deal with majestic? I can remember Brad Hickman standing up in that meeting and saying, it doesn't matter to me, a bulldoze, any building to make money.[00:30:46] And that was the schism that was late 2013. That started at all. They, the Hickman family went away to negotiate with majestic privately wake up in 2014. And that conflict gets in front of city hall in 2014. And there began the main, there's a lot to that story too. We could get into, but learned a lot about how city hall works.[00:31:14] Right. And I think if you take that idea forward to 2017, it's really two groups of people. You know, a group of people who sees Billy Bob's as this magical a global opportunity to provide like a, an authentic Western cultural brand, kind of an American brand for the world for country music and another group that sees Billy Bob's as just another building in the stockyard is development play that may or may not have conflicts with other.[00:31:52] Parts of that development, you know, and that's what happened. And so there's some really interesting legal money that, that are, that the defendants in this lawsuit, you know, engaged in to try to kind of endure to this day, a lot of, a lot of good learning there, but that was the source of the conflict. You know, I think I wrote about that in my second blog visit, we dropped on that topic, and it was, you know, Hey, If, if you have a big segment of your owners that have conflicts of interest, you can bet that they're going to maximize their interest.[00:32:29] Right. And that's exactly what happened. [00:32:32] Michael Moore: [00:32:32] So how, how many owners at the time were involved in the business? [00:32:37] Concho: [00:32:37] I think when our, when I got kicked out of the company, like. Physically, I literally run out of the building. that happened three times, but the first time we have 11 owners. You know, and me on the small end, I just had a couple of percentage of the government.[00:32:56] I was, you know, president and I was gaining equity interest. And then all the way up to the Hickman to the whole family together had about, I don't know, 30, 40% or something, but, and they were all sorts of different kinds of people. People who've just been in Fort worth and business. My dad was, an equity owner.[00:33:13]the Moran family is multi-generational Fort worth, the Donnie Nelson and the general manager of the Mavericks who I brought into the [00:33:20] company. And then another family called the juries from this part of the world. So it's quite a diverse grid. [00:33:27] Bob Wierema: [00:33:27] Yeah. I just think about that. Like you said, with all those different sets of folks involved, I mean, you've got a lot of different people being pulled and I'm sure a lot of political back and forth and positioning it's, it's interesting when you get that many kind of call it cooks in the kitchen, right?[00:33:44] Concho: [00:33:44] Yeah, I'd say so. I thought I had structured around it in a decent way, you know, coming into it with a. What I thought was a decent company agreement, you know, and delegations of authority and all the things that you would expect in that kind of situation. But it just, it just didn't work out that way. You know, greed and conflict kind of dominated the day and a certain faction decided, Hey, we can, you know, create this legal conflict and.[00:34:15] We'll see who wins. And one of my big learnings from that is, you know, the influence of, of money in court. Right. And what I mean by that. And I think a lot of people know this. I, I, I sort of take this, you know, Hey, I'm such an idiot posture. And when I write about this and talk about this, because I really feel like I was, you know, I didn't realize the.[00:34:42] The battle of scale and attrition that you could set up in court through money. Right? And, you know, there's no, they didn't teach you that at Yale, like, you know how to budget for legal success, class one Oh one or something like that, that, you know, and it's not, it's not that I gotta be careful. I mean, it's, I would never accuse any judge or anything like for taking money.[00:35:09] That's not the thing. It's just, you know, you could be completely wrong, set up a legal argument framework and start deposing people. Creating motions and just create this battle of scale and endurance that if you can't counter it financially, you're going to lose. And that it's that simple. And you know, it's, it's one of those things where, Oh, wait, I've got tons of attorney, friends.[00:35:40] I respect the profession. My brother was a judge. He's still an attorney. completely. I just had this. Yeah, it was at the time I was I'm 40 something. Right. And I should know better, but that's a big learning that I've passed on to my kids. And hopefully I can share that with other people who weren't thinking that way, but good friend of mine would say the court's not a place for the common man.[00:36:02] And he told me that a bunch of times during the lawsuit. You [00:36:06] Michael Moore: [00:36:06] get the, yeah, I mean, I, I I've heard that, you know, saying before he say people will tie you up in court until you got nothing left. I mean, that's a real thing that happens and it's unfortunate. [00:36:18] Concho: [00:36:18] Yeah. Yeah. And we're still in court. We've been in Supreme court and back and still there.[00:36:23] So we're fighters, but, going away just a lot of learning along the way about how all of that works. Yeah. You know, and, you know, even depositions, I had a good friend of mine say, you know, you haven't really grown up in the business still. You've been deposed. And I agree [00:36:40] with that. I agree with that until you've been through that experience and get to post for six hours for two days.[00:36:46] I mean, that'll make you grow up quick. [00:36:50] Michael Moore: [00:36:50] It is not fun. unfortunately I've done [00:36:52] that before, [00:36:53] too. And you're right. I mean, it, Yeah, certainly a few more hair sprouted on the chest by the next day. I mean, it's a, it is a punch in the face and you can prepare all you want, but until you've done it it's yeah.[00:37:08] Concho: [00:37:08] I can remember having an attorney, hand me a document and get really mad that I'm reading it. For starters. I, do you want me to read what you're handing? Right. You know, and it's all about setting up this game where they can pop a clip back up on TV in court, where they catch you off guard, and one question and ruin your credibility.[00:37:25] Right? I mean, that's the whole game. [00:37:27] Michael Moore: [00:37:27] So, so for the back to being removed from the premise three different times, like for our listeners that maybe didn't grow up in Fort worth, didn't don't know the whole history of Billy Bob's like. Just the perspective, like, what does that feel like when you've got family involved, you've got multigenerational families involved, you've got iconic names and in Fort worth involved and you show up trying to do your job and there's literally a lock on the door.[00:37:56] Like, what does that feel like? [00:37:58] Concho: [00:37:58] It's it was, it was stunning, you know, to say the least. And it was, It's scarring. And I still think I'm affected by it in some ways. I mean, I've learned a lot about myself since, but you know, the, we were, we had great success, you know, we were essentially doubled the profitability of the company.[00:38:20] You know, we were, had just done a music festival in Italy. we're preparing to do one in Huntington beach. Did all kinds of, I mean, we were. On a tear. Right. And essentially, you know, had people walk into my office one day and say, you're no longer president. I said, how does that work? You know, and I'll say be sort of the legal maneuver they pulled, but just to get, stay in the zone of what you're trying to talk about there, it was, it was as much of a surprise as you could imagine, you know, there'd been some conflict with these people along the way, but just to say, you know, Hey, your employment contract doesn't matter.[00:39:00] The LLC agreement doesn't matter, none of this matters except for your really bad guy contract, get out, you know, and this was, you know, my dad in the room, you know, a few of them where we would just call the bad guys and I'm just walked out of the building and we had a, we had a great team, you know, and it's, it's stunning for all of them as it is me.[00:39:23] Right. I mean, we had a team that was killing themselves and doing really, really well and pushing the envelope and high performers. Right. And it's just a stunning for the employees too, based on the culture that we had. [00:39:37] Michael Moore: [00:39:37] So when you think about the family dynamic of it, and you've got this divisive line and one set on this side and one set on the other and you're sitting opposite from your dad.[00:39:51] And maybe this hadn't come out yet. Maybe you've got to give it more thought, maybe it's time, but like, why is he on that side? And you're on this side,[00:39:59]Concho: [00:39:59] I think it really [00:40:00] comes down to greed. You know, it maybe to some extent, ego, I mean, I think if you asked him that question of why he's hanging out with the, you know, the people that are developing the stockyards, it goes back to what I mentioned in 2014, you know, there was a few things that happened around then, you know, he found himself.[00:40:20] Wanting to align with the people who, and to develop the stockyards without any sort of historical context. Right. Right. And that was an economic opportunity, I think, in his mind. Well, what I didn't know at the time is that to my other partners were offering him. Real life incentives to align. But I learned that later and, you know, there was, there was also some conflict that occurred just prior with me, my stepmother and my dad, you know, through that whole process of the transition of me coming into the business and they hadn't gotten over it.[00:40:58] You know, there's some imposter syndrome kind of things going on there. And you know, there's a whole lot to talk about. They're given time that I really it's probably worthwhile talking about, but they couldn't let go of not being in control of Billy Bob's anymore. And I think they felt that was my fault in some ways that I was now the president, you know, I'm the president, I gotta be the president, but they weren't supposed to be working there.[00:41:24] And, you know, they were. Just about transitioned out and gone at the time we went through that whole real estate conflict and, that pushed them into a camp opposite of me. You know, I stood up in front of city council and argued for form based code and, you know, some sort of developmental guidelines and control for the stockyards, which.[00:41:46] Would not have occurred, had Phillip and I, and many other people not done that. But I guess to get back to your question, Michael, and an answer, it is, I just can't imagine this, anything other than just someone making their best economic bet. Right. And he made a bet against family at the same time. [00:42:07] Michael Moore: [00:42:07] Yeah.[00:42:08] That's a tough pill to swallow. [00:42:11] Concho: [00:42:11] Yeah. You know, I had it, it was, but I, you know, at that point I already had a few years of that schism, you know, through the real estate conflict. So when I wasn't altogether surprised for an abstinence, a lawsuit, you know, but have him. continue to, you know, work against me for years and years of the lawsuit and what I would, you know, there's all, all sorts of things that I think weren't necessarily on the up and up through that situation.[00:42:39] I don't think the truth was always told on the witness stand and, to saw a really terrible, extraordinary circumstance. It, it was tough, but you know, the, the loss of. It wasn't like the lawsuit ended my relationship with him. It was already kind of ending already. That's an unfortunate aspect of that, you know, to me, it was just so stunning to be on a tear and we were having such a great time and so much economic success.[00:43:08] And, you know, just have that, have that ended was, was I guess, more stunning to me. [00:43:16] Michael Moore: [00:43:16] Yeah, no, I mean, I, every time I went over there to. [00:43:20] To work with you on the insurance and the risk management side. I mean, it was just, you could feel the momentum. I mean, I remember one day I walked in, in your office and you have these virtual three D goggles on, and we're thinking about the concerts virtually it did, it had this amazing amount of momentum.[00:43:38] And then all of a sudden I'm reading this, the paper and I'm calling you. And you're like, there's literally a lock on my door. [00:43:47] Concho: [00:43:47] Yeah. I mean, like the dynamics around, you know, getting kicked out, getting a temporary restraining order, coming back in to kick all those guys out, you know, trying to conduct business while.[00:44:04] You know, the river was literally, I would call it sort of competitive terrorism going on. You know, it was, they were cabling, parking, lots closed, you know, and claiming ownership of them. They, there was a building next door. We did all these events and they tried to claim, we would violate our lease and we needed to get out of that.[00:44:24] They were, sending ex-employees and, and try to spy on what we're doing and, and all these kinds of things. We had $2 million transferred out of our bank account by one of the owners into another bank, which we still have not gotten back. There's every single thing you could imagine, including surveillance me in my home was happening to get us to relent.[00:44:47] Disengaged and just let that happen. Right. But we put up about, and it just, it went round and round. We would get kicked out, we'd get a TRO come back. the judge would make some dumb ruling and the other guys think they were in charge and they would bust in, in the middle of the night and you'd wake up and all the doors,[00:45:10] it seemed kind of childish on some level, you know, it's like wild West bullshit. [00:45:15] Michael Moore: [00:45:15] At what point were you like, I guess maybe more of the question is like, why did you keep fighting it? Right. Instead of just saying, I'm done with this, you know, what made you have that to say, I'm going to continue pushing that.[00:45:29] Concho: [00:45:29] You know, I, I think we, you know, the plaintiffs in the case. Yeah. We felt like we were right. We were right. We were very successful and we felt like we were due or, you know, we were do some justice. I felt like no way, no way are we going to lay down, to this group of people it's so wrong on so many levels.[00:45:50] And that doesn't mean we haven't tried to economically settle. Right? multiple times, have we been on the threshold of saddle again and if failed, but you know, it goes back to what kind of partners you have. And you know, when it's a lot of things are. You know, injected with conflict and, and create, and a lot of emotion, then it's just really hard to get people to settle.[00:46:17] Right. Because, you know, that goes into the dynamic of who's in that group who the partnership group is. But yeah, we, we felt like it was worth fighting for, you know, and it, and at the end of the day, it's more than just Billy Bob and Fort worth. You know, we were scaling to build Billy balls around the world.[00:46:34] And it's that kind of thought process that we were engaging in. We had drawings for a Billy Bob's in [00:46:40] Houston. We just, well, I'd already mentioned Italy, which was just a mind blowing experience to run a 26,000 person festival. And nowhere, Italy, there was more really at stake than just this little 5,000 person venue in the stockyards.[00:46:57] And so that's why we fought so hard. [00:47:00] Bob Wierema: [00:47:00] He brought up a great point earlier about, you know, not learning, in, in grad school, like how to fund a lawsuit. And I mean, we're a capitalistic society, like money runs things, but, and we could do a whole nother podcast on this. I mean, whether it's the legal system and these, you know, Bob and I see him every day, these nuclear verdicts that come down.[00:47:24] Plaintiff attorneys being funded by private equity firms now to participate in the, and the awards, you know, and then politics, right? I mean, just running a race to try to build a platform to do what you think is right. [00:47:39] Michael Moore: [00:47:39] Cost money. And so it's like, there's a tipping point where money has to be a vein of the operation.[00:47:47] Well, why does it have to influence the outcome and how do we, you know, if you're solely looking for justice and what's right, like how do you, how do we fix that? [00:47:59] Concho: [00:47:59] I wish I knew. Yeah. You know, my blog three is, is on this topic and I hope I get to release it soon, but it's, I'm not really staring at a solution in that.[00:48:11] That piece of work. It's really more of saying, Hey, here's, here's the problem that I, I was too dumb to really know in advance. And, and I hate to be that guy that says, Hey, here's the problem. I don't have a solution. You know, this is not how I work in business, but I think this one's important enough to put out there.[00:48:29] I can think of a few things that might help us, you know, break the chain a little bit, but gosh, it's such, it's the system is designed that way. I just didn't realize it when you have elected judges and, you know, you can get into the elect, diverse, appointed judges debate, and you know, how expensive it costs, you know, it is to hire attorneys and get the right kind of representation.[00:48:52] There's all sorts of things you can sort of imagine, but it's, it's such a big structural bear. I just, you know, At this point, it's just something that you have to take in, as you got to account for that in your business, you know, and it starts back with what kind of partners you have and that'll eliminate some of it, but it won't eliminate you getting sued from the outside or, you know, doing something like that.[00:49:18] And you'll be arrived back on court. [00:49:19] Michael Moore: [00:49:19] Right. I just had a, a futuristic blast of like it's Concho, Minnick. A junk professor at Yale teaching the class that you never got to learn. [00:49:33] Concho: [00:49:33] I mean, it's just, it's such an amazing experience, you know, and, and at the end of the day, that's what our life is made up of, his experiences and, and you know, that's why we're doing this podcast to share those, [00:49:46]Michael Moore: [00:49:46] on a lighter note.[00:49:48] Cause I really wanted to ask this question. I remember in one of our tours when you were taking me around and you know, you are looking at this a hundred thousand square foot building that does have this feeling of maybe [00:50:00] falling in on you. And I'm trying to figure out, like, how am I going to explain to underwriters that this is a really good risk that they need to underwrite at a fair price.[00:50:08]but we went to that, that backroom where. All of the artists gathered to get ready to come up on stage. And obviously as president, you got to be back there a lot, like give us a couple of highlights of some of the artists, some of the stories, some of the things that you saw back there as [00:50:24] they [00:50:24] were getting ready.[00:50:27] Concho: [00:50:27] This is where you might need to edit. Gosh, that's, I'd have to say, think about, I've had plenty of great music experiences, on, yeah. You know, Ryan being him is probably the pinnacle of that while we were there, we can talk about that. But in terms of backstage, you know, I never approached it from being in off for some reason, because I'd been around it a lot in my life.[00:50:51] And so I never really, I just. Treat is part of the, you know, the business and really providing hospitality. To artists and gosh, it's hard to, hard to pin it down. We would just back there with little bitty bands, just trying to, with their first ever performance on the main stage, the ability vibes, like guys like Mike and the moon pies.[00:51:13] Right. Who I love and, you know, and it's just. creating friendships with them and encouraging them and, you know, seeing how they're living their life to, Willie Nelson, you know, which is, even when, when you're running the honky tonk, they don't let you close to Willie Nelson. Right? He is. But, who I've I have met and I have talked to, but, in are really Revere.[00:51:39] It's really hard to say a defining moment. I think that when, when you're back there, you know, all the artists are signing the wall, painting their logo and things like that. And so, you know, we're staring at, you know, the Waylon Jennings signature on the wall, right. And then under its shooter, his son, and we just started adding to it.[00:51:59] You know, we're adding Lee, Bryce and rival sons and. You know, Florida, Georgia line. And I certainly had some really incredible, like invited back to the artist's bus experiences. You know, [00:52:17] that's what I'm talking [00:52:18] about. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I did see the, the glowing red eyes, skull bong on, you know, on certain artist's bus, but the I've seen it all in through that context, but, I guess it was an overall impact of just adding to those layers back there.[00:52:38] We were opening up the walls and drawing more and, and having artists sign. And then we reconfigured the room and we felt like we were a part of, of some big momentum that had started decades before us, that we were carrying on and we thought it was important. You know what we were doing. I'd like to think of.[00:53:02] I think there's probably a reason I can't really remember. Yeah. Fair enough.[00:53:10] I met a lot of great guys from, you know, Dwight Yoakum who get hit a lot of times gets a bad rap for being, not such a pleasant human, to Lee. So I really love, [00:53:20] you know, Kevin Fowler. I could go on and on. You know, I don't know. I guess there, there was no real big defining moment where I saw someone pass out and fall on the ground.[00:53:31] Cause I certainly saw that. Right. You know, and all sorts of things that shouldn't be backstage there backstage you see there. And you know, I think it's just the, what I enjoyed about is just the collective. just being a part of helping these guys do what they're doing. You know, I like hospitality.[00:53:51] I figured that out about myself over the years, maybe we like making them feel good about being there and you see how these guys live. It's, you know, some are a really great professionals, you know, and some of them are just making it from party to party. Right. You know, and you, you see all of that. Sure.[00:54:09] See the guys who won't touch a single drop of alcohol until they're backstage after the show. And then you see guys who stumble in to, you know, at three o'clock and their shows at 10 o'clock and you're like, Holy shit, they're going to make it on stage. [00:54:27] Michael Moore: [00:54:27] Right. [00:54:29] Concho: [00:54:29] And so I don't know, it was such a big kaleidoscope of things that happened back there.[00:54:35] Yeah, I've had a few artists asked me to sign my name, you know, next to theirs when, Oh, when we signed the wall. And, and that was great for me to be a part of it. And, you know, we recorded a few albums of Billy Bob's albums were there, and I think that's sort of a dying art form there, but, I don't know if that's real viable business model or long-term anymore, but that was certainly fun.[00:54:59] We recorded Billy Joe shaver. I believe I was when I was there. It's a good one. And you know, then the festivals, right. We, I did for Willie's pig next while I was there. And those are each collections of 20 plus pans, you know, and that kind of cadence to gear up for that, put that on for a day. And interact with all of them in that way and live physically, I could live that experience, right.[00:55:28] It's a lot of fun, you know, and it told us we could do it. And that's what gave us the confidence that our team could do it in other countries and other cities and things like that. [00:55:38] Bob Wierema: [00:55:38] I was going to ask you, as you kind of look back on some of your experiences there and even through what you went through.[00:55:44] Is there anything that if you look back, I know hindsight's always 20, 20, but you'd say, man, I really wish I would've done this differently. Or I did play my cards kind of the way I would play them. If I look back today, [00:55:58] Concho: [00:55:58] gosh, it's hard to say, you know, There was the business had been around for 30 years when I showed up.[00:56:06] And you would think that there would be all sorts of systems in place and, you know, it would be more advanced and I probably should have done my due diligence more. I talked about that a lot, you know, and when we came in, I started doing really innovative things like. Adding some HR, you know, budgeting, right?[00:56:26] Yeah. Who would have thought cleaning up the GL and you know, it was such a Malay of coming from nowhere to something you could really get your hands around on a monthly basis [00:56:40] that. You know, all those business decisions after business decisions, after personnel decisions, you know, there were so many of them that we had to get through so fast.[00:56:49] I couldn't point you to one, you know, that I wish I would have done that differently. I think that, you know, the, the biggest obstacle coming in, which I didn't realize was, was going to be my family. I thought there was just more. Yeah, there certainly love and understanding and relationships there, but that's not what it takes in business, you know, and I didn't realize the extent, Bob of how much my dad and stepmother bill about was a part of their identity, you know, and I probably could have seen more of that in advance and prepared some kind of plan around that, you know, I thought I treated them respectfully when, when Pam decided to retire massive events and parties and things like that.[00:57:41] But it was, I didn't anticipate that it was, they would have such a hard time letting go and it wasn't like I was pushing them out the door, but they knew they had to go. It was time for the new degenerations, but all the owners were asking for right. But it still came back to me. It was, it was, I was the catalyst for it and I don't think they ever really got over.[00:58:05] I don't know what the Brian antidote to that would have been.[00:58:09]Bob Wierema: [00:58:09] Yeah, no, it's, it's interesting because as we've had these conversations here with other, folks in business, you know, the family aspect comes into the conversation and, you know, you get both sides of it. It worked out really well. And then.[00:58:22] You get the side, we're a desert knit. [00:58:24] It's I mean, it's hard. It just puts a [00:58:27] totally different dynamic into a partnership. Cause your point when money and greed and ego gets involved with it and it's family, it's tough. [00:58:36] Concho: [00:58:36] Yeah. And I think that. You know, the whole imposter syndrome thing, like the probability that happened when it's a family situation is I think amplified because parents always have this, some amount of separation between who they are, their, their work life and how their kids perceive them.[00:58:56] And when I got to Billy Bob's, I mean, you just, this whole chapter opens up of well, Damn, I didn't, I didn't know that about you guys. And, you know, I think, you know, I was the smart Yale MBA, right. That was your, you know, fixing everything. And I'm sure I made some mistakes in there with what we did. The results were happening though.[00:59:21] And, you know, I think it bothered, I think my success bothered them in some ways and they felt like they might've been the, you know, the, the generation that. Then maybe they weren't there with the technologies and, and all the things that we were doing. And, I think it bothered them. They, I think they described some of that to me, unfortunately.[00:59:41] And, yeah, there's probably some lessons in there how to handle that better. I felt like I was going slow, but Mayo wasn't going slow enough. [00:59:51] Michael Moore: [00:59:51] Well, yeah. I mean, speed in business is defined by the individual. Right. [00:59:56] So, [00:59:56] I mean, it. Well, it seems slow to you and your sort of [01:00:00] worldly knowledge you were bringing back to sleepy old Fort worth.[01:00:05] Although I would say we're, we're very much in a Renaissance phase now again, I mean, it's, it's, that's interesting perspective, you know, one thing that, I mean, I guess the, for me, like the good in all this, right? Cause we've talked about the legal system we've talked about. Money. We've talked about money, influencing the legal system.[01:00:25] Like I go back to that room though. And it's like, that's where business and art and careers, like all just met. And for that moment before they went on stage and they're inscribing their name on the wall, it was like, all that was just perfect. So, you know, I don't know how this is all going to turn out.[01:00:47] Maybe you can give us a little. Light into the future of what you think, but you certainly created a really special place. And we thank you for that. [01:00:59] Concho: [01:00:59] You know, I, wasn't part of it for, you know, a lot growing up. cause my dad was involved for years and years and you know, I got the opportunity to be president for seven years and then plus, or minus a year of being thrown in and out of the building.[01:01:13] I'm not sure what I created, but I feel great about. Pushing forward. Something that felt really authentic, you know, and when we created the vocabulary of our culture, when I was there, authentic was our first word and I still like that. And that's still one of my favorite sort of cultural words. It felt good to be a part of it.[01:01:39] You know, I don't know how it's going to turn out. I don't know. Obviously what the live music world is going to look like has changed a little bit over the past few months. [01:01:49] Michael Moore: [01:01:49] Yeah. [01:01:50] Concho: [01:01:50] I still love live music, you know, we've, we didn't touch on my bands when I was growing up. We can do that later, but, I love it.[01:01:59] I love hospitality, you know, festivals. I don't know what's going to happen at Villa. Doug's a, hopefully it endures, it will be 40 years old next year. And. You know, I think there's still a lot of good things going for it, you know? And it's, there's still a lot of the original owners hanging on is hopefully we have some permanent shifts here where it can, you know, grab a hold of the new that instill, intersect that with the old, you know, and it can, it can happen.[01:02:30] I'd like to see it happen on a global scale. That's where the real. That's why I took the job. That's, what's exciting about it to me, you know? it's not being managed that way now. There's no global vision there now. And hopefully that gets reignited somehow, you know, cause it really is a nice representation of Fort worth for Texas or in some ways America.[01:02:53] Michael Moore: [01:02:53] Right. You know, do you have any thought on what live music does look like? You know, post figuring out COVID-19 [01:03:06] Concho: [01:03:06] got it. You know, I've really been, just been drug into that in a very detailed way in the past few weeks. because we're the ability that is reopening. Right. And so I've been asked to, to weigh [01:03:20] in.[01:03:20] And talking a lot of my friends at AEG and live nation and things like that. And it's, I really don't know. I mean, I've got to think that the outdoor festival has an advantage, you know, for some right. And maybe that's self-serving because that's what I really love. Sure. You know, I think that's practical for this fall.[01:03:43] Maybe. maybe a little bit later, although most of them are getting canceled. I think you can. I see some real premium, live music entertainment experiences where you can have a lot of space. If I build my own venue, you know, if I get in the music business again, that's probably what I'll do a smaller super-premium is a venue.[01:04:01] I think there's, there's plenty of room to do, you know, 500 or a thousand person shows like that. And that'll be easier too. If people have this ongoing, you know, contagion mindset, you know, whether it's COVID 1920, 21, whatever it is, then they're going to think about that. And. I think it ultimately break down into different, you know, demographics that feel like they're okay to go be shoulder to shoulder with somebody and other people who, who don't, or just don't want to, you know, we're hearing that all the 20 somethings right now, or have the COVID cases are spiking big time.[01:04:41] Right. Because they don't, they're not doing to counter it. Right. I don't even think my 19 year old washes his hands, but. yeah, so I, I really, I wish I had more structural thought than that, but, you know, it's, you know, people are just, you know, my friends in the live music business are really more into like the near term of saving their company.[01:05:08] There's I thought for a long time, there's a, there's a big virtual. There's some opportunities to do, first reality type experiences with music. I still think there's a lot of frontiers there that have not been tapped ticketed events sitting virtually in a seat at a YouTube concert or whatever it is, you know, but, so maybe that accelerates a little bit.[01:05:33] Bob Wierema: [01:05:33] It's interesting. I just today, so, Michael knows Mumbai. My fiancé's a professional ballerina and the Joffrey ballet here in Chicago. And she got the note today. That they're canceling season for the year. [01:05:48] And so for, [01:05:49] you know, for an artist and somebody that's her career and that's her passion and what you grew up doing, you know, she's really struggling with like, what's, what's next?[01:05:59] Like, what do I do? I just kind of got this ripped away from me a little bit. How do I, how do I think about how I can do this? And then I'm thinking about the fans that go in the people and just all that community. That's just struggling right now around. We're not having, you know, to your point. I can't go to an outdoor concert.[01:06:16] I can't do these things that I love. They're a part of my life where my social circle, you know, it's, it's, it's tough right now. [01:06:23] Concho: [01:06:23] Was it her season? Just canceled? Going forward into 2021. [01:06:28]Bob Wierema: [01:0

Connect with Michael and BobThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with Brett KaufmanBrett Kaufmanhttps://brett-kaufman.com/  Twitter: @bkaufman125IG: @brettkaufmanLinkedIn: @Brett-KaufmanFounder, Kaufman Development https://livekaufman.com/IG: @livekaufmanhttps://gravityproject.com/  IG: @gravityprojectHost, Gravity Podcasthttps://brett-kaufman.com/podcast/ IG: @thegravitypodcast [00:00:00] Brett Kaufman: [00:00:00] You know, I think you said that this kind of defining, letting your past to find you, you know, to me, that's really a choice and it's not an easy one. I mean, these are very, very complex things, but it is a choice to rewire. Repattern kind of how you think, how you act and how you create your life and your future.[00:00:23] And most people are unconsciously just recreating their past over and over again. And. You know, at a certain point, I just decided I didn't want to do that. And it wasn't without hell [00:00:36] Bob Wierema: [00:00:36] today on the climb, crossroads and [00:00:39] defining moments, we had mr. Brett Kaufman and join us. Brett joined us and  shared with Michael myself, so many good nuggets and takeaways. We have, I think you could write a book with the quotes that we have taken away from this one. He talks about his passion for sharing and giving back and where he started coming from his childhood to where he is [00:01:00] today. And just a great conversation around. Who he is as a person and how he's continuously striving to be better each day and talks a lot about just being a work in progress and what that means to him and how he's going to continue moving forward.[00:01:25] Well, well, Brett, welcome to the climb podcast with myself and Michael. We appreciate you joining us this morning. [00:01:33] Brett Kaufman: [00:01:33] Yeah, thanks for having me happy to be here with you. [00:01:35] Bob Wierema: [00:01:35] Well, your know, a, you're no stranger to [00:01:38] podcasts yourself, [00:01:39] so, you know, let's make sure we get you a plug for your gravity [00:01:42] podcast [00:01:43] and maybe share a little bit, let's start there with what you're looking to accomplish [00:01:46] there so we can let everybody [00:01:48] know, about your podcasts as well.[00:01:51] Brett Kaufman: [00:01:51] Sure. Yeah. We, launched our podcast last year and have recorded. I think we're over 40 episodes. They're kind of getting released once [00:02:00] a week and really the purpose behind the podcast is really to get people, to tell their life journey, their full life. Journey all the kind of childhood experiences good, bad or otherwise, and how that's shaped their lives.[00:02:18] As they've gone on to have varying levels of success in different areas. And really the point is the hope that the listener will see themselves in these people and in their journeys and take some comfort and get some inspiration to continue forward in their own in their own lives. [00:02:38] I [00:02:38] Bob Wierema: [00:02:38] know when we talked kind of the first time when I was thinking about launching the podcast with Michael and what we were looking to [00:02:45] accomplish [00:02:46] a little bit of a different bend to it, but, but not too dissimilar, which is, I think there's a lot of different points within your life that are, you know, as we say, the crossroads, the defining moments of [00:02:56] when you make a [00:02:57] certain decision or certain things that, that make you go [00:03:00] left instead of right.[00:03:01] So it's kind of cool to see how those, you know, your piece and ours intertwined a little bit. [00:03:07] Brett Kaufman: [00:03:07] Yeah, I think it's great what you guys are doing. And, there's definitely some similarities there. I think, you know, these kind of stories need to be told and, you know, at the end of the day, we're all the same.[00:03:18] We're all kind of grappling with the same things in bearing degrees. And, it's really helpful for people to kind of be together and learn from each other. [00:03:29] Bob Wierema: [00:03:29] Yeah, absolutely. So what's Brett's story, like where does that [00:03:33] start? And maybe bring us [00:03:34] to [00:03:35] today and then [00:03:36] Michael, and I'll pepper you with some questions in between.[00:03:39] Brett Kaufman: [00:03:39] All right. Well, yeah, that's a, could be a really long answer. So I'll try to condense that, you know, as it is with most people, you know, our lives are full and that's been the case for me. I grew up in Akron, Ohio for the first 10 years of my life. my parents had [00:04:00] kind of a, a pretty chaotic, marriage.[00:04:03] My father was, an addict and, abusive and, and struggling quite a bit. And, that led to a divorce and eventually, moved to Columbus where I live today. Live most of my life. And, you know, I like to kind of tell the first part of that story because you know, it really did eventually end up informing who I am in a very positive way.[00:04:27] I have a lot of gratitude for that time, despite how difficult it really was. I got to learn a lot about me. I got to kind of do that in a challenging way. As I went into high school and college, I maybe rebelled and acted out and, you know, did some stuff that was just part of my healing. but it also led me to some interesting people, to some interesting experiences, to things like art and music and design and psychology and stuff that I [00:05:00] really wasn't programmed to.[00:05:01] To really, you know, my father was a big kind of business business business, you know, manlihood be tough, be strong, be a man, go make money, be successful. You know, art music, the kind of softer, sensitive sides of me were not things that were really revered. So. You know, kind of finding that in my rebellion really ultimately ends up leading to, you know, my work today and being able to merge all of that together.[00:05:30]and even that journey, my professional journey was one that wasn't a straight line, you know, my. Patterning and programming from childhood had me fall into a traditional path early in my career in banking and in kind of more corporate settings until about 10 years ago, I started my own business and that business was really the kind of, first of several, that really started to bring me back to that kind of more authentic self.[00:05:58] I'm really [00:06:00] trying to incorporate all of those things. The things that I used to see were outside of work, things that you did on the weekends or on vacation or retirement in that, that could really be my work and my life. And as you know, I'm built to lead, which we have in common as well, was a big part of helping me figure that out.[00:06:21] Bob Wierema: [00:06:21] Well, we, we would be, in a little bit of trouble if we didn't [00:06:23] give a Chet [00:06:24] Scott, a shout out at built to lead because, [00:06:27] that's [00:06:27] how we got connected. I know he's been a big part of my life as well for the last, [00:06:32] I think [00:06:32] almost four years now, one of the things that you said. That I think is really interesting.[00:06:38] As you talked about your parents and taking that situation, I want to go back to it is you said, you know, eventually shaped who you are and you actually have [00:06:46] gratitude [00:06:48] for some of those, you know, probably what [00:06:50] maybe can, I'll say it and you can redefine it, but like [00:06:53] challenges you had in your life. [00:06:55] How did you get your mindset to go [00:06:57] there?[00:06:57] Because I think that's a [00:06:58] really challenging [00:07:00] ship to make. [00:07:02] Brett Kaufman: [00:07:02] Yeah, it is. I mean, you know, I will tell you that candidly, you know, transparently, vulnerably, you know, I've learned to kind of share these things, even though they're still not easy, but, you know, my father was out of my life for probably about.[00:07:17] 10 12 years. He was, eventually, you know, went to jail, found himself really in demise and done some things that, were kind of hurtful and concerning for my family as I had young kids. And so there was a long period of time where, you know, I was not in the place that I am today, this place of gratitude.[00:07:39] And really, it took a lot of work to get there. On my end and on his end and not just, it's not just about him, it's about every body and every thing, you know, and for me, that's a lot of things, you know, I'm a big believer in meditation. I'm a big believer in therapy, you know, coaching, physical health.[00:08:00] [00:07:59] There's a, I think a lot of different modalities that go into really working on yourself, truly working on yourself and, and, you know, at the end of the day, You know, it was a combination of a lot of different things that got me to this state. And it really is a state. It's not something that you can kind of intellectually understand.[00:08:21] You can read a book, you can listen to a podcast, you can hear this idea of gratitude. But for me, it was an embodiment that, that ultimately led me there. It was an understanding of kind of what happened. And in my case, and I think in most cases, what happens is generational. My father did not set out to hurt me and his family and everybody that he loved.[00:08:46] That was not his goal in life. It's generally not people's goal in life to ruin everything around them. It comes to them through their own experience, usually their own childhood [00:09:00] upbringing. And these are generational things. My grandfather, my father's father was a very. A well-intended person. He grew up poor.[00:09:10] They used to say like holes in his shoes kind of for never went to college, started a business with his brother, just selling stuff, door to door, hustling. It turned into be successful. He gave his kids and everything. They never had thinking he was just doing well. And that turns out to spoil them rotten.[00:09:31] So, you know, here we go. Right. You know, and when you start to kind of unpack it and realize it, like, Hey, you know, Everybody was trying to do their best. It's really not their fault. You know, these are generationally inherited and body traumas, and all I can actually do is look at well, how did it, how did it shape me now?[00:09:51] What do I want to do with it? And what kind of life do I want to create from here? When you start to look at it like, well, you know, He was really up my ass. He was really difficult. [00:10:00] Is it okay if I cuss on your show? Sorry, it's just kinda like another just happens, but you know, I look at that as like, all right, well, you know, that did actually give me a lot of drive it actually, you know, this idea of like success and money and business, like, you know, That's that is part of me.[00:10:21] And that part of me actually, you know, led me to things that I'm really happy about. What is problematic is when you don't honor the other parts of you. And when you start to kind of live into this like aligned really authentic way of being, which by the way, I am still, you know, As we say, built to lead a work in progress.[00:10:42] This is an ongoing process. But when you start to do that, you start to be able to look back and say, you know, boy, I'm pretty grateful for kind of all of it. [00:10:51] Michael Moore: [00:10:51] You know, Brett to have that kind of insight and reflection this early in your life. it's something that I [00:11:00] work on too. And thank you for, for sharing all that.[00:11:03] It's you talked about sort of the generational aspect. You know, your, your great grandparents did it one way, your grandparents did it. Another, your parents may have done it another, and those all sort of impact you. I mean that, that's the purpose. And you know, one of the, the leading desires behind our podcast is that those stories get told because we live in this world today where it's so fast paced.[00:11:29] It's 24 hour news. It's Twitter feeds, and the time to really slow down and reflect. And understand that the past can define you. If you don't learn from it, then maybe you're going to repeat it, or you've got a missed opportunity there. So now I really appreciate you sharing that. And my parents went through a divorce, later on in life.[00:11:52] I was in high school, but. To your point. I mean, he, you just kind of pissed off and I'll learn really [00:12:00] early on though, that you pushed too hard on the world and it's going to push back and that can be a pretty uncomfortable place to be. So thank you for sharing that. Anything, anything else you want to share on sort of that, that journey to get to the point where your ability to be so reflective now?[00:12:17] Brett Kaufman: [00:12:17] Yeah. You know, it's an interesting thing. I think, you know, it's, it's kind of a part of my DNA to some extent, you know, it's part of my kind of wiring to want to be reflective and to be in a growth mindset, you know? And I was like, I don't know, 15, 16 years old. I was listening to Wayne Dyer books on tape.[00:12:37] And you know, when I, when my parents got divorced, when I was 10 and my mom took my sister and I to therapy and. And, and I walked out, same when can I go back? And my sister never went back. You know, it's kind of part of me just to, I am. And then, you know, I think it's, it's a lot of work too. I mean, it's not fun to kind of like, really look at your shit and, you know, own it and decide like, [00:13:00] not only do I kind of see it, know it, but like, I'm gonna really like.[00:13:04] Change this behavior. Cause you know, I think you said that this kind of defining, letting your past to find you, you know, to, to me, that's really a choice and it's not an easy one. I mean, these are very, very complex things, but, it is a choice. To rewire re pattern kind of how you think, how you act and how you create your life and your future.[00:13:29] And most people are unconsciously just recreating their past over and over again. And, you know, at a certain point, I just decided I didn't want to do that. And it wasn't without help. Again, you know, coaching, you know, and really, you know, not just the plug chat built lead, like built the lead, changed my life.[00:13:49] No question about it. I didn't know what a co coach was when I met Chad. And that changed my life. You know, I went to landmark forum if you're familiar with landmark, but that was another big, [00:14:00] you know, kind of game changer, understanding, learning about how to create my future and, you know, in the spirit of kind of like the gratitude thing, you know, my.[00:14:10] There's a lot of blessings that I think had nothing to do with me. And maybe, you know, my belief system, which is about, you know, the universe, God, you know, I was, I was blessed with a mother who did everything humanly possible to get our lives on track, a stepfather who came into our lives and, and really, you know, blessed us with a healthy home.[00:14:31] There was a lot of like, unbelievable. Kind of unexplainable blessings that showed up in my life and, and really, you know, helped support me in making that transition. Yeah, [00:14:42] Bob Wierema: [00:14:42] I, I laughed when you, you talk about, look at looking at your shit. I've been having this conversation with a friend and we were talking about just like therapy in general, right?[00:14:50] It's [00:14:50] it's it always just had this like [00:14:52] negative connotation of, well, you gotta do this. You have a problem [00:14:56] and [00:14:56] why should I go therapy? I'm good. I've been doing [00:15:00] therapy and, or coaching for nine years now. And [00:15:04] I can definitely say it's completely [00:15:06] changed my life. And you know, when I kind of share, and when you look at, [00:15:11] when you go down, you start to examine [00:15:13] who you are and you realize like, so [00:15:15] for me, you [00:15:16] look at like looking at my father and I'm [00:15:18] going, [00:15:18] man, my dad is this hero.[00:15:20] You start to go down and you go, [00:15:22] okay. Some of these things [00:15:23] I actually don't [00:15:23] believe. And then you start to get like [00:15:26] a little upset [00:15:26] with yourself and going [00:15:29] well, My dad's my hero. This can't be right. [00:15:31] Like he can't be wrong. [00:15:32] And to your point, like, I love that comment. I'm like, [00:15:36] don't just recreate your past because of all these things that are just built in you in your, your unconscious over the years when you're young and built in.[00:15:44] And they might, if, [00:15:45] unless you examine them, [00:15:47] you're never going to know. [00:15:49] Brett Kaufman: [00:15:49] Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm kind of starting to. Understand this idea that we're all on our own path and our own journey and that the idea of being [00:16:00] perfect and, and, you know, I have, I have three boys they're 18, 17, and 14. And, you know, I have kind of over their lives wanting to put up my best.[00:16:15] Foot forward, you know, really kind of show them the best of me. And I think that's been really good cause you know, I'm intentionally trying to role model something for them that, you know, will be helpful for them in their lives. But as they've gotten older, I've started to really learn that it's equally as important.[00:16:37] Maybe more important for me to show them what I'm not. And, and own my mistakes. there was a kind of a big shift in me probably, you know, seven, I dunno, eight years ago where, you know, I started to really say like, when I, when I would get angry with them or something like, you know, I didn't handle that.[00:16:57] Right. I'm sorry. You know, I, [00:17:00] I kind of lost my cool on that and, and I'm working on that and I, and I'm going to, I'm going to try not to do that, even call me out on it next time I do it. Because I had, you know, my father and I grew up in a household where he was angry all the time. So, so that's what I started to do when the kids were little.[00:17:18] And even though I was sober and happy and, you know, in a very different state, I still had some of that patterning. And so, you know, when I started to kind of like bring the shadow into the light and own it, I think that it was more important for them to see me change. And being perfect because we all are, we all are it's, it's unrealistic to kind of set the expectation as a man, as a father.[00:17:45] That you're perfect. So, you know, that's a lot for a kid to carry. And so anyway, I think there's a, we could talk all day and I'm real passionate about kind of the subject of fatherhood and manlihood and kind of redefining, you know, what that [00:18:00] means. [00:18:01] Michael Moore: [00:18:01] No, we need more fathers like you out there, Brett. I mean, I think about that all the time.[00:18:05] I've got, I've got two daughters. So keep your three boys [00:18:09] up [00:18:09] North of Texas here for a little while, but it's the same.[00:18:17] Brett Kaufman: [00:18:17] Okay. I'm gonna have to rethink a few things, great school by the way. But, no, I mean, I think about that all the time. Like. What am I doing today? If, if, instead of telling my kids what to do, you know, I'm really a mirror to them to see what to do. Right. Big, different way of thinking about it. You know, what am I doing every day to instill in my daughters, hopefully what they're looking for, you know, in, in a, in a husband many, many, many, many years from now, And I work on that every day.[00:18:56] And, you know, going through some of the information that Bob [00:19:00] sent over in your website, you know, I love there was a, I don't know if it was a quote or where I saw it on there, but it said, you know, the way things have always been done is a perfect opportunity to disrupt. And I think, you know, whether it's in life and just repeating the way that our parents were our grandparents and not having this time to self reflect and figure it out, bleeds over to the business world.[00:19:26] And it seems like that's the way you've gone about setting up your company is like doing it differently. And then, you know, in this world, Hilly's growing up and like reading business books about like crushing the competition and being completely relentless. And you know, not only putting your knee on the neck, but just never letting up you're, you're creating like love and happiness and this just amazing environment.[00:19:57] So talk to [00:19:57] us about that. [00:20:00] Yeah, well, you know, I don't subscribe and this is something that again has kind of evolved for me over time, but I really don't subscribe to the idea of disruption. I don't know where you saw that quote and if it was me, I gotta, I gotta refresh it because what I believe happens when you set out to disrupt something and it's a little nuance, but I think it's important.[00:20:24] Is is that, you know, it's kind of like you're punching somebody in the gut and then when you get hit in the gut, then you know, you don't just roll over, you punch somebody back in the face and then now you have a fight and that's not really the goal. So I like to use the word expansion and really that's what I've tried to do with our business is take.[00:20:46] A model early on when we were singularly focused on building real estate, you know, the idea was let's take these communities that have really strong fundamentals. They're there. They're built, [00:21:00] constructed in a way that people are going to be happy to live in them for a long period of time in good locations, we're going to service them appropriately.[00:21:10] You know, we're going to make sure that our staff. Treats people in a way that is of a certain kind of level of experience and creating community. But what if we turn that on the side and made the design something that really uplifted them? And what if we provided amenities and programs and content. And experiences for them to actually connect to their passions, the things that they love and to each other, well, what would happen then?[00:21:40] And so to me, that's just an expansion of something that was there before, and, and that's kind of, you know, the way that I like to look at it, you know, the other thing, you know, regarding the competition piece is. To me if, and this is like a mindset thing, you know? And, and, and I, and I [00:22:00] try, I'm not always there, but I try to have an abundance mindset.[00:22:04] And, and to me it's like, if, if everybody, if everybody in my space starts to build communities that are. Fundamentally built on the things that we value collaboration, connection, passion, love, expression, impact wellbeing. If everybody started doing that well, that would be pretty damn good for society. And I'm not so worried that there's not enough for me.[00:22:37] In that then even if there's not enough for me, I'm so confident now in my ability to just go solve another problem, I'll just go do something else. If that problem solved, there's plenty of problems to start solving. And when you start to think about it, that way you don't really care about your competition anymore, you're not focused on winning.[00:22:59] You're [00:23:00] focused on. On connecting to human beings and changing the world. And that's all you care about. And that's like, there's plenty of work to do in this lifetime there. [00:23:09] Amen to that brother. Yeah, I think, [00:23:13] when you [00:23:14] talk through all that, [00:23:15] talk about maybe how you build that into the culture [00:23:18] Michael Moore: [00:23:18] you have at your company, as well as like, I mean, you have a whole group that's feeling the same way.[00:23:25] Like how do you kind of get your passion and love for what you're doing spread throughout the rest of the company and even just other people around you? [00:23:34] Brett Kaufman: [00:23:34] Yeah, it's an, it's a great question. You know, the thing I did when I started my company was I. Decided, and we're still doing this. It's actually a pretty interesting thing as we're kind of looking at the racial tension and kind of how we can continue to lean into doing the right thing.[00:23:53] But, but you know, from the start, the idea was throw out all the rules, [00:24:00] throw out all the societal. Programming, all of the industry norms just pretend like it doesn't exist. What would we create? If we could create anything? Because we were at a point where it was just me. It's one person I can create anything I wanted to create.[00:24:22] And it was really important to me after spending 15 years in corporate America to Curry a culture. That I wanted to show up and go to work in every day. You know, again, coming back to the gratitude thing, I spent 15 years in jobs that I was not that inspired by, but boy, did I learn a ton? Boy was I so grateful to have that experience?[00:24:50] Boy, I learned what I did not want. And that was really more important, not just like intellectually, like we talked about before, but like I got to [00:25:00] experience it in my body. What it was like to work at a bank where they didn't give you a holiday off, you had to take a vacation day. If you, for me, you know, the Jewish holiday was a one time, a year thing that I observed, and that was a vacation day for me.[00:25:15] And it was like, wow. You know that welcome to the world. I mean, I was 22 years old when I'm learning this lesson, you know? Thank you. Thank you. Fast forward to today, you know, Juneteenth, like it's off. Take it off, that's it that's, you know, I don't care. What do whatever you want on that day, we're taking it off.[00:25:35] And I learned that lesson through those experiences. So for me, culture kind of getting back to your question and culture was about, about who I put on my team. It's kinda similar to the comment you made about, you know, role modeling for your daughters. You know, for me, It's a matter of culture will be built by the example of the people that are there.[00:25:58] It's not me. You [00:26:00] know, I I'm the visionary right in the EOS world. That's my role. I'm the visionary, the implementer, the, the rest of the team. They're the ones that are making it happen and they make it happen by just being who they are. So we look, we look for skill, passion effort, and you've got to have the passion for the things we believe in.[00:26:24] So that our culture can really be something more than just words written on the wall or some idea in my head. [00:26:32] Bob Wierema: [00:26:32] Yeah. It's so great to, to think through how you do that. I think [00:26:37] one of the things I want to [00:26:38] come back to, and then I want to actually come back to what you were just talking about is like, So you're 15 years in corporate America, and you're, you're doing what I'll call like paid training, basically.[00:26:50] Like [00:26:50] you're getting paid to learn all these lessons before you [00:26:53] go to do your own thing. Did you always [00:26:56] know you wanted to do your own [00:26:57] thing? Did you always know it was real estate? [00:27:00] And then like also what made you finally just go. I'm done with this. Like I'm going out on my own. [00:27:07] Brett Kaufman: [00:27:07] Yeah, no, I really didn't know.[00:27:08] I wanted to do my own thing. I think that I was too unconscious, you know, kind of early in my career to really know what I wanted. And, and, and when I did have some kind of thread of, of something that I thought I would want, I didn't have the confidence or courage or capabilities to actually go do it. So, I mean, I can go back to.[00:27:33] I was a lousy student. I just kind of like, this is all again, kind of connected to my childhood. You know, I learned to disassociate from, you know, kind of the chaos. So that meant I didn't ever pay attention in school. And the way school was taught was not like catered to, you know, how I learned. So I was allows the student, but I remember sitting in a, in a class in college, one of the few I attended.[00:27:59] You know, I, I [00:28:00] graduated, but I, I really learned I was on like a, more of a, a life learning track than, the academic one, but I sat in a psychology class where I thought, wow. This is interesting. I could do this, but, but again, like immediately programming comes in business success, looking good, you know, work hard.[00:28:20] Right. So I'm in banking because I wanted to impress my girlfriend's parents, you know, which turns out to work because we've been married for 20 years now. Like, you know, but like, you know, I mean, I'm not lousy banker. Like I'm not, you know, so I'm spending most of my career just going like. How can I impress my girlfriend's parents?[00:28:41] How can I now provide a living for my wife? How can I make enough money to take that vacation? And that's kind of where my mind is and what happens is. I'm about maybe, I don't know, six, seven, eight years into my prior job to starting [00:29:00] this company. And I start to get a little bit of an itch to go really.[00:29:05] I think just make some money. I thought, you know, I'm not making enough money doing this. I'm going to make some extra money. And I did what, like, they kind of tell you. In real estate in today know real estate schools. They didn't have that when I was in college and they say, you know, go, just buy a duplex.[00:29:23] That's like a thing, you know, like, do you want to get into the industry? You know, you've got three ways to do it. You can work for a developer, which is really hard to get a job with no experience. You can go into banking or appraisals or finance, some kind of surrounding industry. Or you just go buy a duplex, you know, and most people go, well, how do you do that?[00:29:46] I don't have any money. You know, I don't know how to do that. And that's kind of where I was. I just used an old banking tie. I had no money. I found a duplex, I bought it and I [00:30:00] started to. Go to work on an idea that I had about how I could turn these kind of inner city duplexes into kind of high design units at an affordable price point.[00:30:14] And that just started to really put me on a path where I did it. It worked, I made some money. I'll never forget cashing that check going. Wow. I did that like that, that was like, that was pretty cool. That was fun. And I, it took me still, you know, probably another five years to make the jump from that point.[00:30:38] But that was the beginning of me being an entrepreneur thinking, you know, now I did, you know, I'm in strategic coach and they talked about the four seats commitment. Courage capability and confidence. And they go in that order. So when I, when I bought the duplex, I made a commitment, then came all the fear.[00:30:59] Am I going to [00:31:00] fail? Is this going to work? And as I started to go through it, you know, I got the courage to go through it. Then I started to realize like, Hey, I actually know what I'm doing here, capable. And then I was confident. And, you know, you keep kinda jumping back in on that. I brought all that learning back to my company.[00:31:17] We started to rehab. All of our old units started to work there. I started to use that confidence, those capabilities to keep kind of going through that cycle to the point where I was ready to make a jump. And, and it wasn't just the kind of four CS. It was also at the same time. there was, there was three.[00:31:39] Key events. And I know this is maybe a long answer, but I think these are kind of important things to touch on. And we talked about it a little bit before, but all within a three month period, I went to landmark forum. I started working with Chet. They built a lead. Landmark taught me that I could [00:32:00] create anything.[00:32:00] I wanted to create that my past was not defining my future. Built. The league, taught me how to have a world view and an Opus and really kind of write what I wanted to do with my work and my life. And then I went to something called summit series, which was a, it was a, it was actually on a cruise ship. and it was a big kind of.[00:32:23] A conference of sorts, but it was all these young entrepreneurs that were like doing super cool shit. It was like the founders of, or like Google and PayPal, early days of those guys, charity water, wasn't just tech. It was philanthropy, environmental stuff. I mean, all these super creative entrepreneurs.[00:32:45] Gary V was there. I'd never heard Gary V before. This is 2009. I actually ended up at a dinner with just Gary V and two other people, which was like totally random, but it just blew my mind. And I [00:33:00] came home. I'm like, wait a minute. I can create my future. This is what I believe. And I just saw a whole boat full of people doing it.[00:33:08] I'm taking the jump really, you know, kind of the combination of all those things that got me to start my own [00:33:14] Michael Moore: [00:33:14] business. Hey, Brett, you talked about skill, passion, and effort. How do you know for, for our other business owners, entrepreneurs, C-level listeners, how do you go about identifying talent and then retaining [00:33:33] Brett Kaufman: [00:33:33] the talent?[00:33:35] Well, you know, it's a bit of an art. It takes some work and some experience to do that. You know, when we, when we first started a company, I was a little too. Focused on the passion piece of that equation. I was so, so convicted that we had to have a culture of a certain time that we were go out and hire people out of industry that had no experience.[00:34:00] [00:34:00] And in some cases that was good for our leasing people. I didn't want the industry normal kind of typical salesy approach. You know, this is in 2011, we were kind of one of the first to make sure everybody was working on iPads and, you know, doing all the cool techie stuff. So I was hiring people out of retail, people that had brand experience.[00:34:25] And in that case, you know, the lack of skill was really. A benefit. But when it comes to maintenance, when it comes to accounting, when it comes to finance comes to operations, you need people with skill, right? So, you know, we've had kind of calibrate that and try to find people that have all three, they can demonstrate all three.[00:34:49] And you know, what happens when you have that kind of a high bar is it's much harder. To attract talent, but it's worth it because you [00:35:00] can retain people and it makes your life easier. If you've got really a players, top talent, people that have all three of those things, it frees you up to do the things that you're really good at passionate love that love to do.[00:35:16] And so it's just a discipline of ours that we really stick to. [00:35:20] Bob Wierema: [00:35:20] Brett talk about too, [00:35:22] you know, I know that you guys are using built [00:35:24] to lead it, Kauffman. Talk about that investment in your [00:35:28] people [00:35:29] and how important that is. You know, when you talk about training development and building culture, [00:35:35] Brett Kaufman: [00:35:35] Yeah. I mean, it comes back to kind of the comment around expansion and kind of why we do what we do purpose for me.[00:35:43] And, and, you know, this is much easier for me to say now that we're, you know, almost 10 years into this and I've had a lot of success, but for me, All along. I have always gotten the most pleasure out of seeing [00:36:00] people grow in their lives, but it really probably goes back to that psychology class. It's probably what I was meant to do and work that I'm actually coming around to now.[00:36:12] But I, I started to really do it through my company and built the lead was. I'm one of, it's not the biggest vehicle that we utilize to really help. Other human beings, which is ultimately the most important part of everything that I do now, I am super focused on creating new companies, new products, new organizations, investing, coaching, speaking, the podcast.[00:36:43] It's all about how do we improve the human experience? How do we make. A difference in other people's lives and built the lead does that. So, you know, when, when I have somebody that comes to me and says, and this has happened to me, actually a couple of times recently [00:37:00] they've turned to me and said, Hey, I'm leaving.[00:37:02] I'm going to do X. I've always wanted to do that. And I learned that here. I learned that I should go follow my dreams. I wrote my Opus. I know that I believe. And I'm going to taking the job. That's to me like high five, like, I don't care. What kind of hole you just left in my company who I'll fill it, but like high five.[00:37:26] That's why we're here. When somebody, you know, we say, we want you on fire either here or there. Right. It's built lead thing. So, you know, to me, Not only has it been incredibly impactful in my own life to be on fire, but it also gives people that opportunity, in their lives. And, you know, that's just like a triple bottom line.[00:37:52] Cause I've got people that are on fire, share my passion here. And then I've got some that are going out into the world [00:38:00] and sharing their passion in the world, you know? And I think because. We have that mind step because we have that kind of built into the company. I think it also hits our bottom line. I mean, I think it's part of the reason we're we're successful.[00:38:16] And I actually don't know if that's true, but that's what I tell myself. And I've never really cared enough to find out cause the other parts are just too important to really care. [00:38:29] Michael Moore: [00:38:29] No bread. I really appreciate that mindset because I've left. Jobs before knowing that, you know, and understanding who I am and where I'm going and the things I want to accomplish, you know, maybe I had done all that I could do there.[00:38:43] And it was time to branch out in a different direction and have that previous person not be excited about that is just not, I don't think that's truly leading from the front, like you're talking about. And you know, if, if, if that's your, your goal to have [00:39:00] that. Have them have that deep understanding of themselves.[00:39:03] Although I was reading an article you were quoted in this morning that Carl Young quote, the privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. I mean, that's what you're talking about, right? [00:39:15] Brett Kaufman: [00:39:15] Yeah. Yeah, it is. And, you know, you know, coming back to the, to the role modeling, you know, the other, young quote that I love along those lines is I won't get the exact quote, but it basically talks about the, the life of the unlived parents and that, you know, and that, that one was really one of the big ones that got me that.[00:39:39] Take the jump that I needed to show my kids what it meant to really live and to not be filled with regret and resentment and worry and doubt, you know, that the taking a jump and an investment in my life, you know, really would be the most important thing I can do for me [00:40:00] and for them and for others. And you know, I'll never forget Chet once said this to me, and I've heard this kind of in strategic coach now, I think Chet said.[00:40:08] At the time, you know, whatever it was going to cost was about the price of like an administrative assistant. And he said, you know, You could have that and that's going to like, get you, whatever it gets you, right. Or, you know, you can invest in this and it'll maybe change your life forever. And boy, has that been kind of the cheapest investment I've ever made?[00:40:32]when I think about, you know, kind of how it's changed me, My relationships with my wife, my kids, my family, and my business. I mean, you know, cause some people, you know, want to talk about, you know, the bottom line, you know, I've made way more money because of bill to lead and you know, the other kind of way to look at it.[00:40:53] You know, Dan Sullivan from strategic coach talks about it's an investment, you know, it's not, it's not an expense, [00:41:00] it's an investment. And you get to decide, is the investment paying off or is it not. And in my case, you know, I've found the more that I engage in learning, the more I engaged in networks, the more I surround myself by other really smart people that also have the same mindset, the same abundance growth mindset that investment pays off over and over and over again.[00:41:27] Brett. [00:41:27] Bob Wierema: [00:41:27] How do you, how do you separate chasing the dollar versus chasing and living like your life and your living, your, you know, as we talk about and built to lead your Opus or what your, your dream is like, how do you separate those two? Because what, what I realized, sometimes you talk to some folks it's like, Hey, if I just get to this point, [00:41:46] I'll be good.[00:41:48] And then you get there. And that next milestone is, is [00:41:52] up in front of you. [00:41:53] And what I've tried to do is separate [00:41:55] those out. Cause [00:41:56] if I keep doing that, like my fiance is always like, [00:41:59] yeah, but if you do [00:42:00] that, you're just going to find something else [00:42:01] to go to, which is what built the leads got me to do is [00:42:04] realize more that it's not just about the dollar.[00:42:07] So how do you think about that? [00:42:09] Brett Kaufman: [00:42:09] Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different kind of threads to pull on there. You know, one is that. I, I, I learned not to look at them as separate. That's the, that's the thing, like I'm a for profit business, but I'm also trying to really make my difference in the world. And, and I don't think those two things are separate.[00:42:31] And in fact, I actually think that the key to me making. Money is really the passion for, for trying to change the world. And the more I understand that, the more that I experience that the more I realized how wide open that is. Like, for example, Headspace, you know, the meditation app, it's got like a billion dollar valuation.[00:42:57] No, I don't know how the, I don't know the origin [00:43:00] story of that, but I sure as hell know, 20 years ago when I started meditating that had, I had the confidence. And the, and the courage to go, Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. If you could kind of bring this to the masses, I can make a billion dollars. You know, I didn't, I didn't know that then, but that is the way forward.[00:43:19] That is how I think money is made is finding those things that you really, really are passionate about and connecting the two. And then, you know, the kind of. You know, Chateau, Brianne quote, from bill to lead that, you know, you can't tell the difference if you're, you know, playing or working, you know that right.[00:43:37] So that's kind of the goal, but there's, there's also, you know, kind of some mixed feelings that I still grapple with on the kind of throwing the stick out. You know, part of me thinks that's really good. Part of me thinks that you, you should have really, you know, big dreamy. Aspirational goals and you [00:44:00] should hit him.[00:44:01] And when you hit him, you should throw it back out. And that's part of, kind of, you know, what drives you forward. I think you have to though at the same time, kind of check in with yourself and decide, well, you know, what's really running here. most commonly and for me, I had. Something that I call not enough.[00:44:26] Right. And that was part of my childhood again, that, you know, there was this big, big, you gotta be perfect. You gotta look the part, you gotta sit up straight, shake a hand, look in the eye and make money. Be successful. Big, big, big wealth, wealth, wealth. Well, That was fine. Cause it's served me to get to where I am.[00:44:48] But at a certain point I realized, no, wait a minute, why am I continuing to do this? I have enough, I am enough, but why, why do I throw the stick back out? And [00:45:00] when you, when you kind of make that shift, you're like, alright, well I'm throwing it out because. Here's what I'll do with the money. You know, I can continue to invest in other people.[00:45:09] I can continue to give back. I can continue to create a life for myself. That's joyful and fun and full and whatever. Right. It's not that you got to say, you know, I got to stop making money. Money's bad. You just need to kind of be aware of what you're doing and realize why you're doing it and make sure my case, you know, in this quarantine has been really amazing for this, that you're not on that treadmill.[00:45:40] And like in that rat race and unconsciously, you know, trying to get more and more and more and missing. That kind of very thing that you're actually after, which is like love and connection and time with your family and, you know, things that, you know, I find to be more fulfilling than a dollar. [00:46:01] [00:46:00] Michael Moore: [00:46:01] Do you think the 20 years of focus on meditation helps keep all that clear?[00:46:08] I think so many of us have ideas like that, but then you get sidetracked you're over here, you just, you miss that, that ability to truly focus on the important things and his meditation helped with that. [00:46:23] Brett Kaufman: [00:46:23] Absolutely. It has helped. With that. And, you know, I want to also kind of just say, like, it's not like a silver bullet.[00:46:32] A lot of people feel like they struggle with meditation. And I did for probably 10 years, you know, I was. Thoughts thoughts, thoughts, monkey burning monkey brain, you know, is it working? I don't know if I'm doing it right. You know, and, and wherever you start and wherever, whatever experience you have, it's perfect.[00:46:51] That's exactly what you need. You know, they say, if you fall asleep, great, you were tired. It's fine. You know, if you have thoughts the whole time, perfect, you [00:47:00] needed to move your thoughts. And so, you know, I'm a huge fan and proponent yet, you know, as time has gone on and in more recent years, my routine has expanded beyond meditation.[00:47:16] You know, so like a morning for me is I woke up this morning. I meditated, I have kind of like an affirmation prayer that I use that I just repeat every morning. I write in a journal every day and I've started this new thing about kind of like one life lesson that I, have, learned in a story. And I write that out every day I worked out, I sat in my sauna, you know, went downstairs.[00:47:44] Returned to me, email, grab a cup of coffee and here I am. And you know, at nine 30, you know, and I'm usually getting go on nine, nine 30, which is, which is also a new discipline for me, you know? And, and by the way, before that, I, I made sure I got, you [00:48:00] know, seven to eight and a half hours sleep. That's also a key part of it.[00:48:05] You know, I'm feeling like I've, I am really ready to go. You hit that point. Cause you know, I've, I've moved a lot in energy. I've gotten a lot of stuff kind of out of me that has me showing up clear and conscious and energized and focused and you know, Happy. So it's not just meditation, you know, it's, it's, it's a number of things and, and that continues on throughout the day.[00:48:33] I mean, I, you know, I now, you know, have lunch with my son every day. I'm working from home right now. I, you know, we'll, you know, go for a run or play tennis at the end of the day, before we have dinner. And. You know, I'll, I'll take some time to read, you know, later in the evening, spend time with family, take a walk with my wife.[00:48:54] I mean, all of those things really, really add up to how you [00:49:00] can go. You know, the idea is that you, you don't wait until your, your battery on your car dies. before you start driving, you know, and before you charge it, you charge the car and then you drive, you know? And so that's kind of the philosophy I have is you gotta constantly be charging your batteries so you can drive [00:49:22] Michael Moore: [00:49:22] great perspective.[00:49:23] Bob Wierema: [00:49:23] Right. I was, I was looking for you this morning on the Peloton, but I didn't see us. So [00:49:27] we'll [00:49:27] have to find another one for that. [00:49:30] Brett Kaufman: [00:49:30] Yeah. Well, that was fun. I, I, you know, and then that group got me going and, you know, there is something about, you know, being with other people and I've not been on the bike since, it's too nice for me to be riding indoors.[00:49:46] So I go out and run or do something else outside, but, that was fun. You know, there was a lot of learning in there that group, the motivation that trash talking, you know, dot me going. I'll tell you, I, I really [00:50:00] enjoyed that. [00:50:00] Bob Wierema: [00:50:00] So Michael Chet, the mutual coach we work with during when this whole isolation thing started, right?[00:50:07] He's like, we're going to do this tour de isolation [00:50:12] for all these people that have Peloton. And he, [00:50:15] he was, you know, we had all get on the bike at seven [00:50:18] 46 in the morning and or whatever the time was in, in we'd have what part? We had 22 people on there, something like that. Yeah. It was a good group. And. I mean the, the [00:50:28] personal records [00:50:29] that were set, the people pushing, I mean, it was like [00:50:31] you would get on.[00:50:32] And usually when you do a 45 minute ride, the first five minutes, [00:50:36] it's like a warmup, but [00:50:37] everybody's getting nine, 10 minutes before. So that when we start, they're just going full go. And it was like, I remember getting off at the one and [00:50:46] Chad actually calls me after [00:50:48] and I [00:50:48] Brett Kaufman: [00:50:48] had been laying on the [00:50:49] ground for like 30 minutes.[00:50:51] Cause I just had [00:50:52] nothing left in me and I'm like, [00:50:54] I'm riding it. Stationary bike and just put in, lay in everything on the table. But like, [00:51:00] it was like, how do you [00:51:00] create that? And that's what Chad's been taught. We've been targeted. How do you create that Peloton with your team? How do you create that [00:51:07] thing?[00:51:07] That people are always [00:51:08] pushing each other and, you know, a healthy amount of shit talking in there too, and, [00:51:13] and bust in each [00:51:14] other, which is fine. I think. I like to think of myself as a rather athletic person. Right. And I'm like at the bottom of this group [00:51:21] and Chet has not [00:51:22] let me forget that, you know? So like [00:51:25] if you're at the bottom, I'm pretty sure I was, I was beneath you.[00:51:30] And you know, it's a funny thing because what happened was I really thought I was, you know, at the bottom. but, but there's another guy here in Columbus is a good friend of mine. Also a client. And we were kind of debating, which one of us was at the bottom, which is Chad had that power in a weight ratio thing.[00:51:48] And I was just focused on output. I'd win on output, but I lose on powered away. And so we would, we would argue over that, but, but what I ended up doing [00:52:00] was what motivated me was the personal best. And so to me, that was kind of an interesting learning is like, if I just go out. And beat my best every time what happens and, and, you know, I ended up putting up numbers.[00:52:16] You know, I, I never thought I could do. just watching that little, you know, number and my staying above it, you know, how far above it can I get and, you know, just kind of, you know, learning that, you know, maybe that's all you need to do is go out and do your best every day. I know [00:52:34] Michael Moore: [00:52:34] that's no, that's great.[00:52:36] Well, Brett. [00:52:37] The one thing I wanted to touch on too, that you've mentioned throughout this whole thing was you talked about then constantly kind of going back to this passion you have for sharing and giving back. [00:52:47] What does that mean for you going [00:52:48] forward? [00:52:49] Like, what are some things that you're doing in that world [00:52:51] that are, that are giving you the opportunity to share and give back?[00:52:56] Brett Kaufman: [00:52:56] Yeah. You know, it's a lot of things and it's kind of continuing [00:53:00] to evolve. So w you know, we do a lot of engagement with community, a lot of nonprofit work. I'm a big believer in collaboration. So we, we're an early investor and do a idea that, you know, it was really nothing more than an idea at the time, but it turns out that now it serves as a portal for.[00:53:22] The corporate community of Columbus to access, volunteer philanthropic opportunities in the city. We had just wanted to make that a big part of our business. We were trying to do it ourselves and. somebody came into my office and had kind of this technology to do it. And, and so we invested in, so now every kind of big corporate company in the city has hundreds of people volunteering around the community, that kind of stuff.[00:53:52] You know, we, we love to do, I do a lot of mentoring and investing in entrepreneurs, [00:54:00] supporting people in their work in life. I'm, you know, kind of learning. Coaching I've been doing it kind of casually and informally, but I'm starting to kind of learn how Chet does things, how other coaches work and, and start to do some more coaching.[00:54:18] I think things like the podcast are my way of giving back. As, you know, not everybody has the Joe Rogan deal. So mine is kind of falling into the investment category at the moment. And, and, and, you know, but I love it. And I think that, you know, when I'm out walking around and somebody stops me and says, Hey, you know, I really got a lot out of that podcast, you know, to me, that's how I'm giving back.[00:54:46] I'm speaking, I'm sharing this story. I hope it means something to people. you know, again, we'll, we'll do a lot in the kind of charitable volunteer serving on boards, that kind of thing. But, you know, [00:55:00] mostly I think it's about really, being with other individuals and supporting them in their journey is.[00:55:07] Directly as you can, either with your time or your money, you know, trying to do that full capacity. [00:55:15] Michael Moore: [00:55:15] So, Brett, one of the things that we talk about on this podcast a lot is, you know, there's that saying? You heard probably when you were growing up of, it's not what, you know, it's who, you know, and then Bob and I talk about it's, maybe it's not so much who, you know, it's, who knows you.[00:55:33] And so with, with this platform, What else do you want to share with our audience about the true breadth and where you're headed? [00:55:43] Brett Kaufman: [00:55:43] You know, the true bread? That's a, that's a good question. I mean, it's, it's still emerging. I think, like I said, it's a work in progress, but you know, I think what I'm learning is what I'm starting to land on is that, You know, the, the true bread is, is both [00:56:00] kind of, this, paradox of, of, you know, kind of creating, really making things happen, but doing it from a place of full expression from vulnerability, from the sharing myself, and my experience in life with people in its entirety, honoring the things that, you know, really, I think are oftentimes.[00:56:24] Not as broadly accepted, you know, that continues to be a theme, that kind of story about meditation. Well, what kept me from really doing the Headspace kind of thing. And I, that wasn't my idea, but you know, when I, when I started meditating, I was hiding in my car doing it, not telling me, telling anybody I was doing it 20 years ago.[00:56:47] It wasn't really. Cool to meditate. Right? So the more that I can kind of buck the, the, the kind of societal programming and not worry what's accepted and what's [00:57:00] not. And just honor those things that feel really true to me, to me, that's where the true Brett is emerging. And, you know, this idea of really kind of trying to.[00:57:14] Elevate consciousness to optimize the human experience to kind of aim towards this oneness, you know, with, with what's going on in the world right now. You know, my belief is that it is our target goal purpose. In life to aim for oneness. And that's really what I'm after. I'm trying to figure out how to can constantly do my part, to bring people together, to put our differences aside, to not let the separation, you know, really kill us.[00:57:47] Cause I think that's, that's the biggest. Issue that we face. and, and how to do that, you know, in a variety of ways through starting businesses, you know, supporting [00:58:00] entrepreneurs, coaching individuals, and work in life and working on myself above all else, constantly, you know, continuing to improve myself, loving my family, and friends, you know, that's, that's really, you know, kind of what I'm, committed to.[00:58:18] Michael Moore: [00:58:18] That's great. Yeah. As we talk about, you made the comment of being on fire, I can definitely see that with you. I love the passion and, and like this whole, [00:58:27] Brett Kaufman: [00:58:27] your whole thing [00:58:28] Michael Moore: [00:58:28] about optimizing the homey experience. And I love, [00:58:31] Brett Kaufman: [00:58:31] love [00:58:32] Michael Moore: [00:58:32] getting to know you better and talk to you more, and we really appreciate you spending some time with Michael and I today that to share your story and your words, wisdom.[00:58:40] I know I took a lot away from our conversation today, just personally. So we appreciate you sharing everything. [00:58:46] Brett Kaufman: [00:58:46] Yeah, no, it's my pleasure. And, you know, it's always a pleasure to be with other built to lead clients who, you know, are, are focused on trying to, live their best life and, and, [00:59:00] you know, On purpose and, and that's always fun.[00:59:03] And I really am appreciative of what you guys are doing. I think, you know, the idea of sharing these stories is really important. It will make a difference in people's lives and, you know, it's, it's, somebody said, you know, when. When one teaches two learn. So, you know, for me, I've found that, you know, as I'm, you know, listening to people's stories, I'm learning a ton.[00:59:25] So yeah, it's for other people, but it keeps giving to me over and over again. So, I'm sure that'll be your experience too. And, yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me. [00:59:36] Michael Moore: [00:59:36] But if your son needs another tour of. The UT campus down there in Austin. I'm happy to oblige hookah. [00:59:45] All right. That's great. I'll be there in August so far.[00:59:49] They're planning on going back on time. So we'll be, we'll be moving in and the heat. but we're excited for him. We we've spent some time there and [01:00:00] it's a great city and an awesome school and he's, he's all fired up. So it should be fun. Well, we'll [01:00:06] make sure that everybody gets to know to visit your [01:00:08] podcast.[01:00:09] We'll tack that. And then [01:00:10] the, the notes, the gravity podcast and, and, you know, if they move to Columbus, make sure you're moving into a coffin, development. So thanks again, Brett. We appreciate the time. [01:00:20] Brett Kaufman: [01:00:20] Yeah. Thank you guys. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.[01:00:30] Michael Moore: [01:00:30] thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the client. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider subscribing. And if you know someone who you would think would enjoy the podcast, Feel free to share this with them. Thanks again. And we'll see you on the next episode. [01:01:00] . 

Connect with Michael and BobThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with Chris PowersFollow Chris on TwitterListen to Chris' PodcastCheck out Fort Capital[00:00:00] Chris Powers: [00:00:00] I mean, just fundamentally. I think it's how some people are wired and not everybody's wired this way. But I remember when I bought my first house, I thought, well, if I can just get to 10 houses, like I'm set and then you get to 10 houses and, and as you get there, you enjoy, like, I don't even know if you enjoy it because now that you have 10, you need 20 and is like, you never really arrive at where you think you're going to arrive to that.[00:00:24] The journey kind of is the destinations. I figured that out pretty early on that every time I kind of set my life is like, if I can just get to this point, everything will be okay, or I will have done what I needed to do you really just realize that that's just another step in the journey. I think if, if the journey ended, we wouldn't see companies like Amazon and Apple and all these things they would have ended way before.[00:00:49] Right. and that's kind of the entrepreneurial spirit is like it never really in.[00:00:57] Michael Moore: [00:00:57] Welcome to the climb. I'm your cohost [00:01:00] Michael Moore. Today we will dive deep inside the mind of a man transforming the real estate landscape of Fort worth and beyond meet Chris powers, founder of Fort capital. An amazing family man with quotes like we're just going to need faster horses. Don't buy all the land first and humility is the ultimate super power.[00:01:23] This podcast is one you will listen to more than once. Listen to the Climb.[00:01:36] Chris powers, welcome to the client. [00:01:38] Chris Powers: [00:01:38] Thank you for having me. It's been fun watching this get started. [00:01:43] Michael Moore: [00:01:43] Well, I can, I think I can speak on behalf of our cohost Bob, where I'm, you know, he and I came up with this idea about 90 days ago. But I was preparing for this this morning and look back in my notes and it was the fall of 2019 [00:02:00] that I started really listening to your podcast and set a meeting with you.[00:02:03] And so, you know, I think. From both of us, you're kind of the spiritual founding father of our podcast. So we're excited to have you on and look forward to an engaging conversation this morning. Yeah. Back in and talk about, you know, Chris and not so much where you are today and where you're going, but let's, let's dive back a little bit.[00:02:23] Born in El Paso came to TCU, kind of walk us through the beginning stages of, of Chris power. [00:02:30] Chris Powers: [00:02:30] Yeah, so I was born in El Paso, Texas. My mom lived there, her whole life. My grandfather had lived there pretty much his whole life. So El Paso runs very deep in my family, lived in Lubbock for a few years. My dad was a, a practicing attorney for 13 years.[00:02:50] And then at 37, decided he wanted to become a doctor. So stop practicing law. We moved to Lubbock, so he could attend a medical school [00:03:00] at Texas tech. We moved from one year to Connecticut to do his first year of residency, moving Texans up to the Northeast. Probably wasn't the best decision we did one year.[00:03:12] And we moved back to El Paso to finish and I finished high school there. I graduated, high school a year early. So I accepted my, my letter to TCU. when I was 16, came to TCU and I was 17, played a lot of golf in high school. I cherish El Paso. It's where I get a lot of, probably my values. And, it's an awesome place.[00:03:35] Came to Fort worth in 2004 to go to TCU. And I've been here ever since. TCU was incredible for me. Like it is for a lot of people college. I met a ton of people. I started my business. I have to stay in Fort worth. After where I met my wife, been married for six years. I have a three and a half year old and a she about to be one year [00:04:00] old, two daughters.[00:04:00] So yeah, life's pretty good. [00:04:03] Bob Wierema: [00:04:03] I just wanted to ask one question, cause it was [00:04:04] really intriguing to me. [00:04:06] So tell me [00:04:07] real quick, your father [00:04:10] just says, okay, I'm done with, with being a lawyer. I want to go be a doctor. Like what made him do that? I mean, that's, that's like pretty wild. [00:04:18] Chris Powers: [00:04:18] That's about as wild as it gets.[00:04:19] And when you're a young kid, I was seven. When we, when we went to medical school in Lubbock. And I guess you just, your dad tells you that that's what you're going to do. And you just maybe think that's like a normal thing that people do. And, I'm now 33, I've met a lot of people and I've never met anybody else on the planet.[00:04:36] That's on it. His dad was an attorney. so my dad grew up in the Northeast. he was, from Rhode Island. Went to Virginia then went to Harvard law and at Harvard wanted to really, always wanted to do like an intro in Texas or one of his summer deals in Texas. And he had a roommate from El Paso. He moved to El Paso and that's where he met my mom over the [00:05:00] summer and ended up moving there.[00:05:02] But I don't think he ever really wanted to be a lawyer. I think his dad was a lawyer and I think a lot of people fall into that trap of my dad does it. I don't really know what else to do. And I honestly now looking back on it, I give him, while it's a crazy thing and it's not something I would recommend everybody do as I get older, I really admire him for.[00:05:23] Really being willing to say, like this, isn't what I love doing. And making such a drastic change to do something that he would be happy doing. He had always wanted to be a doctor and even at 37, you know, he's just become a partner at a law firm and everything. He just said, like this isn't going to be fulfilling for me the rest of my life.[00:05:40] And we did it. And so, again, as weird as it was, and, you know, we could have a whole podcast on what it's like to go to medical. Let's go when you're 37, it's something I really admire him for is. Really just kind of doing what makes them happy. I think there's a lot of people that probably don't ever make a big change because they're kind [00:06:00] of keep the status quo or, so not something, I knew at the time, but something I've learned as time goes by.[00:06:06] Michael Moore: [00:06:06] Do you draw down on that though? Is his you're making decisions at four capital and you've got a pivot or maybe launch into something new. I mean, do you, do you see yourself reflecting on your dad's ability to go. This isn't the right direction for me. I'm I'm changing everything. I'm moving my family. I'm. [00:06:25] Chris Powers: [00:06:25] Yeah, no, I do. I think, especially during like a, we can talk about kind of COVID and that experience, but I think a lot of life is you're kind of in your own head telling yourself your own story and, you know, you, you look around and what other people are doing. So you kind of anchor into that. Like, there's not a lot of other people that make changes or, and then you kind of keep telling yourself that story and.[00:06:51] I think it's probably something that just comes with age it's like you only live once life is finite. It could be gone tomorrow. Being part of YPO is, has been [00:07:00] huge. And we do a lot of these exercises. One that I'll never forget that we do every couple of years is. and I would, I recommend everybody do it is imagine you're at your 80th birthday.[00:07:11] And your wife, your kids, and your coworkers have all come to enjoy your 80th birthday and your wife is going to give a speech. Your kids are going to give a speech. And one of your coworkers is going to give a speech and you have to write out each person's speech. What are they going to tell you on your 80th birthday?[00:07:31] And when you look at life backwards like that, and you think of what do you want them to write? You don't want them to write, you know, I never saw my dad cause he was always working. my wife, like it was, he made a lot of money, but. You know, I never saw him. So it didn't really matter your coworkers or, you know, and when you're put in that frame of mind, it makes you think a lot.[00:07:54] And it puts you in a perspective of like, what am I doing now that I don't want to be written about when I'm [00:08:00] 80? it's just a powerful way to kind of look alive. And he certainly did that. [00:08:04] Michael Moore: [00:08:04] I love that I've had a, a pretty spiritual reflective morning woke up this morning, realizing that my youngest daughter's 12.[00:08:12] Chris Powers: [00:08:12] Yeah. [00:08:13] Michael Moore: [00:08:13] And like you, I have two daughters, but it, you just sitting through thinking like, Oh my God, she's been here for 12 years. You know, what have I been doing to influence who she is today and who she's going to become? it's impactful to think about that. And, and daughters are pretty special.[00:08:32] Bob Wierema: [00:08:32] They're awesome. And Mike to like that point too. I think one of the things that, you know, we've talked a lot over the years of knowing each other and then even as we translate and think about what we're thinking with some of the guests on our podcast is like, [00:08:46] we're moving so fast [00:08:48] these days, and there's so much going on in our world.[00:08:51] So like, [00:08:52] you know, [00:08:52] Chris, I mean maybe the question you is like, how do you kind of slow down and think about that stuff when you got. You know, you're running a company, you're trying to [00:09:00] figure out the balance time with family and kids. And then also, you know, as you're trying to write that kind of legacy, like, I mean, there's [00:09:08] so much going on.[00:09:09] So how do you keep that front of mind and slow down and make sure that it's always there? [00:09:14] Chris Powers: [00:09:14] Yeah, that's a great question. That's probably something that, you know, had we done this two or three years ago? I probably would have answered different in two or three years before that probably even more different.[00:09:25] Well, I think the thing that I've always it's come natural to me is there's a lot of people that have done what I want to do, and they're just people and they exist in this world and they're we call them mentors or people we look up to is, I've always. Found it just super natural that if there's something I'm trying to get done, the best way to get started in doing that is by finding someone who's done it and done it really well.[00:09:51] And then just kind of building a relationship and, hearing from them. And so on the kind of question of balance and how to keep it all [00:10:00] together. That was something that started becoming really important to me, probably right when I turned 30. 30 is kind of a, I guess, a number I'm 33 now, and a gentleman local here named Pete chambers, is someone that we've at breakfast every Friday.[00:10:17] And he's, he really started teaching me about doing things intentionally now that I wouldn't regret later in life. And he's sold his business. He's part of a group called the halftime Institute, which. Traditionally works with folks that, have either retired or getting ready to retire, have done well in business.[00:10:38]you know, by business metrics, they've done well financially. they thought they were doing everything right their whole life by supporting their family and come to find out they, they get to that light point. They always wish they would get to, and they kind of look back and they didn't really meet their kids.[00:10:55] You know, their wife that wasn't really their, their coworkers, [00:11:00] you know, while they hung along, it was never a great relationship. And they end up with like a lot of regret thinking all along. They were just doing the right things. And so. You know, we talked about that early on and, it took a long time of just talking about it, but he's helped me to really just realize, like, you're only going to live once staying an extra hour in the office, isn't going to change your life.[00:11:22]but spending an extra hour at the pool with your kids might. And it's just putting it all in perspective. And I would say, I say it like, I have it figured out I constantly am challenged with it daily because the world is moving quick. The pressures of running a business are high, but I think it's just like anything in life, you have to practice at it.[00:11:40] You have to be intentional about it and talk his talk, but you know, you kind of got to live it out. So I think for me, the biggest kind of learning experience so far is just being super aware that. Balance you find. And really the most successful people and successful maybe three years ago for me, was defined as like a huge business that [00:12:00] makes lots of money and supports employees and something I can bring home to the family and really success in life is when you've taken care of your family, your faith in business, and kind of all of it together.[00:12:13] And I guess it's more just a mindset and being aware of it. And I don't think, I think a lot of people don't become aware of it until way later in life. [00:12:21] Michael Moore: [00:12:21] No. That's great perspective. As we think about our mission with this podcast to talk about crossroads in defining moments, preparation, and again, going back to the, the two daughters thing and, and, you know, again, I was being very reflective this morning, but in reading up a little bit, there was an article about, and this is, this is personal, so we don't want to go there.[00:12:45] It's okay. There was an article about. What I took away from, it was things just happen for a reason. [00:12:53] And you're, [00:12:54] in-laws had made a donation to the NICU and cook yeah. [00:13:00] Before your daughter had to be there. Yeah. So if you don't mind just sharing a little bit about the, that would be impactful. [00:13:07] Chris Powers: [00:13:07] Yeah. So everybody's always like having a baby's most exciting time.[00:13:13] Your first child, we had a little bit of a different experience. My wife, unbelievable trooper went on bed rest at 20 weeks, and was in the hospital for six weeks. Could basically get up to go to the restroom. But, other than that had to be kind of flat on her back. And we had a daughter born at 26 weeks, 14 weeks early.[00:13:33] You know, we're not on video, but I can show you a picture of my wedding ring, would slide all the way down her arm up almost up to her shoulder. One pound five ounces spent four months in the NICU. Everything you think is important in life. Like one, the day she was born, it was a, it was great, but it was also the pride scariest day of my life.[00:13:55] You haven't talked about it in a while, but you bring a one and a half pound [00:14:00] baby. into the world and. Who like the odds for anybody listening of a baby, living a full life is pretty, pretty low three and a half years later. She's doing incredible. You would never know she was born early, but those four months, it's just another kind of impactful moment of like what's important and watching this little resilient, childlike grow.[00:14:22] And, you know, I remember thinking she'll never hit three pounds. That was such a big deal. And yeah, it was really tough before all that business was, where I spent all my time and I ended up spending four months, pretty much in a hospital or at my office. I don't know, it was a critical moment. The child health care that cooks delivers and that they're able to do with kids now is, is incredible.[00:14:47] And even crazier as my brother-in-law's now going to be a neonatologist, which is interesting. But yeah, my inlaws had made a. Donation to the hospital that provided some technology that really [00:15:00] helped advance the neonatology. And sure enough, they didn't know it, but their granddaughter was going to be one of their first babies to use it.[00:15:07] Bob Wierema: [00:15:07] That's crazy. I was just going to ask Chris, you know, when, when you go through those things and you know, we all have, people are alive, we'll go through difficult things. Like what, like where did you find that strength? To go through that. I mean, I can only imagine emotionally how you were and then like providing that strength to your wife too.[00:15:25] Like where did you find that? [00:15:28]Chris Powers: [00:15:28] one, my wife, she was a trooper. she, she was, she was really positive. I don't know. She had a calmness about her. That was easy to draw off of. I was probably trying to hold it together, but. She was incredible. You know, I'm a believer in the Lord. I'm a Christian. I've probably become a stronger Christian over time.[00:15:52] I haven't, it hasn't always come natural. and then just a lot of good people, but I will tell you it's it's not easy. And, and then, [00:16:00] like I said, it's just watching my daughter. It's like, I'm not going to be the daddy that's crying while I have a two year or two pound baby. That's, you know, I'm not saying really fighting every day for the first two months of her life to kind of kick it into gear and get it going.[00:16:15] So that in and of itself is inspirational. [00:16:19] Michael Moore: [00:16:19] No, thank you for sharing that, Natalie. Thank you. The, my, my oldest daughter, [00:16:24] who's now, you know, 14 [00:16:27] going, gonna be a freshmen at Trinity Valley in the fall. Not quite that early, but I think four and a half weeks early and bringing a kid into this world is hard enough.[00:16:40] And then you get blindsided by wait a minute. There. They need more time before they get here. you know, from a, from a defining moment, I mean, it's like, I can go back to. The level of concern and stress and, and just chaos. And it makes the hardest day at work. And [00:17:00] what we do, like, are you kidding me today was easy.[00:17:02] Right? So that's the thank you for sharing that that's great perspective.[00:17:08]Bob Wierema: [00:17:08] And Michael, you know, it's funny, like we've had these, all these it's different conversations with folks and Chris, you know, I heard this from you, like your first thing was like, where do you find that strength? And you said, well, I found it from my wife.[00:17:21] And I think one of the resounding themes that we've heard from a lot of conversations is, you know, that importance of their partner in life and how. They rely so heavily on that. So maybe, you know, if you're, you're good to share a little bit about, you know, how you and your wife kind of worked through things together and how that kind of compliments into your career as well.[00:17:43] Chris Powers: [00:17:43] Yeah. I think Charlie in like Warren buffet always say the. The first best business decision you'll ever make is who you marry. Yes, it's so true. Like if you, if you're running, being a business or you own a business, it's taxing on them, you have to have someone that supports you [00:18:00] and wants to see you succeed and, support your dream.[00:18:03] And so I couldn't imagine, you know, if we were at odds on that, that would be very tough. Then my grandfather always used to tell me marriage, it's hard at best. It's, it's hard, especially when you start having young kids. When you live with anybody, your whole life. It's hard at the same time. That's why it works.[00:18:22] And that's why it's awesome. I can tell my wife anything as time has gone by, another thing that, you know, just somebody told me early on is like, you know, always ask your wife her judgment on something. Cause if you're bringing on a business partner or somebody, he would always say, go to dinner with his wife and him and then just enjoy dinner and let your wife.[00:18:44] It's kind of tell you what she thought about the dinner. Cause she's going to see something you're not going to see. And just as time goes by, I rely on her and she puts up with me and late nights and, you know, COVID, I wasn't getting home till nine o'clock at night for [00:19:00] probably a month and a half straight.[00:19:02] But the other part, I think I continuously, we have to remind myself is finding ways to show her. I'm appreciative of it. Easy to take the role of like, well, I'm working hard, that's my job. And again, you get to your 80th birthday, right? It's like, yeah, you worked really hard. And we never went on a date. We never did a vacation.[00:19:22] You know, all those things at the end of the day. You're not, you're not collecting brownie points at home, just working harder necessarily. If that makes sense. [00:19:31] Michael Moore: [00:19:31] A hundred percent there in Nate. Ability to just call your own bullshit. I mean, it's just, it's unbelievable. The how fast they can cut through it and go, Michael, Chris, Bob, like, what are you talking about?[00:19:45] Chris Powers: [00:19:45] Sure. And you guys know this. I mean, you you're, you're running your companies now and there's not, when you, when you run a company. It's funny because most people won't call you on your bullshit. Right? it's, you know, I don't want to say the higher up you get, but people don't call [00:20:00] you on your bullshit.[00:20:01] And then you get home after not being called on it all day and they're willing to like pound it right at you. And sometimes it's hard to, you know, it's hard to take it with humility and understand it, but my wife has no problem calling my bullshit and God bless her for it. [00:20:17] Bob Wierema: [00:20:17] You know, Chris, it's so funny you say that because. I can't tell you how many times I've come home. And I tell my fiance on ice. I say, well, here's what's going on. And I'm all fired up about it. You know, there's all kinds of anxiety or stress around whatever the situation is. And I explain it to her and she goes, well, why don't you just do this or say this? Then I'm like, Holy shit. You're right. Like, this is a lot easier than I just made it out to be.[00:20:41]Chris Powers: [00:20:41] Yup. It's it goes back to that kind of story. You tell yourself inside your head and it kind of keep building on it. And all you're really doing is like it's fictitious almost the story you tell yourself sometimes is it's way bigger deal.[00:20:55] It's like any hard conversation. The hardest part is just getting to the conversation. Then you [00:21:00] have it and you feel like you let the weight of the world off your shoulders. so. [00:21:04] Michael Moore: [00:21:04] No. I love that. well, dive in back in Chris, to, to what you've built, right? I mean, again, the story of you, one thing we kind of.[00:21:16] Pivot into this, on, in the podcast we've done previous to this one is like, there's the saying of, it's not what, you know, it's who, you know, but then you can take that further and say, it's not what you know, it's who knows you. Yeah. And I've just been, is an outsider looking in, but someone that is so.[00:21:35] Invested in Fort worth. And now to the point in my career of making sure I'm doing everything I can to give back to this great city, too, right? Yeah. Like you've transformed an entire. Segment of our city. Yeah. They didn't have a lot going on. I mean, I had to drive past it to get to shady Oaks, but it was, it didn't have a vision.[00:22:00] [00:21:59] So talk to us about how you, how you got there and what you want people to know about. How you define that and then, you know, ultimately where is it heading?[00:22:08]Chris Powers: [00:22:08] Yeah. I had to wonderful parents, both very loving. They were a great model of, of a marriage. I had everything I wanted growing up doesn't mean we had all the money in the world.[00:22:21]when my dad went to medical school, It was kind of a reality change. We were been a lawyer. My mom was from El Paso. He had been a partner, you know, we're kind of on the up and up. And then you go to a situation where in medical school you're making no money for four years. And then in residency at the time, I think he was making 30 to 35,000 a year with two kids and a wife.[00:22:45] It was a really great period, even though I was young, you know, they're like in medical school, going out to roasters cafe one time a month was like a big deal. And those, those kinds of roots were just [00:23:00] always in me. So the entrepreneurial spirit of like, you know, I didn't have a huge allowance. I didn't get.[00:23:05] You know, everything I wanted, but my dad was always like, if you'll go mow the lawn, if you'll wash cars, if you'll do et cetera, et cetera, you know, we'll get you a baseball glove or whatever. And that kind of, once I got into my teens, I started selling golf clubs on eBay. before eBay was really a thing.[00:23:22] This was like in the early two thousands, basically. And when I got to TCU, I met a guy again, kind of who, you know, a guy named Adam Blake, who had just won entrepreneur of the year. And he was buying houses around TCU and he taught me how to buy houses around TCU. And I started. Was it basically a zero down loan, 3% down, 6% cash back at closing.[00:23:48] This is Oh four before the real estate that doesn't happen anymore. It was a day when you could be 17 years old with no credit or history and get [00:24:00] alone. And started buying rental properties. And I formed a website called rent by tcu.com, which at the time that was still kind of a novel idea. People weren't going online to rent their, their houses, started managing properties and really didn't start it thinking that real estate was like my forever career.[00:24:19] It was more of a college thing. The market was really good. And then, I don't know, I kind of always assumed I'd probably go to like wall street or something and. Get some investment banking or whatever that seemed like a big job back then. And then, Oh, eight hit. Right as I was graduating. And, I ended up sticking with it.[00:24:38] Didn't really have, have an option. I had these houses, I had this company. I hadn't really planned. Even if the market hadn't crashed, I'm still not sure how I would have gone to wall street with what I had already built here. But. Right before that crash, I got a line of credit which really kind of was a pivotal moment, a revolving line of credit.[00:24:56] And when that crashed, it allowed me to go start buying foreclosed houses, [00:25:00] basically with cash. And I mean, I could take you through the whole series, but fast forward, 16 years, we're now. We have 22 employees, we have about $450 million of assets under management, raised over a hundred million dollars of that, but I haven't been done it all.[00:25:23] I've the team I've built around me is, is exceptional. and to your point on, on Fort worth, just being here in Fort worth and being a small company. Started developing around TCU and, then went down into the West seventh area. And you mentioned shady Oaks. I would always kind of had started doing deals.[00:25:44] We're buying unentitled land and titling it, and then selling it to developers that would transform a whole area. And that's where I started kind of. Figuring out how areas changed, and would drive to shady Oaks all the time in this spot, along the [00:26:00] Trinity river. it was just astounding to me that it's a beautiful part of the city.[00:26:05] It's flanked by the river on three sides. It's between, you know, kind of river crest and Westover and, Crestwood and Monticello in Arlington Heights and West village. All these great. Places to live. but there was just this area that, just probably hadn't been given the attention that it needed.[00:26:23] And so we raised some money and to say, I had this huge vision really early on would be, not telling the truth. We just thought, okay, we could buy a bunch of land and. We kind of had the game plan of how we could get it rolling and what turned into kind of a, let's do a couple of developments and buy a bunch of land turned into, we bought a bunch of land and really became a master developer and kind of figured it out.[00:26:49] As we went, we almost bought too much land. Nobody wanted to come in and compete because we owned all the land less than number one, if you want to. If you want to bring in other people, don't [00:27:00] buy all the land and Fort worth, given a ton to us. And the city's an incredible place. I mean, you never meet somebody from Fort worth that doesn't love living here.[00:27:11] And we, turned in, we turned kind of a big land play into this big development and, Five years later we've built or we've been a part of 2000 apartment units under construction. We have a senior living facility coming over 125 townhomes. We've built office buildings, retail, and we've really kind of built a little micro city over here on the West side of Fort worth.[00:27:37] And, we're six years into it that. Over time has brought in other people that are now doing their part Jackson. I really think over the next 10 years, 15 years, you'll see this whole side of the city completely true and form, for the better. And it's been the most challenging project I've ever worked on.[00:27:55] It's been a lot of sleepless nights. Development's [00:28:00] really, really hard. Especially in an era of social media and now people can congregate in chat rooms on next door to talk about the neighborhood. People are okay with good news, bad news change is always met with confrontation. And so a while it's been super gratifying and I think it's great for the city and an unbelievable positive.[00:28:23] I think some of the challenges that you just face when you're changing a neighborhood is. You know, the resistance to change and things of that nature. And so we've tried to be a leader. We've tried to do the right thing. we can't make everybody happy in development. but I'm, I'm really proud that, you know, for decades to come, I'll be able to look on this area and, know that we have played a significant role in changing it.[00:28:46] Bob Wierema: [00:28:46] Chris, what, when you think about. Your business and it could maybe the core of what you do. Like what, what draw, you know, is it, Hey, I really have this love for real estate. Like where does the passion and love come [00:29:00] to have these late nights and to have this vision and go out and put everything on the line for some of the, you know, like a project like that, like where does that all come from?[00:29:12] Chris Powers: [00:29:12] I mean, just fundamentally. I think it's how some people are wired and not everybody's wired this way. But I remember when I bought my first house, I thought, well, if I can just get to 10 houses, like I'm set and then you get to 10 houses and, and as soon as you get there, you enjoy, like, I don't even know if you enjoy it.[00:29:29] Cause now that you have 10, you need 20 and. It's like, you never really arrive at where you think you're going to arrive to the, the journey kind of is the destination. I figured that out pretty early on that every time I kind of. Set my life is like, if I can just get to this point, everything will be okay, or I will have done what I needed to do you really just realize that that's just another step in the journey.[00:29:54] I think if, if the journey ended, we wouldn't see companies like Amazon and Apple and all these things, they would have [00:30:00] ended way before. Right. and that's the entrepreneurial spirit is like, it never really ends. And so I love real estate. While we have a big development here in Fort worth, and that's kind of what the we're thought of in the community.[00:30:13] I'd say 80% of our company actually, invest in real estate, outside of Fort worth buying commercial properties and operating them really well. Specifically industrial. don't talk about it a whole lot, but we've raised two funds and invested in over 40 venture capital, early stage companies in Silicon Valley through some people I know up there and yeah, real.[00:30:36] Estate's been great to me. I love it. There's never a dull moment. There's always a deal to be done. You never quite, you know, quote unquote, get there. And it's, it's a longterm, it's a longterm game. met phenomenal people and look being in Texas and DFW and is been a bright spot. If you're in the industry, real estate in [00:31:00] Texas has done extremely well.[00:31:01] And, There's no really sign of slowing down anytime soon. I don't even think COVID could slow down the real estate market in Texas, just from a, this is a place people are going to be moving to and a place they want to be for a long time to come. And I don't see any end in sight to that. So yeah, I think real estate I'll be in it for a long time.[00:31:20] I have other dreams and thoughts of what I could do in business, but for now I'm putting all those in real estate.[00:31:28]Michael Moore: [00:31:28] Love it, the, he we've talked, he hit on COVID-19 a little bit just to kind of address it for what it is. One of the themes we've been talking a lot about on this podcast is like, you know, that's a, that is a defining moment.[00:31:42] We're all gonna remember where we were and what we did of those 90 days and what it looked like six months from now or a year from now, [00:31:48] et cetera. [00:31:50] Couldn't agree with you more that, we're very blessed to be in the metroplex going through this. Cause there's a lot of places that were hit a lot harder, but you think through [00:32:00] that and, and I think you've had some, some phenomenal guests on your podcast that have hit on this too.[00:32:06] It's like the old economy versus the new economy. [00:32:10] And. [00:32:11] We could spend four hours on that. But as you, as you think about that with this sort of wedge that created that, Hey, what do you see on the horizon outside of, of what you're doing with, with, for capital, but then also how it affects you guys? [00:32:26] Chris Powers: [00:32:26] Yeah.[00:32:26] Think about it a lot. I think the pandemic in COVID in a way. It poured gas on a lot of fires. So it accelerated a lot of trends that were already happening. So coming out of these, the trends that kind of maybe would benefit from something like this. Like if you just take the state of Texas, you're hearing about a lot of migration from California and New York, other States that have handled it differently and that are much more dense and have more dense populations.[00:32:58] The trend of Texas was [00:33:00] already happening that might have been accelerated. No, I think about like industrial. I always say like, you know, for every there's so many things I say probably around industrial, but for every billion dollars of online sales, there's a 1.2, 5 million square foot need for industrial.[00:33:17] So if you just simply took the stance of yeah. If you just took the stance of. even pre COVID, are people going to be ordering more online over the next 20 years or less online? That's like an easy way to maybe make a bet on industrial and then COVID hits and people are forced for 90 days to basically do everything online, not just shop, but you know, now you here zoom and all these other things.[00:33:41]but maybe an interesting. A thing is there's old big generation, you know, the over 65 or they never really adopted online and didn't shop on Amazon. I still went to the grocery store and did things how they did when they were kids. That's what people do. well, they were forced to learn online and there's like a new there's [00:34:00] 20 to 30 million new people that will probably change their habits and not go back, which it makes the online business more robust.[00:34:09] How I think about the pandemic. And I've talked to a lot of business owners, the unemployment is the tragedy. The good news is that there's a, there's a God program to pay them. And I think a lot of those jobs will come back, but. A lot of companies figured out in 90 days that they could get the same amount of work done with less people.[00:34:32] And so there will be some jobs that don't come back purely because maybe they shouldn't, I wouldn't say they shouldn't have existed to begin with, but once you were able to be given kind of this 90 day window to figure out new processes and adopt new technology, you realized you didn't need them, but you don't really get the opportunity to ever do that.[00:34:52] If a. Pandemic or something. This severe happens. Now having said all that, there's all these businesses that are [00:35:00] going to start out of this. I mean, commercial sanitation businesses are growing four or 500% in the last 90 days there, you might not go back to the job you had, but there will be new, a whole new economy created from it.[00:35:14] And. If you anchor into, well, the only way that we're successful coming out of this as if we go back to where we were 90 days ago, you could be disappointed, but if you anchor into let's embrace, like the change that we received and let's kind of focus on how we can. Take a part in joining the companies that maybe have tailwinds behind them or opportunities that will come in the future.[00:35:40] It's kind of, I don't want to say, like, I don't want to say that what's happened. Isn't tragic because it is, but it's kind of exciting that there's kind of a new way of. Doing things and we'll figure that out. And the truth of the matter is we've done it for hundreds of years. I mean, if you had asked people in the early 19 hundreds, if they wanted a car, they [00:36:00] would have said, no, we just need faster horses.[00:36:02]it happens over and over and over and over again. And this is just another point in history where people are going to innovate. And again, We worked hard the last 10 years in a bull market, but I wouldn't say you can say you grinded, but when you put people's back really against the wall and you unleash American potential, which were the greatest HubSpot of innovation on the planet.[00:36:26] I think you're going to see a new generation of people born that have a fire in their belly that, that we haven't seen in a long time. And you give a bunch of Americans, some fire in their belly and no frickin telling what's coming over the next 10 years, but I'm excited to see whatever does, it's tough to, it's tough to say that while we're still in it.[00:36:44] Right. But it'll happen in history tells us that it happens every single time. [00:36:50] Michael Moore: [00:36:50] Well, when we were catching up, he said, you know, because of the zoom calls and. You're constantly looking at yourself and other people looking at you. Like there may be a boom in plastic [00:37:00] surgery. [00:37:01] Chris Powers: [00:37:01] There's consequences. [00:37:03] Michael Moore: [00:37:03] There's probably a pretty good baby.[00:37:05] Boom coming too. I mean, he's been at home together for a long time. [00:37:09] Chris Powers: [00:37:09] Oh yeah. [00:37:10]Michael Moore: [00:37:10] and so, so maybe the, the COVID-19 creates our next baby boom. And maybe they do have that fire in their belly. I agree. [00:37:16] Chris Powers: [00:37:16] And I think if you look at some silver linings, if there can be. We're going to be a cleaner society and there's not anything wrong with that.[00:37:25] I mean, you know, masks and America, or like really weird and awkward, and they're kind of scary if that makes sense, but you go to other countries and if you have a cold, do you like put on a mask to go to work that day, just to not cough all over your coat workers in America, sneeze on people and cough and do whatever hygiene will get better, which probably means health.[00:37:49] Longterm will get better. And if there is ever a real pandemic that happens with something that is super lethal, we're kind of prepared for it now, like we kinda got a test trial, [00:38:00] right? So there's some silver linings that will come out of it. It's, it's hard to see 'em all in the short term. You always see them in hindsight, but I don't know.[00:38:08] I'm, I'm super bullish and optimistic about the next 10 years. [00:38:13] Bob Wierema: [00:38:13] That's awesome. And I think it's such, you have the conversation like we're having right now, where you have someone like you has that perspective, and then you have that other group that doesn't have that perspective, which keeps saying, well, I just want to go back to normal or what normal was. Well, you know, that's not the reality of what we're going to ever be back to. And then there's, you know, I've had some people where they're just like, well, I'm going to wallow in, in all the challenges and, you know, to hear someone like you and say, Hey, well, I'm going to go out [00:38:45] and I'm [00:38:45] going to go grab the opportunity.[00:38:47] Right. I mean, that's, it's just, I love that perspective.[00:38:50]Chris Powers: [00:38:50] Yeah. I think the one it's just, that's the entrepreneurial spirit and we know that not everybody's built that way. I mean, that's, that's, I don't know if it's DNA [00:39:00] or genetics or whatever, but that's just, you're not going to, if everybody on the planet was a, was a me, this place would blow up.[00:39:06] I mean, you need people that, that aren't, everybody was Elon Musk. You know, the, the, the planet wouldn't work. You need a balance of both. I think my only comment to that. Is if there is something that I do believe needs to change in a significant way. It's this media, social media culture that's been created where you can't disagree with anything every day, there's a crisis.[00:39:32] And there's a flavor of the day and you're shamed into, you know, you have to participate in it and, and people are addicted to fear. If people, if news stations just gave them good news, that happens in the world every day of which there's tremendous amounts of good news. People live longer. Now people you can get across the globe in a day, used to take a year.[00:39:55]if you look at things over the longterm, we make progress, but that doesn't sell. [00:40:00] And so what we tend to see on a day to day basis, it's this, it's this horrible world. That's just, you know, everything's terrible and blinking red lights of crisis. And. The ma the media, the mainstream media sells drama, not necessarily facts, right.[00:40:16] You're glued to, the drama and we're hitting this inflection point where it's just like, you don't really don't talk to people that don't listen to the news or get off social media. And they're not just like disgusted by the last. 30 minutes of what they consumed. And I don't really believe that they believe it, but it's so shocking and so addicting.[00:40:38] And so part of you that if you're going to participate in the madness, it allows people that are optimistic, that aren't part of it, painting in the ma the madness to keep kind of on their journey. And so I'm not saying like this isn't a fake news rant or anything like that. I just encourage people. To like, not make your daily source of inspiration.[00:40:59] Whatever's on your [00:41:00] iPhone. Like, I tell my wife, when in this day and age you pull out your iPhone and you're putting yourself at risk to have your mind hijacked for the rest of the day. Like, you don't know what you're going to see. You don't know what comment's going to piss you off. You don't know.[00:41:15] And it's hard not to get go down kind of a tunnel. And so. You know, I'm not on social media, I'm on Twitter, but I'm not, I've been on Instagram or Facebook for a couple of years. And I would just tell you why I feel a lot happier about it. I don't under, I don't know all the issues going on in the world.[00:41:33] And the truth is if you ask most people, what the issue was two weeks ago, they have no freaking clue. They only can tell you what's right in front of them. Donald Trump's been president for four years. It's been four years of crisis in the white house. But if I asked you to name 10 of them, you could probably only name the one or two that's gone on in the last couple weeks.[00:41:52] You don't remember what happened two years ago, even in the moment you felt like it was the biggest deal on earth, right? Sarah's my rant. [00:41:59] Michael Moore: [00:41:59] I [00:42:00] mean, it's, it's, it's a crossroads and, and, you know, we need a. Whether it's it's our generation or the one before us or the three or four coming behind us, like truth seekers.[00:42:12] Chris Powers: [00:42:12] Yup. [00:42:13] Michael Moore: [00:42:13] Right. I mean, everybody just wants this surface level BS and they think that's good. I got it. I can move on. Yep. And it's just sensationalized again for, you know, our, our sources for most people or the television and. They're running a business, it's all about ratings and viewership and. It's turned to just it.[00:42:38] I don't get anything out of watching it except maybe the weather [00:42:42] Chris Powers: [00:42:42] for sure. Yeah. I mean, and the amount [00:42:45] and they're never right. [00:42:47] Like the amount, like how do you form an opinion anymore? If you don't spend any time thanking for yourself? And the amount of information that's out there. I mean, if you just took COVID in general is [00:43:00] like half the country feels like it was a, you know, I don't want to say fake.[00:43:03]it's real, it's a real virus, but half the country thinks it was the most biggest overreaction ever. And half the people still won't walk outside their front door and the, the misinformation around it all is tremendous. But the truth is, and this is my own opinion. That's what the media is good at is putting out lots of ways to look at things.[00:43:22] And that keeps people engaged. If we just gave one source of truth, that would be boring and nobody would care anymore that excites people all the different ways to look at it. And this person said this and this graph said that. And if you just kind of take a step back and just kind of, you know, form your own opinion, I dunno, it's a much easier way to live in a lot less stressful.[00:43:44] Bob Wierema: [00:43:44] Well, and Chris you're like that comment of form. Your own opinion, I think is, is sad as is. Sometimes it's really hard for people to actually do that anymore and actually sit down and think this is what I believe this isn't what I [00:44:00] just read on Facebook. This is what my true worldview and beliefs are on this situation.[00:44:06] They, they listen to, Hey, I'm, I'm on the, you know, the left side or the right side. And that's where I'm going. Well, Did you really break that down for sure.[00:44:15]Chris Powers: [00:44:15] And politics is as is meant to create the drama. we can't all agree on everything or else it would be boring and we drama is created when you draw lines in the sand.[00:44:26] I think. I watched this documentary on Netflix the other day called the creepy line. And it was about the algorithms that Facebook and Google too, you know, I know how their algorithms work. And it was really interesting because if you really think about it, some of these people now spend four or five days, four or five hours a day on their phone, and they're consuming content through these, through these companies.[00:44:51] And they're really like the company has set the agenda for what that person's day is going to be like. and not everybody sees the same information you see, [00:45:00] what's good for you. You see what confirms your already beliefs and they keep doubling down on it. Google, Google has Google maps, Google search, Google Chrome, Google.[00:45:11] They're all free. But you're not paying anything, but I promise you you're paying something. They know where you're driving. They know where, what you're searching. They know who you're emailing. They know this and they have, they can come up with, what do we need to put in front of this person today to kind of keep them on this journey that we've been tracking for the last 10 or 12 years?[00:45:33] That was just kind of an interesting thing when I thought about it as like, if, if, if your source of truth is through the internet, you're, the algorithms are strong enough. Now that they'll just keep putting the next like thing in front of you and you just kind of keep chasing it and doubling down on that belief.[00:45:50] But what I search might not be the same thing that you see when you search it. It was just an interesting way to think about it. How did these companies, how are these companies worth a [00:46:00] trillion and a half dollars when you pay nothing to use them? [00:46:04] Michael Moore: [00:46:04] So, so going back to kind of the new economy and you know, your, your specialization and around real estate, I mean, Bob and I.[00:46:13] Talked a lot about this, you know, we've collectively get, you know, North of a million square feet that our offices occupied across the United States. we're not trying to win the race back to the offices because [00:46:29] I'm a lot more risk tech. We [00:46:30] got a lot more risk and we're in a people business. But technology wise, we were set up to do this and be able to pivot and work from home.[00:46:38] But as we think about bringing people back and. You know, we're at whatever phase you are in the, in the lease in our Chicago office or Dallas office or LA office, or whatever, to your point about the analysis of like the workforce and how many employees that you need. I think we're going to be doing analysis and probably a lot of other people are.[00:47:00] [00:46:59] And how much square footage do you need? do you have. Alternating days where, you know, Bob's team is coming in on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, the first and the third weeks of the month. And Michael's, team's coming in Tuesday, Thursday, and he flip flop. And so instead of a hundred thousand square feet, you got way more hoteling spaces.[00:47:19] You're more spread out to your point of. Of what that looks like. And you're in 40,000 square feet. I mean, w what is your viewpoint on that? [00:47:27] Chris Powers: [00:47:27] Yeah, I have a super contrarian opinion on it. I think this is short mindedness. I think I was joking the other day. I'm going to start a company. That's gonna go rip out all the plexiglass that all these businesses are going to put in and realize six months later, they don't need it on need it.[00:47:42]people don't like working from home, Longterm. I think it's been an experiment. If you have kids and a family, it's extremely hard. if you're not in a good relationship in a marriage, it's extremely hard. You and Bob are great friends because you've met in person you've [00:48:00] shared experiences together.[00:48:01] You know that you're going to see that person. if you look at the best business people, what they're surrounded by as this incredible network and that network was not created through a bunch of zoom calls, It almost the zoom to me feels like over the longterm, the relationships get less and less tight.[00:48:20] And I think, again, it's, we're living in a, or live or living in the moment, but the like we're social creatures, the people that will win out of here will be more engaged with people will want to be around people. And while that doesn't mean, I'm not saying you can't work from home or that remote doesn't work, remote still happens in an office by the way.[00:48:42] The desire when we let our team come back, they, I mean, they were thrilled the first time I did a restaurant with my friends, like it was like Christmas, people want to be around each other. And so I think in the short term, I think for companies like y'all every big corporation, it's more of like the legal risk and the [00:49:00] political risk of coming back in the short term.[00:49:03] I think people will redesign and think about things but long term. And I think we can be smarter about it. I don't think everybody needs to be in the office five days a week. I'm not saying that at all. We, we, that's why we have laptops. That's why it's a culture thing. If, if, if you, you can spread out and keep the team really solid, but this idea that everybody's like never really going to see each other, and we're just going to do business through zoom again, it's where I'm like more, more power to, to me.[00:49:29] Cause I'm going to be out shaking hands and. Meeting people and giving them a hug and a high five. And I can't see a world where that doesn't continue to win. Now what happens over the next couple of years is there's risk and all that. That's a totally different story, but I think longterm, the human interaction is going to be important and that's going to have to take place in some type of office environment, even if it's different.[00:49:53] I don't know if that answered your question. [00:49:54] Michael Moore: [00:49:54] Oh, it does a hundred percent. And you know, in an industry that. Whether [00:50:00] it's technology or other mediums, they try to sort of commoditize what we do. [00:50:06] Chris Powers: [00:50:06] Yeah. [00:50:06] Michael Moore: [00:50:06] I mean, Bob and I spend. An unbelievable amount of time. They making sure that doesn't happen. This is a relationship business.[00:50:15] This is a people business. We do care. We are going to come see you. So I couldn't agree more. And I think you're right. And I hope that it is just a short term. Or a reaction, right? Like they're going to see past that and go, no, we need to get back to, to collaboration and people being together because the zoom call, they, I mean, we call it zoomed out, like you just buy four or five or six or eight.[00:50:40] How many do a day? I'm so much more tired than if I had flown on their plane driven to a meeting. Yeah. Done three or four of them gone to dinner that night got back to the hotel. Yeah. [00:50:52] Chris Powers: [00:50:52] Zoom wears me out more. It wears you out. It's hard to build relationships. I don't think well, think about like, getting promotions [00:51:00] and it's going to be easier to promote the person down the hall from you than it is the person you never see.[00:51:06] And just talk to through zoom. I mean, it's just like, That's human nature. and then the, the thing that nobody's really mentioned yet, but you still have to work 40 hours a week. If you're from home or wherever, there's labor laws in this country. And if you watch a lot of the polls about like how people spent their day at work from home, I'm not saying everything has to be eight to five, but I think you see over time this, this idea that.[00:51:37] You know, because it's harder to be held accountable. You've start finding people that aren't putting in the work and they're gaming the system. And then you get into the labor law rule. And that doesn't mean you have to be in an office to follow the labor law rule. It just means if you tell people like we'll never have it to see you again, we'll only talk through zoom and you're just going to be at home every day.[00:51:57] I think that's going to create some, some labor law [00:52:00] challenges. And then the, the answer to that is. Put a tracker on their computer. So you can see all their computer usage. So big brothers w we're a culture of trust, but we don't trust you a ton. So we're going to put trackers on your computer and watch get a report every night, about how long you're on your computer.[00:52:17] What a way to kill culture about, about as quickly as possible. And I've seen the repercussions already from business owners that did it during the pandemic and the. It's not a positive for certain situations and at certain times, but people don't want to feel like they're being monitored. And if you have to feel like you have to monitor someone that's again, that's just a, that's a person issue to begin with.[00:52:44] Yeah. And it's, [00:52:45] Bob Wierema: [00:52:45] it's interesting. I've been hearing a lot of people say, and I I've been arguing this and saying that, well, no, everybody's just as productive outside of the office. And I'm like, I don't know if I necessarily agree with that. Some of these [00:53:00] calls that I've been on, I'm going, we weren't having these calls before. What are we doing on this call? Why are we having this now verse before? Is it just to check in. [00:53:11] Chris Powers: [00:53:11] 10 minute, zoom meeting, eight minutes of figuring it out, getting the camera to work, making sure it's not all staticky. Two minutes to talk and then it's done. And again, I think we'll move to a world where some of our people work from home one or two days a week.[00:53:27] And I think that's productive because they're part of the flow. But once they're kind of out into the abyss for long periods of time, it's like what you said. You're having meetings just to like check in and make sure that things are they're understanding workload. And I don't know, we're only 90 days into it.[00:53:44] I just, I can't see. It's getting better. The longer it goes on and not to say people can work from home or remote, it just has to be, are centered around an office environment. And look, you read about some tech companies that are going fully remote. There [00:54:00] are industries where, you know, coders, software engineers, they like being alone all day.[00:54:05] They don't want to be bothered that works, but there's a lot of industries where the people need to be around the people. [00:54:14] Michael Moore: [00:54:14] One thing I did want to hit on. Cause I know you're passionate about it with the employees that you recruited into your company, like talk about how you think about culture, how you define culture and then how that emanates down to the workforce.[00:54:32] And as you get bigger, right? How do you keep yeah. And, and continue to grow. [00:54:38] Chris Powers: [00:54:38] That's a good question. Cultures. It's been in a lot of ways. I call it. It's kind of the magic. It's, it's hard to necessarily define it. It's why ever not define it, but it's, it's why everybody, these is different a little bit. When we started for it, I had culture to me at the beginning was just like a, something I read in my business textbook that we [00:55:00] needed one.[00:55:00] And I thought I solved that by putting like a mission statement and some core values on our website. And that was our culture. And then you just start realizing, like, you kind of hire the people that you like when it's all said and done, you kind of have the team that you deserve. And you deserve your team.[00:55:18] If, if you put no emphasis on making your team better overall, the type of people that want to be a part of something like that is what you deserve when you treat your people poorly. are you taking advantage of a situation? Eventually the people that are the ones left standing are what you deserve and a good culture, repels.[00:55:41] The people repels the type of people that you wouldn't want, and that attracts the people that you would want. And it's something that you've kind of fight for every day. Your culture is either getting better every day or worse every day, and it's getting better every day. That's the people get better.[00:55:59] And as [00:56:00] you hire new people, but we also know that it takes one bad Apple to screw up, can screw up a lot of people. And so the amount of effort we put before we hire someone and we spend, we get told all the time, like your interview process takes forever. And we're like, yeah, because once you're here, We hope that you're going to be here forever and we'd rather catch it before you they're here then, then after.[00:56:25] Okay. So the, the culture is just like, who are the people that you want to over time work with and how are you going to build an environment that's going to attract more people like that to want to work for you. And again, there's not one right culture. It's just what. Environment do you want, and you're never going to have it, like you're always working on it.[00:56:48]but it requires a lot of work. And so I think at its easiest, I just think about it as our culture is strong. When it, when it repels the people that we don't want to work with a [00:57:00] way, and it attracts more people that we do want to work with. And that's just not the people in the office. That's our vendors.[00:57:05] That's our bankers, our insurance providers. The whole deal is. You want to naturally attract people that make the system better and not have to work as hard, getting rid of the people that make it worse. It naturally just kind of pushes people out. And that's where it gets back to values that everybody shares a certain amount of values, whether we're hiring a new contractor on a job or whatever, if it's obvious those people, you know, are not honest or.[00:57:33] You know, they're, they're not very flexible. Like one of our core values is being agile. Like in a world like today, you gotta be willing. You can't just anchor into one thing. You gotta be willing to, to be agile, being accountable, being resilient, being driven. I mean, if I walked you through our office, I can say all of our people share that common value and it would be, it would be weird to bring someone into the office that doesn't, they would stand out like a [00:58:00] sore thumb immediately.[00:58:01]But that's taken years and we work on it every day and you're kind of always working on it, whether you realize it or not. And hiring one person into the company. It doesn't share those values. It reinforces the values that you do have, but it makes it to where that person couldn't exists. It couldn't coexist for very long, without the whole company being like, why the hell is this person here?[00:58:25] And if you're accepting of those new values, then you're accepting to having your culture change. Right. and that's what happens to a lot of companies that go that don't. You know, continue growing and getting better as they come solve for the lowest common denominator. and the greatest companies have a really high standard and really high values and they don't break them.[00:58:45] Bob Wierema: [00:58:45] Hey, Chris, earlier, you mentioned, you know, we were talking about your wife and calling you on your BS. Do you have people that within your, your shop that can call your BS on your leadership team or do you kind of [00:59:00] enforce that or try and get that openness with your team? [00:59:03] Chris Powers: [00:59:03] Yeah. My business partner is pretty good about it.[00:59:06] I would say, Probably the one thing I think about more than anything. And this is, again, we're doing this today. It wouldn't have necessarily been something I said years ago, but humility is the ultimate superpower it's being willing to, like, I've told the team in a team note I wrote this morning, I was like, I couldn't have been any more wrong about where the economy would be today when I first wrote you guys 90 days ago.[00:59:34]and I think. As a leader being really, having a lot of humility and showing people, I it's almost like, I love telling people when I've gotten something wrong. Cause it shows that you're human and just kind of creating that it allows, it's easier for people to call me on my BS because they know that I'm really accepting of like, Being called on BS outside of the company.[00:59:59][01:00:00] YPO has been an extremely big part of my life, but I get to sit with eight other business owners for five hours every month. And they are no problem calling me on my BS. So. It's it's easier said than done again, given my position. I know there's people that will not call me on my BS, but over time, if you're willing to just, again, part of your culture have humility, ask for feedback.[01:00:27] Sometimes people won't give it, but if you'll ask for it, they'll give it, but then taking it and not using it as like a weapon against somebody or, You know that that's, I think a lot of people want the negative feedback to be used as ammo, like down the road. And I hope my people would know that, as long as they're being honest, even if I don't like what they have to say, they never coming from a place of, you know, trying to get an extra, you know, weapon or something like that.[01:00:57] Michael Moore: [01:00:57] No. That's great perspective. as we're [01:01:00] kind of coming up on an hour here of getting inside the head of Chris powers, you know, from my perspective, Chris, a thank you for coming on, it's been really fun to watch your career blossom and see, I can't wait to see what you do with it from here. [01:01:19] You [01:01:19] know, certainly some, some things that, that stood out today, I love the.[01:01:24] The comment where you're talking about, you know, people a hundred years ago. Yeah. If you asked him if you wanted cars, he'd, you know, they said we just need faster horses. I [01:01:32] think that's great. [01:01:33] The fact of the people that win stay engaged, you have the team you deserve that one really hit. and then, you know, your last, when humility is the ultimate superpower, you know, that that's what we're looking to do to explore.[01:01:49] And, And get down in on this podcast is just, it's the truth, right? It's those defining moments and you've certa

Connect with Michael & BobThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with MollyWebsite: https://mcshane-construction.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/molly-mcshane-4316454/[00:00:00] Molly McShane: [00:00:00] But what if you viewed it, you know, in a broader context of it is our responsibility to this industry and our communities to open up the doors and give somebody the chance, not only to learn the industry, but frankly put it on your resume that you had an internship with us. Cause that's valuable. And if you can give back in that context of let's, let's provide real opportunities to people who don't have a dad or an uncle in the business.[00:00:31] You can start to make little baby steps, but it's a lot of baby steps. We got to take [00:00:37] Bob Wierema: [00:00:37] on this episode of the climb. Michael and I had the opportunity to sit down with Molly McShane, the COO of the McShane companies, a real estate and construction company based in Rosemont, Illinois. It's a family owned business and Molly is going to share her experience of.[00:00:57] Rising through the ranks and not [00:01:00] only a family held business, but also being a woman in a primarily male dominated industry, Molly realized early on in her career that things don't happen on accident. And it's definitely not a straight line to the top. You'll definitely enjoy this episode of the podcast.[00:01:17] Thanks for joining us.[00:01:28] Molly. Welcome. Thank you for taking the time to join Michael and myself today. Appreciate you spending some time. [00:01:35] Molly McShane: [00:01:35] Thank you very much for having me. I'm excited. [00:01:38] Bob Wierema: [00:01:38] Course. Well, I think a great way to kick it off would be if you could just give us a quick little background on you and let all the listeners know, we know a little bit about yourself and you know where you were and where you're sitting today.[00:01:50] Molly McShane: [00:01:50] Sure you got it. Maybe I'll start with where I sit today. And that is as chief operating officer of the McShane companies, the McShane companies are [00:02:00] comprised of three different companies, McShane, construction, and cadence, McShane construction are both general contractors. And Connor commercial is our development arm.[00:02:10] So, I got to this place and probably not a straight line. I think there was perhaps more, more applicable to the real estate industry, but a lot of us get there and kind of a funny path, which applies to me as well. So I started off, I went to Boston college for my undergraduate. And when I was there, I majored in marketing and thinking at that time, advertising sounds really fun.[00:02:37] You know, they are, it's a, it's a fun vibe. Really cool. I think that's what I'm going to go into. So I did right upon graduating, I went into marketing and advertising and after about, maybe I'll call it a year and a half of that. I very quickly realized it. Wasn't what I was meant to do in my career. You know, I found myself working really [00:03:00] long hours, getting paid just above minimum wage.[00:03:03] It felt like, and you know, really not making the impact that I wanted to make in the world. So I started some soul searching and moved back to Chicago. I had been living in California prior to that and started thinking about what am I going to do with my career? And I was talking to my dad about it. He said, well, you know, construction and real estate.[00:03:27] Those are, those are really good industry place to work. Why don't you come work here? [00:03:32] Bob Wierema: [00:03:32] And I know your, I know your dad well enough to know that. He's a very convincing person too. [00:03:36] Michael Moore: [00:03:36] So yeah, [00:03:38] Molly McShane: [00:03:38] that is true. That is true. You know, when I told him, when I said, you know, I don't really have my degrees in marketing, I'm not sure I have the experience for this and you can figure it out.[00:03:51] So anyway, I did decide to kind of roll the dice and join. So I joined the McShane construction first. I really felt strongly, like I [00:04:00] wanted to know the foundations of the business and understand that at a level that I really didn't at that point in time. So I spent four or five years in the trailers on the job sites, doing project management.[00:04:13] So I did, you know, everything from senior housing to medical office to, you know, big factories. So kind of got a good perspective of the different types of products that we built at the same time. I went back to graduate school to get my MBA. So I went to Kellogg at Northwestern and I got my MBA with a real estate and finance concentration.[00:04:39] Okay. Once I got that, I transitioned over to our development company. and there, I spent lots of years doing different product types that we developed medical office apartments, industrial, and got a wide perspective from the development side as well. So with those two things, plus my experience [00:05:00] being on our board of directors for many years, I've now transitioned into leadership of the group of companies.[00:05:06] So, you know, cadence, Nick, Shane, and Connor, and that's where I am today. [00:05:13] Bob Wierema: [00:05:13] So when you came out, you got right into that project management piece. What were some of the struggles you had in that world? I know that's a challenging space to jump right into. And maybe even, what did you enjoy most about being in, in that part of the game?[00:05:28] Molly McShane: [00:05:28] You know, it was a different environment than I was used to, you know, sitting in a trailer all day, kind of walking around, getting your boots dirty was not an environment I had worked in before. And so I think that finding the right mixture of how to act in that environment, because it's not being professional on a job site kind of has a different tone to it than being professional in an office environment.[00:05:56] So I think navigating that. that part of it while [00:06:00] being the boss's daughter was a little tricky. What it, what it boiled down to for me was really the personal relationships that you develop over time. I think when you're, when you're on a trailer with somebody all day, every day, you get to know each other pretty quickly and those relationships and, you know, having.[00:06:19] Mentors within that context opening up within that context really helped me to understand the business better and learn at a pretty quick pace with those one on one relationships. So that's really what I valued the most, not just internally, but you know, the relationships that we would have with our clients in those settings is really, you go out to lunch together and you have a lot of fun together, and it's a little bit more casual.[00:06:45] And so you develop. I think more personal relationships pretty quickly. And I think that was my favorite part of it, meeting people from all over the place that was, you know, kind of an intense experience, but really rewarding [00:07:00] [00:07:00] Michael Moore: [00:07:00] Molly on that career path. And I got to say, I respect your father for not inserting you at the corner office day one.[00:07:10] You had to earn it.[00:07:14] Exactly. But I think for, [00:07:17] Molly McShane: [00:07:17] for some of our younger [00:07:18] Michael Moore: [00:07:18] listeners who are starting their career paths and kind of thinking through that, like, did you have an idea in mind of the different levels you would be at, within the organizations to, to get to where you were? Did you just put the blinders on, put your head down and earned where you are today?[00:07:35] Like give us some insight into how that developed. [00:07:39] Molly McShane: [00:07:39] Yeah, there, there was really no preset path whatsoever. And I know that's different. A lot of family businesses are very intentional about training, different generations to take over as leaders someday, we were not mad. This was my dad's business. It wasn't a family business.[00:07:56] We hadn't gone through any of the legal [00:08:00] changes or training or anything. When I started, it was really, I was working for my dad and I think it's. Part of our family ethic, but it's also part of the construction industry ethic that you earn your stripes and you got to put in the long hours and the hard work.[00:08:19] And that's kinda what I did. It was just what was expected of you. So I don't think when I joined, I even knew what the possibilities were for my path. It wasn't something that we talked about. I just tried to do my best. Where I was when I was there. I think later on there came a point. I don't know how many years into it.[00:08:43] It was, but I had, I had been working exclusively for Connor at that point for, I don't know, maybe somewhere between five and 10 years in. And that's when the conversation started of okay. This, we might turn this into a family business now. [00:09:00] we want some continuity in leadership. My dad was starting to think about, okay, if I get hit by a bus, what happens to all of these people who work for us and you know, their salaries and their family, we really got gotta tour that.[00:09:12] We've got this thing on very stable footing. So it kind of went along with that. When we started talking about turning it into a family business with a board of directors and continuity planning. That we started talking a little bit more about more thoughtful career planning. And by that point I had enough experience in different parts of our companies to know what I was good at and what I enjoyed the most.[00:09:39] And for me, going into a more leadership role that focused more on strategy, focused more on, you know, kind of the longterm success of the business growth of the business. Recruiting of the right people setting the right culture. That was the area that I excelled in. You know, I don't think that you [00:10:00] can understand the business without understanding the details.[00:10:03] So I'm, I'm fully capable of it and can often step in to help if we're, you know, caught with a lot of things going on at once. But my skills were really more on the management end of things. So that's, that's what we started looking at that, and it took a while. Even doing that before, it was more of a clear path set for me.[00:10:26] It was kind of feeling around in the dark. Where can you add value? Where's your skill? What are you enjoying right now? So it's, it's different from a lot of other family businesses that are probably farther along than we are of intentionality in any of it. It was just do your best to feel around and see what you see, what you're good at.[00:10:47] Michael Moore: [00:10:47] No, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, but now knowing where you are and being able to reflect on where you've been, do you think that your dad was slowly and watching and [00:11:00] sort of directing that even though you didn't know it or was it I'm going to give her just enough rope and well, let's see what she does.[00:11:07] Molly McShane: [00:11:07] No, I don't think he was secretly intentional about anything. Part of what makes us, you know, us as a company is that we always give people a ton of responsibility before they probably even think they can earn it. You know, we have people who are in their early twenties that are in charge of, you know, big contracts and of course there's oversight, but we kinda, it's not sink or swim, but you're in the deep end day one.[00:11:33] And that's. It's just kind of, a lot of our company culture, I think just stems from my dad and how he views things and how he found enjoyment and success in life. So, no, I don't think he was ever really secretly planning it. I think he was really like, all right, let's see what she can do. And that was it.[00:11:50] And I wouldn't even say that my dad was always my biggest supporter in it. You know, I think a lot of other people saw potential in me that, My dad [00:12:00] might've been the second one to realize, but not the first[00:12:05] earn it. He wasn't, he was not going into it thinking that his kids were going to take over leadership, [00:12:12] Michael Moore: [00:12:12] truly respect that. And thanks for sharing about that. As I shared yesterday, I'm the dad of two daughters. And so. Hearing that story and getting a really in depth glimpse into this culture that can be created if you're not careful of, you know, everybody can finish first.[00:12:29] I mean, that's just not reality. And the faster, I think we learned that, especially, you know, being specific around being a woman in a male dominated space, you know, kudos to you for figuring it out. [00:12:42] Molly McShane: [00:12:42] Yeah, well, you know, I think it's for a lot of people, not for everybody, but I'm, I'm one of the people that in order to have the confidence in doing something and in leading others in it, I have to have the experience doing it myself.[00:12:57]you know, not to every single level of detail. I mean, [00:13:00] I'm not an accountant and yet, you know, we have an accounting department. I'm not an it specialist, but. Really going through the operational part of the business to me was important. And that's where I get a lot of my confidence because I've done it.[00:13:12] I know how to do it. And now I know what questions to ask and I'm not really thinking anything. I know what I'm talking about. And so to me, that's important. I think others, others don't need as much of that. But for me, I did [00:13:27] Bob Wierema: [00:13:27] Molly. There's kind of. Two [00:13:29] Michael Moore: [00:13:29] things that come to my mind. So [00:13:30] Bob Wierema: [00:13:30] it's one that Michael just mentioned, which is being a woman in the real estate construction business.[00:13:36] So I definitely want to touch on that. And then maybe going back a little bit more to the family dynamic of the business, and maybe some of the challenges that you run into there, even the transition from going from, like you mentioned your father's company. To a family owned business. What were some of those hurdles?[00:13:55] And as we talked about, you know, with the, kind of the title of the podcast, you know, the climb, some of those [00:14:00] crossroads or some of those challenging areas, like what are some of those things that stuck out to you? Like talk a little bit about that transition. [00:14:07] Molly McShane: [00:14:07] Well, when I was reflecting on part of this podcast, being about those transitional moments and those points in your career where you can go one direction or the other.[00:14:18] But the moment that I reflect on a lot is when I was in advertising. And I remember one meeting specifically, it was at midnight and my boss was at this meeting and her boss was at this meeting and we're all sitting around a table putting together a presentation. That we were going to give the next day that the person we were presenting to probably couldn't care less about and take it or leave it, but it didn't mean that much to them.[00:14:44] And it wasn't going to impact their business in a huge way, either. That's myself doing, you know, how am I impacting the world right now? Like, I don't want to be this person, even if I get promotion after promotion, after promotion. Going to be sitting here, this table, making a recommendation about something [00:15:00] that I may or may not find important.[00:15:02] So that's really what made me search out a new career. And I've been lucky enough to find one in which I can have an impact. And at the end of the day, I am making the decisions and those decisions that are important to me. I can put a lot of my time and effort into and steer them in the right direction.[00:15:22] So I think that's. Number one, you know, I really found something found out about myself that I need, I really needed to be the one in charge.[00:15:36] Sounds like everybody wants to be in charge, but I didn't realize that about myself before I thought I would be. You know, happy doing creative things and working with teams, but I learned, I really want to have a voice in it. And I want to, you know, at least to be a part of the decision making, if not be the final decision maker and that's really important to me.[00:15:56] So I found that out a little bit, the [00:16:00] hard way by experiencing the opposite. So that was one, which caused me to. No a little bit, roll the dice, going into an industry. I didn't have any experience in joining, you know, what, wasn't even a family business at that point. You know, those can go North or South family members.[00:16:17] So that's a little bit of a role of the dice joining something. I didn't have any experience in. So that was one area where I think I saw something in front of me. I didn't want to go. And then I. Chose to go into a little bit more of the unknown and take the risk of going towards a new career. So another one that I've been thinking of has a little bit more to do with industry leadership.[00:16:39] We generally encourage all of our employees to take active roles. In industry leadership. So there's lots of groups out there, that you can get involved in depending on what side of the business you're on, what city you're in, you know, which groups make the most sense. And for me, early on, I got involved with a [00:17:00] group called NAIOP, which is pretty active in Chicago doing a lot of industrial, but it's a lot of developers and brokers that are in that group.[00:17:11] And I joined as. Simply a member of NAIOP. But then I, I was asked to join and did agree to join the developing leaders board. Cause I was younger that time 35 and under is the, which I no longer qualify for. But, at that time I did. And so I joined. Right. Exactly. I just, just aged out yesterday, but I joined the developing leaders board and that was my first real experience with, you know, working with your competitors and everyone within industry to try to make.[00:17:45] It's a meaningful change beyond just what you could do as a company. And I really enjoyed that. And then eventually I got asked to lead that group. And even that going from even a member of the board leading the [00:18:00] board was a very inspiring experience for me because you know what I was saying earlier, I like to be the one in charge and.[00:18:07] You know, steer the ship. I could do that in a larger context with this industry group and it really opened my eyes to the impact of your efforts can be magnified. Once you lock arms, you know, when you're with your friendly competitors. And trying to really focus on areas of your industry that you think need improvement.[00:18:29] So NAIOP is one of them I've been involved in others since then, but that experience really broadens my horizons beyond, you know, focus on your career, do the best that you can do in your own career, too. Let's work as an industry to make change in our communities and help others is a super huge part of what I do right now.[00:18:51] So I think those two. Experiences were really what came to mind when you had asked me the question. [00:18:58] Bob Wierema: [00:18:58] And if you think about that too, [00:19:00] from an industry standpoint, I mean, you look at the real estate and construction business. It's a super competitive marketplace. And I know Chicago well that Chicago is, you know, sometimes even, even multiply that even more.[00:19:13] But as you came together with some of those other groups and leaders in the industry, what were a couple of the initiatives that you took on, or maybe you had some passion around that really stuck with you? [00:19:24] Molly McShane: [00:19:24] I would say that one of the most glaring issues that we have as an industry is that you walk into a room and there's 500 white men that are six foot two, and they're all ex athletes.[00:19:41] And they're all talking about, you know, whatever game was on this night. And. It's not diverse in any respect. And I think that's really glaring. So there's been a couple of different groups that I've been in some with the express intent of changing that others with it just being, you know, one leg of the stool of [00:20:00] how we're trying to improve.[00:20:00] So when I was president of NAIOP Chicago, we instituted a rule that we put on breakfast panels, you know, once a month. And we Institute a rule that a woman has to be on every panel period. You can find them. It's not as easy, cause we're not as plentiful as the men are, but we're here and we can find enough experts to put on a panel.[00:20:22] So we did that and that was I think, an important change. And I think it's been lasting since then. Now, now NAIOP is focused on it's not that they weren't before, but they didn't have that mandate before. And. I think that's made some level of change is increasing the visibility of women who are already in the industry.[00:20:41]because it matters to see people up there as experts, especially to younger people who might want to, you know, envision themselves as up on that stage someday. So that's one thing we did through NAIOP, but there are other herbs that are more focused on other things. other levels of diversity. So.[00:21:00] [00:21:00] ULI has in many ways around the country has the women's leadership initiative. And I was one of the founding members of the Chicago WLA branch. And that really does have an express initiative of bringing more women into this industry, supporting more women in this industry, helping them progress in their careers and giving them visibility.[00:21:24] So really all the initiatives that we did within that context, we're focused on women. So it's, it's going to college campuses. In talking to women about what careers in real estate might be getting women together in networking groups to help them find one another and mentor on another, getting women up on panels.[00:21:46]it's profiling, you know, women who have been really successful. So I would say with WWI, that really is the express intention. Of that group. There's other groups that I've been involved with, [00:22:00] you know, that look more at racial diversity. I'll tell you the reason that we said there has to be a one woman on every panel at nap is cause I knew we could do it.[00:22:09] I did not say there has to be a minority on every panel because I wasn't sure we could do it. And I didn't want to put something else, put something out there.[00:22:43] I have tried and listen, I am not trying to hold myself out as an expert in the city and inclusion. I have a lot to learn from others, but I can speak to my own experiences and what I've done to try to make it better. And honestly, a lot of it, both for women and [00:23:00] minorities, I think is starting young. Once you're in college, it's almost too late.[00:23:07] You know, kids know what they want to get into. At that point, they have their majors, they've already taken all their pre-recs, you know, but it's getting into the high school level and saying, cause a lot of kids you'll say what's real estate and they'll say, Oh, it's selling houses near to a lot of kids at that age.[00:23:22] Think real estate is, and they don't even have the vision of what it could be and what a great career it could be.[00:23:56] Can be intimidating. You know, if you don't know what a cap rate is, [00:24:00] or, you know, pick your construction term, if you don't know what that is, you might be intimidated to join that group. They all, they all know what they're talking about. I don't want me exactly, you know, it's a little bit of a mental barrier for people to cross.[00:24:15] So I think making it a more approachable career is really important. [00:24:21] Bob Wierema: [00:24:21] How do we get to, or how do you get to those folks [00:24:25] Molly McShane: [00:24:25] before college? [00:24:28] Bob Wierema: [00:24:28] Like, is there anything that you've seen that's worked if you see a initiatives out there that you've explored that have had some, some success to them? [00:24:37] Molly McShane: [00:24:37] I will tell you I have experienced it to be very difficult.[00:24:40] I have been involved in some there's one in particular that NAIOP national sponsors. And I think I know a lot of other groups sponsor this as well, but it's, it's an, it's a summer call it a summer camp, but it's an intensive experience that is aimed at black and Brown. Sophomores and juniors in high [00:25:00] school and they come and they stay at a university.[00:25:02] So in Chicago, we did it at Roosevelt university, but you know, they've been at Georgia tech and MIT and Cornell, and they spend like a week, week and a half there. And you bring in all sorts of people from the industry to teach them about commercial real estate and. Yeah, you give them projects to work on.[00:25:18] It's a little bit like, you know, one of those university challenges and in a perhaps less condensed form, but it's a summer camp and you can get 20 kids. So it's a great program. But it's not really at scale, you know, you've got at any one school, a couple dozen kids at it. So although I think that efforts like that are absolutely worthwhile, I have not yet found something that is the real solution.[00:25:51] And I don't think it's probably going to be one solution. Right. Probably going to be. A combination of a hundred different things that come together to fix. [00:26:00] It has some other stuff that they teach high school classes, basically, but it's, it's going to take a ton of effort. It's gonna take a ton of different initiatives.[00:26:11] We have to be intentional about it, cause it's not gonna happen by accident. One of the really great suggestions that I heard, and then I think, you know, we will be implemented. We don't take a lot of interns. development side, we do in construction, but we don't really on development. And I think if people think about internships in a broader context, you know, we think about interns as an extended interview, right.[00:26:37] We we're going to have. But we're going to, you know, get you for three months and make sure you're, you know, you're pretty good at it, but what if you viewed it, you know, in a broader context of it is our responsibility to this industry and our communities to open up the doors and give somebody the chance, not only to learn.[00:26:57] The industry, but frankly [00:27:00] put it on your resume that you had an internship with us. Cause that's valuable. And if you can give back in that context of let's, let's provide real opportunities to people who don't have a dad or an uncle in the business. You can start to make little baby steps, but it's a lot of baby steps we gotta take.[00:27:20] Bob Wierema: [00:27:20] It's so interesting. When you think about those larger initiatives and you, you think, how do you tackle some of those things? And, you know, I think that the natural human reaction is to look and say, well, this is a big thing. How were, what can I do individually to make that change? And in a short amount of time, instead of looking at it from a longterm and banding together and doing more and, you know, I mean, All of this is obviously very right now, what's going on in the, in the world right now is just like that.[00:27:50] It's like we got to band together and push together for a common, you know, but there's a lot of different things that go into it. There's not just one solution. And, you know, everybody's got a different view and a [00:28:00] different opinion of what is right and wrong. But it's hard. [00:28:03] Molly McShane: [00:28:03] I think you're right. And I think that's what will help this continue is having the conversations I'm sitting here talking about my.[00:28:14] One singular experience in the world and what I have seen and what I have found, there are people out there that are exclusively focused on this, well thought out ideas that are doing great things, but if we're not having those conversations, you're not going to hear about it. And constantly what I see is.[00:28:31] You know, so many people are frustrated with where we are as an industry and how we need to improve it. And the desire to change. Is there a fight? You know, almost everyone you meet, but I think some of the conversations to get there are slow coming and eventually you gotta, you gotta put your money where your mouth is, make the hires you need to.[00:28:56] Implement things and lead in that way. And [00:29:00] I think that, I think I'm hopeful that we are at some kind of a point right now I'm ready to go back and, you know, it's podcasts exist in 20 years ago. You could probably hear somebody saying it 20 years ago too, but I don't know. I mean, I think we've done turned a level of conversation.[00:29:16] In this country over the last couple of weeks that I think is, is good. I see business leaders stepping up to make social change and impact their, their own employee base. And I think there's reason to be, you know, cautiously optimistic, [00:29:32] Michael Moore: [00:29:32] you know, Molly take it, that theme of, of diversity that we've been hitting on a little bit.[00:29:37] And, you know, Bob and I's passion and reason for doing this is the art of storytelling has just gone away. And so by listening to your story and listening to others, we realize like to become a leader, to become a thought provoker, to become someone like yourself, you define it it's you gotta be willing to do the work.[00:29:59] And I [00:30:00] think that right there is, is a defining moment that I really appreciate you sharing with us. And if you look at what has occurred in 2020, which, you know, feels more like a year, not six months, Bob. And I spent a lot of time kind of talking about the old economy versus the new economy. And so from, from where you sit and the initiatives that you have, give us a little peak around the corner of what you see the new economy being and how that affects you.[00:30:28] Go on about your business. [00:30:31] Molly McShane: [00:30:31] Well, I think it's interesting to think about the demographics of our, you know, taking this from a super macro level five years ago, every single conference you went to, they're saying nobody is ever going to live in the suburbs again, nobody's ever going to own a car again. You know, we're all gonna live in these micro apartments and, you know, take Uber pools to work, which, you know, sounded good, I guess at the time [00:31:00] lived that experience millennials.[00:31:04] But, you know, I think that it's probably going back more towards maybe a more commonly shared experience of, you know, maybe you're getting married later. Maybe you're having kids a little bit later, but as human beings. You know, we want social interaction. We want to live in a safe place. And for some portion of society, that's moving back to the suburbs.[00:31:27] It's not for everyone. So I don't think that we're going to have the same balance of urban and suburban living that perhaps we did, you know, 20, 30 years ago. But. It's not all or nothing. It's not like everyone's moving to the cities and the suburbs are dead. So I think you're already, you already starting to see some of that as the millennials got older, you're starting to see some people move back into the suburbs.[00:31:51] You know, maybe the more dense suburbs, more walkable suburbs, but suburbs.[00:32:18] [00:32:00] Than we were before. I didn't know how to set up a zoom call before COVID, but here I am doing a zoom podcast. So I think some of us kind of got dragged into it, but now that we're comfortable with it, can I, can I do something over zoom instead of jumping on an airplane and going to see you for a two hour meeting?[00:32:38] Probably. So I think you're going to see a lot in that. I think she's going to play more and more role for some of us that are now comfortable with things that we weren't six months ago, you know, the look of the boomers, my God, you know, between, you know, Uber's then they can, they don't have to drive anymore order Instacart.[00:32:58] I mean, it's a [00:33:00] whole nother experience to be retired right now than it was. I dunno, five years ago. So, I think that's going to change a lot too. We're really active in industrial real estate developments and we're pretty excited about it. I mean, it's all the signs are good, you know, Amazon's. Insane growth path, but there's others.[00:33:22] This world, you know, all your three PLS, all your internet retailers. I think there's a lot of room for room for growth. I think a lot of businesses after COVID are looking at their supply chains and perhaps diversifying certain strategies, either, you know, material procurement or the report strategy, but you'll get, I think some other cities, maybe some East coast ports that will benefit from this.[00:33:47] Again, they were already on the growth path and I think this might be hyperspeed for that. So when you look at the macro factors, you can draw some of the conclusions, right. But then you [00:34:00] gotta dig in to each individual market and each individual intersection and, and really make the deals more up. But it's a little bit more fun to talk about the macro.[00:34:09] So [00:34:11] Michael Moore: [00:34:11] again, kind of taking on the whole theme of, of this. This podcast and telling the story about you, I'm sure you heard this one either, you know, from your dad or a mentor or somebody along the way, but you know, growing up, I always heard it's not what, you know, it's who, you know, and I always thought about that and I thought, well, you know, that that's an interesting concept, but it is about what, you know, as well.[00:34:35] And I heard a really good one the other day, which again, I think is. As part of the catalyst of this podcast is it's not what you know, it's who knows you. And so if you're using this, this podcast as a medium for people to know you, what do you want them to know? [00:34:55] Molly McShane: [00:34:55] Well, I think that hopefully what I would like for them to know about me is [00:35:00] something that they already know from working with our companies or a reputation that precedes us.[00:35:05] I think it's really important that people know the individuals running the company, because the ethics that you find at the top permeate down. And a lot of what we are currently well known for is straight from my dad. The, the honest, ethical, straightforward, fair business tactics that he has used his whole entire life and our name's on the door.[00:35:35] You know, we're not working for any company. So if somebody goes out there and isn't behaving in the way that we are proud of, that has our name on it, there's going to be a problem. So, you know, I think it's important for people to know. That, that family value of ethics and honesty continues beyond my dad.[00:35:56] It continues beyond me. I mean, it's, it's the leaders [00:36:00] that we hire, that that should reflect all of those values. And I, and I think that they do, and I think it's important for people to know. Where my priorities are in this time, you know, as you know, taking over the leadership of the company shortly, I'm leading in a different time than my dad was waiting and starting a company is different from growing company.[00:36:21] And we find ourselves in different times. You know, we were just talking about how the last couple of weeks of protests and these in this country has sparked these new conversations. So, you know, was, you know, real. Action around diversity, something that was top of mind 20, 30 years ago. No, I don't think it was, it is now, you know, and it's not that that's a new value, but it's, it changes over time kind of what, how you react to the world around you and what's important to you.[00:36:56] I think that nowadays our employees, [00:37:00] they don't go home at five o'clock and turn it off. Right. I mean, people. Emails till 10 o'clock at night midnight, they're coming in on Saturdays and Sundays. And the level of understanding about the whole person is important to us because you're giving a whole hell of a lot of your life to us and dedicating it to this company.[00:37:24] And we need to show the same level of respect and care. For all of our employees, not just while they're at work, but you know, with their kids. And, you know, you got to go to a baseball game, go to the baseball game, but respecting somebody as a, as a whole entire person, because that line between work life and personal life is disappearing, you know, it's well, hopefully not disappearing.[00:37:51] So, you know, it's, you know, I think most people who. Had gotten to know me a little bit of an open [00:38:00] book, because we were a little fresh. I'm trying not to on this podcast, [00:38:04] Bob Wierema: [00:38:04] you're doing well so far, Mike Michael's actually behaved himself to [00:38:10] Michael Moore: [00:38:10] batting a thousand so far,[00:38:15] Molly McShane: [00:38:15] but anyway, you know, you kinda, you see what you get here, Molly. [00:38:18] Bob Wierema: [00:38:18] I think one of the things. I've loved about getting to know you is just to your comment is like your passion around the business and who you are, and just like how family and all of that does meld together. You know, you hear the comment of a work life balance.[00:38:34] When you hear that, what do you think? [00:38:37] Molly McShane: [00:38:37] That is like the unicorn that you'll never find. I just, I don't think it is, you know, you're going to be unbalanced this week in this direction next week. It'll be a different direction. You know, you got a newborn at home. You think you've got balance? Like what a joke.[00:38:53] So I don't think it exists. What you need to do is always keep in mind your life's priorities [00:39:00] and, you know, try to somehow over the long run, balance it out, but you be different at different times in your life that you're an empty nester. You can eat at eight o'clock at night, right? When you get home from work, that's fine.[00:39:13] If you've got a two year old at home, my God, you're going to be divorced. If you show up eight o'clock, it's crazy. [00:39:20] Bob Wierema: [00:39:20] If you're eating, whatever's left of the chicken nuggets on the plate. Right.[00:39:26] Molly McShane: [00:39:26] You know, I think it's, you know, if you take the longterm view of it, you're probably going to end up, okay. You don't want to. Over commit to one thing or the other. I kind of feel like I can get 80% of the way there of where I want to be in all areas of my life at any one time. That's my balance for me.[00:39:43] I'm probably going to suck at something today. I was like, it's something else tomorrow, but overall, [00:39:50] Bob Wierema: [00:39:50] how do you keep your passion and your fire for the industry and the business? Like, is there anything that when you're having, you're going, you know, we're going through [00:40:00] challenging times. In your world right now.[00:40:02] And I mean the entire world, is there anything that you say that you can fall back on from an inspirational standpoint or a passion standpoint that goes, okay, this is going to set me straight or get me back focused. [00:40:14] Molly McShane: [00:40:14] Right? That's a couple of things. One of the benefits of being in a family business, Is that you're really planning long term.[00:40:22] And so talking to, especially my dad, but others as well, who have been through really, really challenging times before you think, okay, we're going to get through this. Like, now's the time that you got to show people what you're made of. And stick it out and do the hard work this too shall pass. We're going to get through it.[00:40:45] And that longterm perspective of, you know, our elders who have done it before, I think is really important. I've kind of been blessed. I think there are some people I joke around with my husband that are just prone to [00:41:00] stress. You know, and making French fries at McDonald's and stress out about it, or you could be running a fortune 100 company and you'd be stressed out about it.[00:41:08] It has more to do with what's inside of you than what's outside of you, I think. And I've been blessed with the ability to kind of just turn it off and stop thinking about it. And for me, that's important. I generally tend to, if things are really going on, it's always kind of somewhere back in your head.[00:41:26] But trying to put something, something different in the front of your head. So I'm a big fan of watching science shows that have absolutely nothing to do with my industry whatsoever, but I'll watch something about deep space exploration on Nova. And it's interesting. And I'm thinking about something else, you know, it'll kind of just take my mind on something else and give it a break.[00:41:48] That's when the real solutions come anyway, when you're not thinking about it, I think taking that time to focus on something else. Is really important. Everyone's got their things. I kind of joke around. I was asked once in an [00:42:00] interview when I had really young kids, like a three year old and a one year old, what are you, what are your passions outside of work?[00:42:06] What do you do? What do I do? I've got kids. This is what I do. I'm not mountain climbing on the weekends, but at some point in your life, you know, you can, you can do that again. And so everyone's got their own thing to take their mind off of it. So whatever works for you do it.[00:42:44] I think we're going to let it play out. We have, so, you know, I have two children, but you know, amongst my nieces and nephews, there are 11 in the next generation. Yeah. And I, you know, what we have always said is this is what my [00:43:00] parents said to me. We just want you to be happy, do whatever you want to do.[00:43:03] Just be happy, find what makes you happy. And we have such a wide variety of. Personalities in that little bunch, I think making the opportunities there for them to learn about the business so that they can make an educated choice of whether or not they want to come into it is something we try to do. So we try to talk to them a little bit more about it, but as they get older, you know, with summer jobs or internships or whatnot, we'll probably make those available if they want them.[00:43:30] The other thing though, that we are going to be very careful about, and this comes from a lot of. Research done with different family businesses. And there's a ton of it out there that we tried to get smart on is don't have the family business be the only job you ever have. Do something else first and find success, doing something else.[00:43:54] Before you come in because you know, a, I think you're going to come in as a better employee that [00:44:00] you're going to provide a wider perspective, but B you're going to feel like, you know, you're not just given something and that's important cause you're not going to find happiness. I don't think if you don't, if you don't earn it, you know, if you don't work hard and earn it and feel like you deserve to be where you are and everything is just handed to you on a silver plate, you're not gonna, you're not gonna find happiness.[00:44:23] So I don't, I don't want to do that to my kids or my nieces or nephews. [00:44:28] Michael Moore: [00:44:28] Good perspective. What with, with multiple generations now, what is the mix? Shane family, Christmas or Thanksgiving look like? Is it, is it a big piece of business and family? Is it all business? Is it to give us some insight? [00:44:43] Molly McShane: [00:44:43] It's loud, if you can.[00:44:47] I mean, there's probably 20 conversations happening at once. It's very little business, you know, there's only three of us that are in the business. It's my dad, my brother and myself. So, you know, maybe the three of us might have a side conversation [00:45:00] here, but it's really.[00:45:25] At my parents' house outside of Chicago last year, we went on a trip for it. So we might experiment a little bit and [00:45:35] Bob Wierema: [00:45:35] ask Molly because you get, you went to Costa Rica. Was that right? How many. [00:45:41] Molly McShane: [00:45:41] There were 25, 24, 25 of us. I planned the trip and it was a lot of work. So when we got there, I said, I hope you guys enjoy it, but if you don't, I don't want to hear about it.[00:45:55] Bob Wierema: [00:45:55] Not my problem. [00:45:57] Molly McShane: [00:45:57] Yes, exactly. Exactly. It was a ton of [00:46:00] fun. We know, as a family, we love getting together as a big family. But we also recognize that everybody needs a little bit of space as well. So we don't usually rent one big house. Everybody has their own space to go home to at the end of the night to keep the peace.[00:46:14] So it's, we've we have found a way that works for us to, you know, But it's, it is a lot of fun. We have a place in Breckenridge, a family place there that we always enjoy going out there and it's always ski together. And it's just, it's great to have these places where we can all gather as a big group, because it's pretty fun when it happens.[00:46:34] So [00:46:35] Bob Wierema: [00:46:35] when, when you and Dan and your father are, are arguing at work, you're able to separate it from the family. When you, you all get back together, [00:46:45] Molly McShane: [00:46:45] you know what honestly sounds crazy, but we don't really argue that much. You know, my brother I'm here. Different personalities and it works out really well because he comes at it from one perspective.[00:46:58] Generally I come [00:47:00] at it from another perspective and we know if we agree on something that we've probably found the right solution, but you have kind of complimentary. Skill sets and perspectives. And one thing that we have always done, you know, I don't know whether or not it was a thoughtful decision or if we just did it, but we've all been really respectful of one another's intelligence and gifts that we have to bring.[00:47:27] And it's just always been like that. So not that we never disagree, but it doesn't turn into an argument. [00:47:34] Bob Wierema: [00:47:34] So, and I know we talked about it earlier and come back to, I was just thinking about when we talk about the family dynamic and the business, you all have a board of directors as well. So maybe talk about how that works.[00:47:47] And when you put that in place as a firm to say, [00:47:51] Molly McShane: [00:47:51] we need this. Well, first of all, it's been great. Having a board of directors, we started it the whole entire process to [00:48:00] turn it into a family business with a board of directors happens. gosh, somewhere, I don't know, maybe it was 15 years ago or so, but the initial impetus for it was my dad had a health scare and.[00:48:14] That kind of made him start thinking about, you know, what, I might not be on this planet forever. I should start making plans. And so we started, he started talking to other people about, you know, different alternatives that he had. And one of those would be turning it into a family business with a board of directors and that's.[00:48:36] Yeah. Eventually where we landed. So we hire, we have three outside board members, and then there's a group of, you know, kind of inside members. I'll say two. So my dad, my brother and I represent the business and the family. And then we have the president of each company on the board. Our CFO is on the board and then we have outside directors.[00:48:55] It really is. Something [00:49:00] that has been wonderful for our business. It's we have these outside perspectives that ask questions that are great questions. You know, how well, why do you do it this way? And maybe that's something we haven't asked ourselves in five years. So we made a decision five years ago to do it like this is it still the right decision to do it this way.[00:49:19] And so those really fundamental questions that our guest are second guessed at that level. Have really brought our strategic thinking to a new level. And it's been really, really great to have. we've gotten close to the board members there. they know all of us very well and, and it's been great.[00:49:41] It's been helpful as a family to have them, you know, for one, one example is it probably doesn't mean as much now, but in the future, it may, it's just making sure that the compensation for family members is fair and goes along with what we think it should be. You know? It paid market rate variance no more, no less.[00:50:00] [00:50:00] And to have an objective third party who understands all of the nuances to it is important. So having that source of objectivity is really great. I think, especially in a family business where. We haven't experienced it as much, but we're certainly not immune from it. It's just emotions, you know, coming through or, you know, God knows in future generations, when the individuals maybe didn't grow up in the same house, but they're working together, you know, those kinds of either rivalries or distrust or, you know, whatever it is.[00:50:34] It can intensify generations for generations. So having that objectivity I think is really important, for family businesses. So when I talked to others who are considering running their business into a family business, that's usually my first piece of advice is number one. Go get smart on it. Cause there's a lot of research out there and a lot of lessons learned that other family businesses, it's interesting.[00:50:57] You go to some of these conferences, [00:51:00] these family business owners are open kimono. They tell you all the problems they've had and it gets. You know, it gets a little spicy. I mean, there's the book, but they share it with you so that you could learn from it as like, Oh, okay. If that ever happens to us, how would we handle it?[00:51:21] You know? So I think getting smart on it, getting through the research of how do you do this well in a thoughtful way, and then getting an outside board. Those are the two things that I think that we have done that have been very, very helpful for us. [00:51:35] Michael Moore: [00:51:35] Molly. I could really respect that. That perspective and challenge.[00:51:40]having grown up inside 150 year old family company in, in Texas, I can remember the shift of, of it being just truly family. And decision-making done at that level to bringing in outside leadership and thought to help us grow because we thought that was important transition [00:52:00] at the time. How do you go about this siding?[00:52:04] The outside. Board members like what's the criteria. And then is it, are they there for a certain amount of time and then they roll off? Or how does that work? [00:52:16] Molly McShane: [00:52:16] So we have not gotten that prescriptive about it in our company yet our thought process, which was led by my dad at that point was really, we've got different companies here.[00:52:28] We need to have somebody who's really smart in the construction. History that they can add value there. We need another person who's really smart in the real estate industry. And then we want somebody who understands family business. And so we identified three individuals that brought that to the table.[00:52:48] But beyond that, what was, it should be important to everybody is a cultural fit. You know, it's not. Profits that drive our decision making, you know, we're longer [00:53:00] term. And sometimes we'll make a decision that is not the most profitable decision, but we think it's the right decision to do. And so people who really understand that way of doing things help, help guide our actions.[00:53:15] So that's part of, that's kind of how we decided our current board membership. I think in the future, there may be other. The factors that we consider, you know, right now it's, one woman in the room it's me, or it's typically are more effective when you have at least two women on them. it has to obviously be the right woman with the right amount of experience, but that's something we may consider at some point in time.[00:53:42] Having diversity on the board is important. We don't have a lot right now. So I think that's something we might consider. We don't have like a specific, you're going to roll off in two years to our board members, they have kind of been with us for awhile and they've been just wonderful, you know, parts of our [00:54:00] family and our business, but they're not going to be there forever.[00:54:03] And I think it's too much to ask of somebody to commit. Now for decades and decades and decades. Although, you know, some of them, we would like for them to stay that long, but maybe someday we'll get more prescriptive about it. If, if we need to, I also, don't like to place unnecessary restrictions on myself.[00:54:18] So if we don't need to, we probably won't. [00:54:21] Bob Wierema: [00:54:21] I was gonna ask. And again, I'm of course I'm bouncing around because this just came to mind thinking about, as you talked about some of those folks who have been helping you lead, I'm sure seeing you grow extremely over the last, you know, some of those board members have been there talk maybe a little bit [00:54:37] Michael Moore: [00:54:37] about [00:54:37] Bob Wierema: [00:54:37] mentors and people that you would say have helped kind of shape the career.[00:54:43] And then also, I know you have a passion for mentoring, so maybe hit on that as well. [00:54:49] Molly McShane: [00:54:49] Yeah. I have a long list of mentors who have been important to me. I think one of the things that you know, was a mistake is to think about a mentor as one person, [00:55:00] because, you know, you can grab little nuggets and value out of so many different people in your life, whether or not you work with them or not, they can mentor you in different ways.[00:55:10] So I, I have a long list. Dan is certainly one of them, but, but not the only one. I think one of the. The best things that I got out of my mentors was confidence when I needed it. When I was younger in my career, I was not always the most confident person. I, I wonder, you know, does my voice, am I really, is this going to be valuable to the conversation?[00:55:37] If I say it, or should I just keep an eye shut? Cause people are gonna roll their eyes. I say it, you know, asking myself those questions inside, you know, when you're in your twenties, you're just uncertain. Or I was. And so to have people that were older and more experienced, you know, ask my opinion and then value that opinion and make changes based on that opinion was [00:56:00] really important to me.[00:56:01] And it made me see the value that I brought to the table that, you know, they saw it before I did. They brought me along and helped me. Find my voice. And that was really important to me. I think obviously everyone has their own experiences for the mentors, but that was mine. And that was really important for me to.[00:56:20] To kind of borrow their confidence at times. Yeah. [00:56:23] Michael Moore: [00:56:23] I [00:56:24] Bob Wierema: [00:56:24] think that's important, Molly, because insert interrupt, because I think about is, you know, even myself as I grew in my business career, you think about that inner, that inner confidence and you know, I think they call it imposter syndrome. Right? Should I be in this?[00:56:39] Should I be in this room? Why am I in this room? And asking yourself those questions. And then when things come up, we'll use strong opinion. I know at least for me, I remember many times where I sat back and said, okay, I'm not going to insert myself here. I'm not sure if this is a strong enough point. And, you know, as I moved on the executive [00:57:00] committee at my company, Then it kind of brought me to another level that goes, why am I sitting in this room?[00:57:06] And it's like, these people want you there. They want to hear your voice. There's a reason they're there. And your point, I had a mentor that said, you're not there because they feel bad for you. They're there, you're there because they value your opinion. Right, [00:57:19] Molly McShane: [00:57:19] right. No, exactly. And that's. Yeah, I guess that comes with experience to feel confident in that.[00:57:26] And because you and I are not the only ones who have gone through this, I think most people do. I talked to my dad, he went through it. You know, everyone thinks that he's always been a hundred percent competent. [00:57:40] Michael Moore: [00:57:40] A lot of it is, is, is what you've demonstrated to us in the, you know, in the hour a little bit over an hour we've been talking is it's a balance.[00:57:49] I mean, I remember growing up, you know, and getting my report card or the, you know, the parent teacher conference and was like, well, he makes great grades, but God, he talks a [00:58:00] lot. And you know, and then my grandfather always kind of telling me, you know, it's better to be seen and not heard. And see you grow up with that mentality.[00:58:09] And then. You get into the business world and Nino no. When, when it's your first meeting, you know, you need to bring that mentor with you or someone along and help you stumble through, but, you know, learn and recalibrate and learn and recalibrate. And I just got to say, you're, you're such a perfect example of what we are accomplishing with this podcast, which is telling the story of your client.[00:58:38] It's just been. So fascinating to, to dive deep into it and really do appreciate everything that you've shared. [00:58:46] Molly McShane: [00:58:46] Thank you. I've enjoyed it as well. [00:58:50]Michael Moore: [00:58:50] just a couple of quotes, Molly, that you said that you wrote down that I really liked was I think you were kind of just talking about your career path and you said it's not a straight line to [00:59:00] get there and, and are really like that a lot.[00:59:03] I also love the, you know, I, I figured out I wanted to be in charge. You know, I wanted to be the one, having the conversations, which I think is great for a young audience to hear that, and then really enjoyed that. Starting a company is different than growing a company. So thank you for sharing those with us.[00:59:23] Bob Wierema: [00:59:23] Yeah, absolutely. And maybe the thing that resonated for me is that planning for the longterm, you know, we talked a little bit about, you know, getting in and hoping you're going to have that corner office and taking that longer term approach, not only with your career, but also for your business. And I think that's just great, great advice.[00:59:41] So we, we appreciate you coming on and spending some time with [00:59:45] Michael Moore: [00:59:45] us today. Thank you, Molly. [00:59:47] Molly McShane: [00:59:47] These guys[01:00:00] [01:00:00] Michael Moore: [01:00:00] thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the climb. If you enjoy the episode, please consider subscribing. And if you know someone who you would think would enjoy the podcast, feel free to share this with them. Thanks again. And we'll see you on the next step. . 

Connect with Michael & BobThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with Luke Reed & Quantum/PureWebsite:https://www.getpuresanitizer.com/Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/pure_sani/Twitter:https://twitter.com/pure_handFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/Pure_HandSani-101314821644885/?modal=admin_todo_tour[00:00:00] Luke Reed: [00:00:00] The answer is humility. You gotta be humble enough to tell them right where we are. I think the worst thing about our industry is not necessarily the CEOs, but the executives mask problems, you know, Hey, you know, we're, everything's going great. Just get more jobs. I mean, my team will tell you, like, I'm very open.[00:00:21] Like, Hey, finances are horrible. I would need to figure this out. We need more work. Does anybody have a plan? You got, be honest with them and you got to put them there and then you got to enable them to talk and you got to listen. I mean, I have to listen. And when, when a guy like Ben says, Hey, I think we need to make a pivot to the Northeast.[00:00:41] This is the guy I literally picked up the phone. I was like, are you out of your mind? Have you checked the news? Do you really think that we should be getting into the Northeast in the middle of COVID? And he was a hundred percent. Right. And that's all you, you gotta listen. You gotta listen to your people.[00:01:00] [00:01:00] Michael Moore: [00:01:00] Welcome to the climb crossroads in defining moments. [00:01:04] I'm your cohost Michael Moore. [00:01:06] Today we will go inside the mind of an entrepreneurial spirit growing up in rural Oklahoma and eventually making the OSU polo team. Luke Reed is changing the game. Is pivoted his business in the last 90 days by taking the chemical division of his own oil and gas company and transforming it into a multimillion dollar hand sanitizer manufacturer, his faith and his family guide him, listen to the client.[00:01:47] Luke. Thanks for joining me and Bob, welcome to the climb. [00:01:52] Luke Reed: [00:01:52] Glad to be here.[00:01:53]Michael Moore: [00:01:53] Well, [00:01:53] I'll start it off by saying, unlike several of our other guests, where there's a super long history for [00:02:00] us to feed off of our relationship is, is in its infancy. But several months ago, which feels like years ago in the world of COVID and.[00:02:11] Boiling gas, negative prices and all the things that have been given us black eyes for the last 90 days, when we sat down for that initial lunch, it was just this, this feeling like I had known you for a long time. And there were just commonalities in the way that we thought. I loved hearing your story.[00:02:27] And so as is Bob and I came up with the idea about the climb and crossroads and defining moments. I couldn't think of a better guest. So thank you for joining us. And I think after our initial meeting and we'll dive into this, I would have said you're. Probably one of the most interesting people in the oil and gas [00:02:46] business, but, with [00:02:47] the pivot that you've made and, and, and I can't wait to dive into it.[00:02:50] I'd say you're probably the most interesting person in the hand sanitizer business [00:02:53] now. So [00:02:56] thank you for, for joining us and just start out by giving us a little [00:03:00] background on you, kind of where you've been, where you are and where you're headed. [00:03:03] Luke Reed: [00:03:03] Yeah. So, definitely, definitely appreciate being here.[00:03:06] Yeah. When we met, I guess it was four or five months ago, but, so my wife and I bought a company called quantum valve back in 2015, 2014. It was a valve company here in the Barnett shale specifically for XTO, you know? So for about six months, we stayed here in the Barnett. moved to Midland in January of 16, and then from January to 16 have been operating ever since an hour.[00:03:32] We were one guy. Now we're 87 people or. All the way across the U S we've got facilities in South, Texas, Midland, the Northeast, and, yeah, we've, we've, we've got a really, really, really good core group of guys. most of us have worked together for 10 plus years and that synergy is what makes quantum, quantum, you know, we, we pride ourselves on the fact that we're super, super nimble.[00:03:56]we're not private equity backed, so. Really the only people that we [00:04:00] have to argue with is the people we shaved with. So conversation's pretty simple, but no, we, we started in the valve, went into bop, got into horsepower, got into chemical. The deal went really well. Yeah. So we went from a one product service line company to a five product service lines and, you know, went from a.[00:04:20] Million dollar a month, a year kind of revenue company, just small, small, small, small to North of 30. And I mean, honestly, all of that is attributed to the fact that we have. In each division, a true subject matter expert. And one of the things like our group. So between the four main executives outside of the finance, we have been together for a long time.[00:04:44] We've done a lot of Wells. We've we've done roughly 1400 Wells in the Northeast 1600 Wells in West Texas. So we have an extensive background on downhole. And so the whole idea wasn't to like get into the service world because it's [00:05:00] sexy and you're going to make a lot of money. It wasn't that at all, it was let's bridge the gap between the bow tie in New York and the boots on the ground, in the oil field and figure out a way to make it efficient and do that at a.[00:05:14] Cost point that doesn't kill somebody. And that truly makes a good return. I mean, it wasn't like 99% of the industry. I think whether it's ENP or OFS in the last three years, four years it's Hey, let's build something up sexy enough that we convinced some private equity that it's lipstick on a pig and they buy it with more money than you can see over.[00:05:34] They're just not practical. I think it's fake money and it, it doesn't sustain. And so the idea was okay, let's, let's do something that's meaningful. And in the meantime, let's build an ENP company, which is our assets in the Northeast, under black friend resources and let's vertically integrate. And rather than some companies that are out there that have that vertical integration, I think they really just Rob Peter to pay Paul.[00:05:59] And at the end of the [00:06:00] day, Peter and Paul, one of them comes knocking. And I think that's where you see a lot of downfall, especially with companies that you see there, they have a midstream component. It's a very attractive component, but you've got to treat it like it's an individual business and, and we've, we've got some really, really awesome mentors.[00:06:17] And quite frankly, I think that's one of our biggest strong sets is like, whether you're Blackford or your quantum. The group of people that are there to pick you up and not let you fall are huge. And we've got a plethora of resources of good older guys that say, Hey, Luke, or anybody on the staff, like, Hey, this is a bad decision because they're out there.[00:06:40] I mean, the. The idea of jumping at the next greatest thing. I mean, oil fields one-on-one and so it's, it's like trying to figure out what is a good move and then some of it's just gut and, and I think the one thing that we're really good at we've made mistakes there. No doubt about it. But we're really good at people.[00:07:00] [00:07:00] And we've had some really, really, really good leaders and that's made us individually, like where are, you know, each product service line we call them PSLs probably cause all of us are from Halliburton. You know, we just look at the world differently and if we can get true subject matter expert into the product service line, that means I don't have to do their job.[00:07:21] And that's kind of the, one of the biggest things is trying to, trying to just get everybody to. Stay in flow. I guess if you will, every day is a new day. Just when I feel like we get ahead, you know, we get another curve ball, but so much of it is just the backbone of the leaders of each division. And we've got a really, really strong executive team that, you know, it's not an executive team that we're all Harvard MBA guys.[00:07:48] We're true. Boots on the ground. Every single one of us have been just as much time in the field as the other and having that operational experience. You know, if anything we're the weakest at is finance, but that's what we [00:08:00] hire bankers as well. That's their job. So now it's been, it's been really good.[00:08:05] It's, it's definitely been a challenging, five years, but, something I know that we're going to look back at and say, Hey, it was worth it [00:08:11] Michael Moore: [00:08:11] backing up from kind of the current landscape. And before we pivot into your idea during all of this turmoil, that's just fascinating. Give us a little more insight into how you grew up rural Oklahoma, OSU polo.[00:08:27] Yeah, let's hear about that. [00:08:29] Luke Reed: [00:08:29] So, yeah, I grew up in Northwest Oklahoma and Gaiman and, lived there. My whole life went to Oklahoma state, I guess this is what, gosh, it makes you really feel old. This is 2020. so it would have been 2000 went there, got, had an awesome college experience. I did the whole five and a half year.[00:08:47] Good victory and a half lap, if you will. biomechanical engineering and you know, not arrogantly speaking, I. The education part was pretty easy. I had a, I was, I had a, it feels like as [00:09:00] far as books wise, I had a pretty easy time getting through school, but that's where I learned how to play polo. And, anyway, it turned polo into, I went to, I guess it was LA first and Seattle and I worked as a, a groom for a patrol and.[00:09:14] Somehow got, I guess, good enough that somebody said, Hey, you should think about this as a career. And, two days before I graduated college, I told my folks, I was like, Hey, I think I'm going to go to New Zealand and play for this team. And my folks were like super, super supportive and they were like, follow your dreams.[00:09:31] And so I literally, I had already accepted with Halliburton. And the guy's name is John reads of John. If you ever heard this, you were instrumental in my life. And he said, dude, follow your dreams. And, whenever you grow up and get a real job, call me. And it's so easy to remember. Cause I'm John Luke Reed.[00:09:47] So this was really simple to remember his name. So I did pull up for the next 10 years all over the world and, How I met Tim Kelly and just a bunch of great, great humans and had an awesome has had an [00:10:00] awesome run. And I met my wife in school. I was playing for a team in Jackson hole and we were traveling to Houston for the fall, and I was going into a libation establishment and, making sure that all my friends and everybody is still waters, keeping up to my standards.[00:10:15] We were having a good time, obviously. And, Ran into my future wife. She was like, Hey, this is 2008. She's like, listen, I, I like you. But pull, it was a little much for me. So, by 2010, she'd convinced me like, okay, it's time to get a real job time to let go of polo. And, I was playing here for a team in Dallas and I ended up calling John Reed, the guy 10 years prior and said, I guess this was Oh five.[00:10:39] And I guess it was six, seven years. And I said, Hey, I've grown up and he had a job and three days later I was working for Halliburton.[00:10:47]Bob Wierema: [00:10:47] So, so Luke, did you, did you stay in touch with. John [00:10:53] throughout that time or  [00:10:54] you know, those six, seven years you just called him up and he'd say, come on, [00:10:57] come on over.[00:10:58] Luke Reed: [00:10:58] Yeah, I never, never spoke [00:11:00] to him. I, I had a bunch of college buddies that went to Halliburton it's, for biomechanical engineering out of Oklahoma state. It's a pretty, fast track to Halliburton if you will. So it was kind of an end, but, no, John, it was quite humorous. And then, that's how I met half the staff at quantum and on it went.[00:11:18] So polo and my grandfather on my mother's side was, was quite into it as well. Probably not the same level as you. I mean, it's a very tight knit community. So that, for lack of a better term club that you became a part of, I mean, is that, is that something that you still rely on today? Those connections and relationships and.[00:11:39] People that you met along the way, [00:11:41] you know? No one thing if like you asked my wife like about me, I'm once I'm done with something I'm done with something I'm very. Very little look in the rear view mirror. And I always thought, especially when I got into engineering and I'm, you know, sitting in West Virginia on a well site, wondering what the hell am I doing?[00:11:59] It [00:12:00] was really funny to think like, why did I play polo? And what was the whole point of all that? And then when I got into Midland, With the oil field service company, you know, immediately BTA, they're not a customer of quantum, but Kelly Beale was one of my, sponsors there for a few years. Great, great guy, Craig, Duke, wonderful people.[00:12:19] I mean, I reached out to them and you know, they were there to say, Hey, we support you and Hey, if you're in town and you need something and it just opened this little web up and then, you know, here recently between. Tim over at Lockton and, bill Webb over in  Alabama. I hadn't really talked to a whole lot of people just cause I gotten out of it.[00:12:38] I, you know, put up the polo saddle and got a Western saddle out and started trying to show a Western brand in California, which was quite humbling. I thought I was really good at polo. I really was horrible in a Western saddle and then kids came and, you know, five years ago we had our son lane. And then Evan, he's now two and a half, almost three.[00:12:57] And we just had a baby girl Lillian. [00:13:00] So she's like five weeks, maybe four weeks. And so it's, it's chaos. Like literally, I mean, if, if I, if I had, you know, to write it down and look at it, you're like, what were you thinking? Like, why did you put all those cinder blocks on your back? But you know, if you're always, if you're going to wait for the right time, I think you're going to wait a long time.[00:13:19] Michael Moore: [00:13:19] Exactly. So your wife helps you see the light at the end of the tunnel on polo. You do decide to get married and typically that's enough, but then you guys decided to buy a company together, like talk about those conversations around the table. [00:13:35]Luke Reed: [00:13:35] are you sure you want to do this? Like, I mean, this is, once you got some pretty good deal, like, do we, do we need to go there?[00:13:40] You know, if the truth be told and a bottle of wine is down, I think she would tell you that, Hey, this is just who he is. His heart is completely wild and untamed. And if, if there's something to go after he's going to do it and not because I want that from a standpoint of beat my [00:14:00] chest, I genuinely just love people and I want to make a change.[00:14:04] I want to make a difference. I don't, I don't care if I have, you know, a thousand awards on my mantle. That doesn't mean anything to me. If I can show people. That doing good, gets good and show through faith of Jesus Christ. Like this is the right thing to do. It works. It ends up working. I mean, there's, there's unsurmountable things that I think all the time, how in the world are we going to get through this?[00:14:32] And I had one of our main guys yesterday, tell me this is by faith and faith alone. And I, I love that our team. You know, for the longest time, I thought it was awkward to talk about God and in a public situations, if you will. But our team's quite the opposite. And I think we get to feed on each other and show like, Hey, we're going to get through this.[00:14:52] I mean, it's not going to necessarily be the way we thought it was going to be. I mean, who in the world thought I was going to sell hand sanitizer, but to that, we'll get that. [00:15:00] Yeah, we'll get to that. But I mean, at the same time, who would have thought somebody from Guymon, Oklahoma, where. There's. I mean, it's, it's, you're either in cattle or, or wheat pasture or corn.[00:15:10] I mean, there's, there's not polo for any mind sake and, you know, he puts things in front of you and you either choose to go down that path or you don't, but I mean, either way, it's your destiny, I guess, Luke, [00:15:23] Bob Wierema: [00:15:23] you know, I love, I love the comment of what you said.  If. If you get away  for the right time, you know, you're going to wait a long time. At what point was the tipping point from you to go, okay, this is like, this is time I'm ready to go. Was there something that was a catalyst to say, I got to leave and go do this. [00:15:42] Luke Reed: [00:15:42] Like, [00:15:43] did the opportunity just fall in your lap? Like how did all of that come about? You know, combination of things. I feel like I was putting my.[00:15:51] Self and a place to lead a company that I was with at the time, kind of fell through, you know, no harm, no foul, if you will. I learned a [00:16:00] tremendous amount working for that company and I just thought. It's time for me to go do this on my own. We know what I think of back when I think back about that.[00:16:10] And I think, okay, wait a minute, rewind. This is 2015. So you've now been a grownup. If you will, quote unquote for five years, like give me a break. Like people spend 30 years getting to that position. I don't know. I just, I led, you know, I led a team that was started with two guys and went to 104 and that's just my personality.[00:16:30] And I looked at it like, Hey, here's an opportunity. I believe in myself and the weights on me. And, and like I told Erica, that's my wife. I said, if you, I mean, I know you believe in me. I know we believe in each other. So if, if we feel like we got this, let's, let's roll the dice and let's go. I mean, the, some of the best advice I ever got on, like, going out on my own was what's the worst thing that can happen.[00:16:55] I mean, I get a job. You know, I mean, it's, it's not the worst [00:17:00] thing. I mean, I'm educated. I've, I've got my health, I've got wonderful children. I've got a wonderful wife. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, especially with what's presented itself in the last 90 days. I mean, tell me what person hasn't looked back in the last 90 days and said, Hey, maybe the last few years I could have done a little differently.[00:17:18] Not that you would've changed everything, but there's definitely things that you would look at differently and say, Hey. Maybe I need to put a little less priority into, you know, being gone three days a week or, you know, fill in the blank, whatever it may be for each person. I don't think it was exactly a catalyst.[00:17:34] If anything, it was just my time, [00:17:37] Michael Moore: [00:17:37] you know, but that's a unique skill set that at your age, really at any age, a lot of people really struggle with, I mean, to understand the role that faith plays, but then every time I sit down with you, You know, a lot of C level guys or owners or entrepreneurs, they're really good at thinking three steps [00:17:56] ahead, [00:17:57] or maybe they're really good at analyzing the [00:18:00] now, or maybe they spend the majority of their time looking in the rear view mirror, but to be able to pivot between the three, I, I certainly see as a defining moment in, in a, you know, a way that you go about your day and so.[00:18:16] Now we're in the midst of COVID-19 oil has gone to a negative number and you pivot talk to us about that. [00:18:29] Luke Reed: [00:18:29] So our COO, his name's Luke, we've been running together since literally the fourth day of Halliburton. So we used to put the show on called Luke and Luke in the morning, and it was our, it was our Mike and Mike interpretation of the oil field.[00:18:45] And. We've been extremely close ever since. And he sends me this message the day. I mean, the night Lily and his being born. And he's like, Hey, I think we got to do this. And he like sends [00:19:00] me this mad brochure about pants appetizer. And I just rolled my eyes and I sent him a message back. I was like, what the hell are you talking about?[00:19:07] Like, I mean, let's, let's, I mean, I, I haven't slept for a while, but I'm not that stupid yet. let's, let's just reset for a couple of days. And anyway, we, we got on the horn and. You know, this is pre everybody getting back into the office, which is for our team, extremely weird. Cause we all are. You know, very tangible folks that want to like to be around each other.[00:19:30] Look at each other, talk with one another. We want to interact on a face to face level. So anyway we have inside quantum was a chemical division that did pretty well. And you know, our leader of the chemical division had mentioned, Hey, like this is a, this is an Avenue that we should think about Luke pressed a little harder than anybody.[00:19:50] And it grew wings and, All of a sudden it was, you know, Hey, this is a good idea to hate this as a great idea to financially, [00:20:00] you know, could change your company. You know, I mean, I'm a wide open book, so we've got debt. And you know, when we look at our books, you know, again, we're not private equity owned, but you know, we own the bank or we owe the bank and we owe, you know, private investors.[00:20:12] And when we look at that, And you think about, okay, well, so on the, on the trajectory we are January and February were just slam out, knock out months for us. It was awesome. And then to have that kind of a shot in the heart, it was, it was like everything we had worked for through 19 to get there was there.[00:20:30] And then it was like, okay, we've got, gotta reset. And. You know, the thing about oil field is, is, you know, you're working on what I would consider smaller margins just because of the industry right now. And even in January, February. I mean, I think if you're really, truly. Call a net 20 is, is pretty remarkable.[00:20:48]some people might think I'm off, but I just think their math is probably wrong. You know, when, when we got into hand sanitizer, it was okay. Let's lean on some people that are really, really smart in this space. And I've got a [00:21:00] really, really, really good close family friend. Probably next to loop my closest friend.[00:21:05] And, I reached out to him and I was like, Hey, you're in medical sales space. Like, get in here, let's start brainstorming. And so he's been sitting at the head of the conference table every day. And so when we to give you a little bit of background of why I say conference table, so our office, everybody clearly has their own office, but, in December I asked everybody.[00:21:26] That was on outside of finance. Cause they need to be next to their computers and not listening to me babble, but sales team, COO corporate development, all the leaders of the future and the vision. I was like every single one of you, this is your new office. And so there's been roughly seven or eight of us in one conference room since December 23rd.[00:21:47] And. And the whole reason was, is, you know, the vision of going forward, you got to get there and you've got to work on it. And if you, if, if you're always wondering what Bob says and Luke says, and heritage says, and Tom said, you know, it's just miss [00:22:00] combobulated, which that posed to be a problem when it got COVID and everybody's conferencing calling each other and saying, Hey, did you talk to Joe?[00:22:07] Or did you talk to Bob? And it got kind of out of hand, but all in all, it was a. We've been sitting in there. And since, I guess it's been about three and a half weeks that we've been back in the office and we brought Ryde in and it's, it's just been, you know, relationship driven. But it's, it's been honest.[00:22:26] It's been a little slow at times, but you know, we've got a great product. We've got a really, really good following. We've got people all across the U S pushing this and there's unfortunately, because the pandemic. There is so much BS out on the market from a hand sanitizer, whether that's a, you know, some ethanol I get imported from Mexico.[00:22:47] That's poor. I mean, I literally could tell you so much about hand sanitizer. It's absurd, and more about packaging than you'd ever want to know. But we just said to the team were like, Hey, we're going to get really, really smart. On lane [00:23:00] logistics, packaging, the actual formula of the sanitizer, and we're going to push it.[00:23:04] And if it's a three year play, it's a five-year play. It's seven year player. It's a three month play. Let's capitalize as best as we can. Let's not price gouge. Let's not get ourselves into a problem with the government. And let's just put out the same honest quantum product. That we've been putting out in the oil field, let's put it out and hand sanitizer and the margins were good and let's keep paying that down and let's keep people employed.[00:23:27] That was the big goal of it. And it's taken off and now it's turning into something quite meaningful. [00:23:34] Michael Moore: [00:23:34] Talk about some of the early successes that you've had. I mean, the, the market penetration you've created and. Inside of a couple of months is astounding. [00:23:43] Luke Reed: [00:23:43] Yeah, it is. we've had some really, really good people that have gotten into some big, big box places.[00:23:52]a lot of Costco, whole foods, Walgreens, Cisco, a lot of hospitals, a ton of school [00:24:00] districts. And it's taken off and it's, I think a lot of it's like, you know, everybody wanted to sell a product and say, well, this is what it is. You guys figure out packaging. Mine was quite the opposite. It was like, why they have a need let's go figure it out.[00:24:13] And so we got hooked up with a guy, his name's Jim. On the packaging side and he's taken care of lane logistics and, and bottling, and he's been our one stop shop. And it, again, it goes back to quantum. Like if you put a subject matter expert and it's something that he's really good at leave well enough alone.[00:24:30] I don't need to learn about how to bottle a two ounce package. That's not my skillset and I don't need to be that guy. So that's something that we, we really did and it, it worked. And now it's. It's driving home. I mean, we're, I think we're moving a lot of product right now and it's, it looks like on the horizon, at least we're seeing six and 12 month contracts, which for us, is awesome.[00:24:55] And let's see what happens. Who knows we were, I I'm, I'm premature telling [00:25:00] this, but, my team would appreciate it. We're launching a brand of the product called pure. And it's going to be a, it's going to be an awesome move. It's going to go into eCommerce and we're going to, we're going to push it as hard as we can and, see what good things happen.[00:25:14] Michael Moore: [00:25:14] So Luke is you, you know, again, going back to what I've seen your ability to look at things from all angles and you have such a, I mean, you know, I hope it becomes a rear view mirror thing sooner than later, but you get a defining moment, like a COVID-19. I mean, how are you looking at kind of like the old economy versus the new economy?[00:25:38] Luke Reed: [00:25:38] You know, I think on things that are going forward, we're probably going to look at cash differently. Definitely conserving more, holding that closer to our chest rather than going out. And I mean, I think that there's, don't get me wrong. That there's really, really good opportunities right now, but an opportunity, you know, just because it's half off doesn't mean you need to buy it.[00:26:00] [00:26:00] And there's a, there's a lot of oil field services right now that, you know, every say, Oh, it's 10 cents on the dollar. It's 20 cents on the dollar we're got, but yet to have that 20 cents. And if you're going to borrow that 20 cents at 15 cents, now it's 35 cents. And I think everybody just thinks like, Oh, this is just simple and it's not.[00:26:19] And I think we look at it like, okay, how do we hold our cash? How do we strategically think about the next five years? And then what do we want to be a part of? I think something that our industry is so laser focused is that we, we say we diversify relative to the industry. Well guess what? It's still the industry.[00:26:40] One thing the hand sanitizer is at least taught our team is like, Holy, there's a lot going on in this world that we know nothing about. And so it's gotten us a completely different perspective of like looking at. Everything else that's going on. And so I think that, I think diversifying our team, I know that we would like to [00:27:00] maybe do a little bit more real estate, maybe continue on a, what do we call it now?[00:27:04] What does it say? Says households and, something health gone. Our, our VP of finance, he called it something like health and households or something. It's, the launch of the pure brand. That's, you know, stuff that. Stuff that's every day that affects everyone. And I think that people don't realize, you know, especially like some people in my family, they think all of this is, you know, fad.[00:27:25] It's not a fad. I mean, you, you like it or leave it it's changed. And the world's go in there and if you can't go there, you're going to be left behind. And so I think that's kind of our goal is to, to really look at opportunities outside of the industry capitalize and then. Maybe be a little more nimble than we are right now.[00:27:47] Michael Moore: [00:27:47] So [00:27:47] along those lines, and then Bob jump in here. I don't want to monopolize the questions, but, you mentioned earlier, you know, we're really good at people, right. But how do you [00:28:00] transform, motivate, educate a workforce that has been oil field services? And look, there's a lot of technical expertise that goes into that, but get them behind the charge of this extreme pivot and direction and start all rowing to the same beat again, and, and heading, you know, heading towards where you're going to take this thing.[00:28:28] Luke Reed: [00:28:28] Well, first is so every product service line leader. So we've got a guy named Ben who runs our pump down division. And we've got a guy named Mitchell who runs frack stack. I'm not asking them to sell hand sanitizer. I'm asking them to get even more focused on their product service line because their lifeline of Luke Reed is, you know, 80% taken.[00:28:49] Now. Now not that you know, you can't call me cause we all talk every day. It's more of. You guys have proven yourself, you've got wings, jump off the cliff. You got this [00:29:00] figured out and enabling them to know that they are, who they need to be at that time is probably the most paramount piece in the success is, you know, everybody, you know, you're only as good as you, get to call that lifeline.[00:29:14] Well, when you realize, Hey, lifeline stepped away and I need to step up. That's what they've done. I mean, Ben has grown a division of horsepower. I can honestly say we're sold out of our horsepower right now. And I mean, nobody can believe it. Nobody even understands it. We opened a shop in Pittsburgh, middle of April.[00:29:30] Everyone's like, what are you doing? We hired 15 people and we were sold out within days, but the manager up there, his name's D he's just, he's been rock solid. And that's because they see. The D and the new guys, they see me give that free reign to Ben and you feed on it. I mean, leaders cream rises to the top.[00:29:53] You don't have to be a rocket scientist. You just got to give them that. And if you try to control people, it just, it just doesn't work. I [00:30:00] mean, it's, it's so counterintuitive to talk about a guy being such an expert, but me controlling him. It's like, well, if he's such an expert, then what the heck am I doing?[00:30:10] And. That's probably where, you know, the people skill set has come from. Everybody's really leaning on each other, but we know like, Hey, I don't have to ask Reed for permission. I mean, it's probably one of my first things I ask in an interview. If you're a yes, sir, kind of guy, I don't need you. I want you to say, Hey, Luke, you're wrong.[00:30:32] But I'm okay with that. I love to be challenged. I mean, Luke and I, the COO, I mean, we just get in, knock down drag outs, but we're best friends, Don, and I same thing. the guys that are, we all know like, Hey, that's why we're here. If we were all, getting along and it was perfect, how we'd have a big ENP company in the Northeast and we'd, you know, it'd be sunshine and rainbows and it's not.[00:30:55] Bob Wierema: [00:30:55] Luke, how do you build, how do you build that trust? [00:31:00] [00:31:00] That's clearly there between the team to [00:31:02] be able to do that when, [00:31:04] you know, to get [00:31:05] those folks to step up and speak their mind. I mean, that, that sounds, it sounds easy, [00:31:10] but it's [00:31:11] not right. Like, how do you get them to say, [00:31:14] Hey, [00:31:14] Luke, you know, I firmly believe this [00:31:17] without fear in their job.[00:31:19] Right? How do you build that type of culture?[00:31:21]Luke Reed: [00:31:21] The answer is humility. You gotta be humble enough to tell them right where we are. I think the worst thing about art industry is not necessarily the CEOs, but the executives mask problems. You know, Hey, you know, we're, everything's going great. Just get more jobs.[00:31:39] I mean, my team will tell you, like, I'm very open. Like, Hey, finances are horrible. would need to figure this out. We need more work. Does anybody have a plan? And I think you've got to, you gotta be, you gotta be honest with them and you got to put them there and then you got to enable them to talk and you got to listen.[00:31:58] I mean, I have to listen. [00:32:00] And when, when a guy like Ben says, Hey, I think we need to make a pivot to the Northeast. This is the guy I literally picked up the phone. I was like, are you out of your mind? Have you checked the news? Do you really think that we should be getting into the Northeast in the middle of COVID and he was a hundred percent, right.[00:32:18] You know, gas, like all of a sudden became this bright shining star. My phone started ringing off the hook. Everybody was like, Hey, I heard your cause. Our, our black from resources, our assets are in the Northeast. And, and 90% of us, I mean the whole executive team, we spent six plus years in the Northeast, but we never thought we'd have a service company up there.[00:32:36] Yeah, it's just, that's great. And that's all you, you gotta listen, you gotta listen to your people. [00:32:43] Michael Moore: [00:32:43] No, I think, you know, you're hitting on some, some great themes here that I'm writing down. Like, [00:32:49] you know, listen, [00:32:50] let me just hit on that one. I loved how open you were about your [00:32:54] faith. You can't do this without humility.[00:32:57] You can't do this without [00:32:58] empowerment. [00:33:00] [00:33:00] I mean, as you, as you think back on the, the influences in your life that define you, I mean, does that, does that carry forward in how you pick teams? You know, you mentioned, I don't want a guy that says yes, sir. I want a guy that says you're wrong, which is awesome. A lot of leaders don't look at it that way.[00:33:18] talked to us about that. [00:33:20] Luke Reed: [00:33:20] Yeah. I think, Especially in our industry, there is somebody at all corners trying to teach you. There's somebody taking something under the table. Some, you know, you gotta buy him something to get the work. I mean, it's, it's just absurd, but that's one thing like our team is known from day one.[00:33:38] You do it once. Luke is a one and done guy because that's a slippery slope. It never ends. I mean, am I expecting to see you here in this podcast? So if I do another one, am I going to get a pair of boots? And the next time I'm going to get a shotgun. I mean, I'm going to wear you guys out. I'm gonna try to be on the phone on the podcast once a month.[00:33:54] So it's, it's it's you gotta, you gotta go after guys that say above [00:34:00] everything, I'm going to do the ethical thing. And if I can't do that, Hey, it's not worth doing. Even if it leads you down a slope that says, Hey man, we're out of money. We've got to, you know what that's where the impossible. Can be possible.[00:34:14] I mean, that's where faith prevails. I mean, there's, there's plenty of times that, on our place that we live out in, West of Weatherford, all go to the barn and I'll. Have my alone time from the three rug rats. And I can sit there and say my piece and it's, it's my time to say, Hey, I don't have this figured out.[00:34:33] I don't know what to do. I mean, ask my wife, she's my soundboard. When I'm at my wit's end, I go to her and I'm like, Hey, shoulder need to go to bed early tonight. I literally just need to vomit and like give you everything. Tell me what I need to do. Because that's at the end of the day. Like that's why those people are great.[00:34:51] That's why the leadership is great. It's, you've got to process things. And if you think that you're going to solve them all and just, you're just not going to. [00:35:00] So I think that, that, and like pushing people to realize that. By faith, we're going to be good. And everything's going to work out for those that actually like do right.[00:35:10] It might, again, it might not be the path you think you're on, but let's be real. I was playing polo 10 years ago. Thinking why in the world do I care about, you know, Reynold's number and getting some flow regime out of the hole? I wasn't thinking about a wellbore. I was thinking about hitting the polo ball.[00:35:25] I mean, you know, it's just. You got to take what God gives you and says, Hey, you're either going to be upset or you're going to make lemonade[00:35:39] Bob Wierema: [00:35:39] . You mentioned your wife, [00:35:41] Erica, [00:35:42] and how you, you need that time to say, Hey, we're going to put the [00:35:44] kids together time for me to kind of. Get [00:35:48] a lot of things out. I mean, I've heard from a lot of people over the years of like how that partner is so important in their career and kind of [00:36:00] molding of personal and professional.[00:36:01] Can you talk a little bit more about like [00:36:04] how you guys [00:36:04] are a team and this and what all that looks like?[00:36:07]Luke Reed: [00:36:07] Oh yeah. I wouldn't put her there. I wouldn't have anything. I wouldn't be anywhere without her. I think in the beginning. So she, she worked at the local bank and, a few different places when we first got married.[00:36:18] And then about four years in, she stopped working about the time that we got pregnant with lane. She hasn't worked since, so I guess it's been five and a half, six years, but it's like, I think a lot of people discount. The, the real CEO in the family is her. I mean, she keeps all the buttons on and it's.[00:36:37] To me, like, especially like I'll go into like a two week road trip, or I did this massive private equity tour with Luke for a few years and I was gone a lot, but if I don't get to come home and have that reset, it's so negative for me, you know, she's definitely a, a God fearing woman. she is a. Very large studier of the [00:37:00] Bible and she leads me Kimmy.[00:37:03] She leads a, we've got a small group of married couples that come over, typically on Thursday nights and she does all the cooking or they'll pass it back and forth, however they do it. But, we all get together and, you know, try to figure out, you know, how to be better people and that's her. And that's when you're being pushed from the level of.[00:37:23] You know, the girl next to you in bed. It, it makes it really real. Yeah. She's bar none, everything. [00:37:33] Michael Moore: [00:37:33] No. That's great. I mean, you, you, you're definitely got three different perspectives of sort of the beginning, middle and end of that, that powerful relationship. I mean, Bob, I don't want to share too much here, but I mean, Bob would be married right now instead of engaged, but he had to pivot his wedding date because of COVID-19.[00:37:55] Now I'm pretty excited about that because I now can attend it. Wasn't gonna work, [00:38:00] but. We're all at that different level. Whereas I got married in 2003 and it's the same thing, Luke. I mean, if too many night goes by that we don't get to sit down and have those talks. I don't feel like I understand where I'm at.[00:38:13] Luke Reed: [00:38:13] That's right. [00:38:14] Michael Moore: [00:38:14] You know where I'm going and it's so important. It's the same thing. I mean, then she's the same way too. I mean, she's got stuff on her chest and things she's dealing with. And that she wants to talk to me about, and I've got to be a good listener there too. It can't just flow one way, but we'll have that sign.[00:38:29] Like, Hey, we need to put the kids to bed. It's time to sit down and have our talk. And I really think if I had to define one thing. That we do on a consistent basis. That's the strength of our togetherness. It's that, that ability to communicate on a very open and regular basis? [00:38:47] Luke Reed: [00:38:47] Yeah. I mean, we, my folks are, her folks will come down and they're like, you know, how do we turn the TV on or something?[00:38:53] And, you know, just to watch a program when the kids are to bed and Hey, do you guys watch the news? And we're both like, no, I mean, w what's there to [00:39:00] watch, you know, we, we still sit at the dinner table and power meals together. We communicate through that and that's kind of our, you know, that's our time.[00:39:09] And if you don't have that, it's, it's, it's so unbalanced. I mean, things just feel out of whack and, yeah, I think we don't as, as a. Culture. I don't think we give them enough credit, but, they definitely are the backbone. [00:39:25] Bob Wierema: [00:39:25] And that's a lot about, I think what we talked about is as Michael and I have always thought about, about this type of conversation is all that, that news, that politics, things like that, that, [00:39:37] that get in the way of, of, you know, [00:39:40] having these types of conversations [00:39:42] of even just having those dialogues [00:39:44] at home with your, your wife, your partner, your kids, everything.[00:39:48] I [00:39:48] mean, That, that has gone [00:39:51] Michael Moore: [00:39:51] away to some extent that, you know, I can't tell you how many times you go out [00:39:54] to dinner and you see two people sitting at dinner together and they're both on their [00:39:58] phones. [00:39:59] Luke Reed: [00:39:59] I mean, it's [00:40:00] incredible. [00:40:00] I mean, what, what has happened with, [00:40:03] with those [00:40:04] devices, they're touched our hands and what it's done to communication.[00:40:08] It's disgusting. yeah, the, my LinkedIn, one of our ladies in the office runs it. I mean, I have zero social media. You know, honestly, I would rather get my mail via horse. I have no, I have no care about that whatsoever. If my, if email all that stuff, I could, I could easily unplug from that. I mean, unfortunately now I have to keep it pretty glued.[00:40:31] If my wife were sitting here right now, she'd roll her eyes because she knows how I am constantly on the phone, but it is like, I think one of the biggest problems I have with that right now, if we can speak about today's world is. Somehow the rules and I don't even want to call them rules, but somehow the world said, Hey, you know what, I'm going to write whatever I want on the internet.[00:40:56] And it's going to be acceptable and there's no [00:41:00] repercussions. There's no backlash. There's no, you know, Hey, I'm worried about getting into trouble. I mean, I just, I mean, we all probably grew up in the same born late seventies, early eighties, if you will. Timeframe of like our folks, you know, you respected who is in office.[00:41:15] You respect whether you agreed with them or not. Like I could care less. I mean, there's always going to be an opinion, but at the end of the day, it's like the world or at least our country we've lost this just massive sense of respect. And it's, it's so easy to just say whatever we want, do whatever we want.[00:41:35] No big worries. Nobody has to know. It's like nobody is accountable for anything. And that lack of accountability or lack of discipline is what creates chaos. And it's, what's created what we're in right now. I mean, it's just absurd. It's like, can you people not realize like, if you're just kind to one another, everything else works itself out, but this like the things that we're seeing today in the last.[00:41:58] Two weeks, if you [00:42:00] will. I mean, it's absurd. I told you about going to Houston last week and I go down there and the Galleria is like, literally like shoulder to shoulder with, with armed people, every windows boarded up, I was like, where are we? Well, you think we're gonna like Columbia in 1965? I mean, just, it makes zero sense.[00:42:18] Bob Wierema: [00:42:18] And we're supposed to be social distancing too. A lot of that work [00:42:22] Luke Reed: [00:42:22] right there. They're leaving a man out, you know, there's that, there's this space for a six man, six foot man. [00:42:28] Michael Moore: [00:42:28] Well, and we're trying to bring, you know, [00:42:31] whether it's [00:42:31] mom and pop medium or large, I mean, all business has been affected by this and we're trying to bring him back.[00:42:38] And then we're going to pivot and have riots and looting and just send them in a far further direction. That's going to be even harder to recover from. Like, where's the humility and sense in that? [00:42:50] Luke Reed: [00:42:50] I I'd really like to know what was being accomplished there. I mean, there's, there's definitely different ways to get your point across, but it's like, why?[00:43:00] [00:42:59] Like why, why go down that road? but again, It's it's the, it's the world we live in today, where if I have an opinion about something, I can just tweet it and nobody's gonna. Be upset at my tweet and it's absurd. And it's like, you know what, say that to my face. And let's see what happens because not, not that it's not that it's all of a sudden going to be a fist fight if you will, but I'll bet you a thousand to one.[00:43:30] 85, if not 95% of the comments made would never happen face to face because they know they're not right. You can't look at somebody in the eye and talk negative about somebody when you haven't been in their shoes, you don't get to do that. That's not humanity. I mean, that's just, that's absurd to me. And that's what, that's what we do.[00:43:49] Michael Moore: [00:43:49] I mean, like raising kids in this environment, The idea of you're not being bullied on the playground anymore. It's over [00:44:00] social media. And to your point, they wouldn't do those things if it was on the playground anymore. And it's just, it's debilitating for these kids. It's just ridiculous. [00:44:11] Luke Reed: [00:44:11] You know, I'm fearful, like in that sense of, you know, so my wife and I both grew up in small town, America, a, there was no such thing as a private school.[00:44:18] I mean, we're talking, I grew up in a town of, of 8,000 people. My wife grew up in a town of 1200 people. I graduated with 211. She graduated with like, 12. And so the idea of like raising kids in Texas and private schools and schools in general, I mean, it's a much bigger topic here. You know, it was really easy for the first five years cause we didn't have to worry about it and now we're figuring out, well, where's laying, going to go to school and well, how does this work and what does this teachers think?[00:44:46] And I'm like, Wait a minute. I mean, the only way I process this is to sit down with the school and it's like, Oh yeah, I'm sure they're going to take a meeting with you though. Just go ahead and get yourself a meeting with the school and make sure everybody including the janitors on board. Well, it's everybody [00:45:00] agrees with Luke.[00:45:00] Yeah, exactly. So it's. It's it's tough. Cause I, I, I lean on, you know, friends that have older children like, Hey, how do we, how do we maneuver through this? And how do we get our children to understand this? And it's, I think the first thing, you know, we, especially with Eric, I mean, she does a lot of, you know, good children's time, Bible time.[00:45:22] She's, she's constantly with the children obviously, but just being open with it. I mean, my, my five-year-old's can say pandemic better than I can. And he, and he knows what's going on, but I think it's just making them aware and then telling them, Hey, this is not right. You know, these are wrong things in these are right things.[00:45:41]clearly he doesn't like to see riots cause we don't turn on the news. So, you know, it just, if anything, I hope COVID shows a lot of people like we've gotta get back to the house and we've gotta be parents. We gotta be present and we gotta make sure that. I mean that it's our job. Our job is to raise children and [00:46:00] ultimately that's what we're responsible for.[00:46:02] And, it's, it's tough. Like I think maneuvering through today's world is a headache. [00:46:09] Michael Moore: [00:46:09] Well, Luke, and you nailed it. I mean, I think one of the greatest ways to tell stories and transfer that knowledge is through stories and that's how Bob and I came up with this idea, like, it's just, it's gone away. And we got to bring it back.[00:46:24] I mean, like you, I grew up in dripping Springs, Texas. I think we had 600 people when I moved there. One stoplight and every Saturday I would go to the dripping Springs store and listen to all the old men coming back from catching bass in the little central Texas creeks. And they tell all their stories.[00:46:43] I mean, it was like, I looked forward to that. It was, it was educational. It defined a lot of the way I think about things, but that's. Unfortunately, it's, it's gone away. And you know, when you were talking about your phone, like there's a difference being on the phone, which is what we do for a [00:47:00] living [00:47:00] Luke Reed: [00:47:00] and in your phone.[00:47:02] Michael Moore: [00:47:02] And that's where people got to figure that out because. I mean, nothing drives me more crazy than to see a family of four sitting down for dinner and they're all in their funnel. [00:47:11] Luke Reed: [00:47:11] It's unbelievable. And it happens all the time. It's heartening. I mean the, but Google the phone and I pick up Google, fill in the blank.[00:47:21] The internet as a whole has created masters of everything. Students have none. Nobody actually wants to learn anything. Hell they, all you have to do is Google it. I mean, Hey, how do I do this? Just Google it. I mean, it takes away from, let me tell you about the story that this happened rather than Wikipedia in a matter of seconds to give me the actual fact, I mean, maybe I've messed up the story, but it's still my story.[00:47:47]it just doesn't happen. And, and both of us, Eric and I both, we grew up in families where we are both wonderful family, oriented stories, communication. And sitting down for meals are important [00:48:00] and spending family time is important. So it's, it's, you know, knock on wood. It's easy for us to give that to our children because that's how we grew up.[00:48:08] We don't know any better. I mean, neither one of us have ever lived in city limits in our life. I think we both would like freak out if we were in town and it's like a concrete jungle. I mean, I don't think the town could handle us to be quite Frank. [00:48:20] Bob Wierema: [00:48:20] That's great. I mean when we think about it is as Michael alluded to earlier is on a set, I think about getting married and all of these things.[00:48:29] I mean, the thing that we always talk about is, you know, [00:48:33] do you want to have kids [00:48:34] and what kind of world and where would you want to have them potentially grow up? And I mean, I never would have thought that that conversation would even come up, but you're like with some of these things going on in [00:48:46] the world, you know, do you know, how can you [00:48:49] protect your kids from that?[00:48:50] And that's what on ice always tells me, like, how can I [00:48:52] protect my kids when they go [00:48:54] to school and they have all these things coming at them and [00:48:56] it's just, [00:48:57] Luke Reed: [00:48:57] I mean, it really makes you think. [00:49:00] And what is, what is that going to be in [00:49:02] 20 years? I think the one thing is, is that change is always going to be there.[00:49:06] But God's not, it's, he's, he's always going to be present. So like, no matter the change, you know, your foundation is your foundation. And if you can stay true to the foundation and know that, you know, God's going to get you through this good, bad, or indifferent, the doom and gloom really isn't that much doom and gloom.[00:49:25]yeah. Things may change and, and the way your children grow up might be different. But it's teaching. I mean, the more we teach our children right from wrong. I mean, they're going to make wrong decisions. Anyway, folks out here they'd tell you made plenty of them, but my foundation was always there. I mean, I might've rocked it every once in a while, because I was a 25 year old polo player who thought he knew everything of course ask  Tim.[00:49:50]he'll tell you plenty of stories. I was probably two drinks away from going to jail, but, but you know, you go back to doing the right thing. Erica says this all the time, do the next [00:50:00] right thing. I love that it's really not difficult, but it is in today's world. So, [00:50:08] Bob Wierema: [00:50:08] and Luke, Luke, you talked about, you know, kind of to that teaching piece, one of the things we've talked about, people on the podcast is who are you, if you look back on the one or [00:50:20] two kind of teachers [00:50:21] that you have and, and, [00:50:22] and, or mentors, right?[00:50:24] What, what was that and how to utilize some of those relationships to get you to kind of where you are today? [00:50:31] Luke Reed: [00:50:31] I think for at least for me, maybe different for the younger generation, because I think they lean or desire to lean more on Google than the older guy in the office. I was quite the opposite again, back to the fact that I'm not social media at all.[00:50:46] I gravitate to the guy in gray hair. And I'm like, Hey, teach me your ways. And if it means I've got to put in more work, I'm going to put in more work because I want to know, I want to know firsthand knowledge and Luke and I, when [00:51:00] we were at Halliburton, we had a guy that taught us everything on the cement side, Don kid.[00:51:05] Now he's one floor above us with nine energy. I mean, fantastic human. And, you know, he instilled that into us of, of learning from the field. That's where you gain respect. And I think to that point, Bob, you know, we, I, I wanted firsthand knowledge of it, but I wanted to learn it. I didn't want to learn it to say, Hey, I can tell you what the book says.[00:51:29] I wanted to learn true experience and. You know, forget the textbook for a minute. And that was, that was probably the thing. Like, I mean, I grew up with a job my whole life. whether I was working on the ranch for family friends, or I was bailing hay in college, like work was something I truly enjoyed.[00:51:46]my wife thinks I'm a workaholic, but, I, I do, I love it. I thrive in it. I, if we're going to have to, I mean, if you told me, Hey, tomorrow, let's go build seven miles of fence. I said, Hey, Far out was wrong. I mean, I like it, but I like it [00:52:00] because work brings together people and brings opportunity for comradery and relationships and it's, it's awesome.[00:52:09] And that's, that's, you know, I've leaned really, really heavily on, I mean, I had a. Really really awesome boss. before I bought quantum that, I mean, I was in his pocket for six years or five years, I guess. And I mean, he taught me so much and it shows because people do ask, like, how did you get so far in such a short amount of time?[00:52:31] I listened and I wrote a lot of notes and I, and he literally taught me a tremendous about, of what I know now. So, and then it's leaning on. And now your parents and, now my in-laws and people that truly can speak words of wisdom to you that are little golden nuggets of, Hey, hold onto those points.[00:52:53] Cause you're going to need them someday. [00:52:55] Michael Moore: [00:52:55] And are you, are you continuing to kind of pass on that to others as you [00:53:00] continue to grow in your career? [00:53:01] Luke Reed: [00:53:01] I, you know, I think so. I've got a, I've got a couple of young guys in the office that I hired for just that reason. One of them, he used to be a student of mine.[00:53:10] I taught at college men's Bible study and, You know, when he was 18, I was like, gosh, this guy's just full of it. I love it. And I mean, he was, he was super smart and he's now, I don't know what he is. 25, 26, and he's one of our analyst and he's, he's awesome. And we've got a new guy to the team probably in the last few months.[00:53:30] And he's, you know, for a 27 29, I'm not sure how old he is. He's 45 in his mind and it's just, it's awesome to watch, but every one of those guys, they all have the same parental story. And they're just different and you can, you can see it. I mean, it's like you lined up a hundred guys in the service world in oil and gas.[00:53:51] And if seven of them were from Halliburton, I bet you, I could pick them. They're just a different breed of human. And, so I, I, I do, you know, Bob to the point, like [00:54:00] I want people to. Feel powerful and be able to make decisions and, and, and know that, you know, right wrong or indifferent that decision's being heard.[00:54:11] And if we implement it and it goes haywire, it's not the end of the world. I think getting people to feel empowered and that their voice is being heard. Not, not how you say that. Not, not light to the whole. Yeah, put it on Twitter and all of a sudden, you know, the world sees it, but you know, true life experiences, I think people need to need to be heard.[00:54:32] And, and I think you need to give them the opportunity to say, Hey, I mean, I'll tell myself I'm not the smartest guy in the room. I'm just the smartest guy to find the smartest guys in the room. And, and that's, that's, my tactic is like, fill yourself with success and you'll be successful. Yeah. [00:54:50] Michael Moore: [00:54:50] Those two younger guys you hired, you know, having the same.[00:54:54] Call it parental DNA or that background? That foundation. I mean, I think that [00:55:00] is probably one of the defining problems [00:55:02] with, [00:55:03] you know, I mean, there's, there's one thing to, to protest and be heard. I'm not saying that's not something people should be able to do, but when you don't know why you're protesting and you're just out there to make noise.[00:55:15] I'd be interested to know what their parental DNA actually was. [00:55:19] Luke Reed: [00:55:19] Yeah. It might not even be, I mean, you can't say, you know, just because you're out there, your folks must be morons, but it's more of like, where does it go wrong? Like where did you get off track? Like what happened? What happened in life that led you to believe that, you know, going out there and, you know, Burning down a building was a really good idea and putting whatever you stole on the, on the television to say, Hey, look what I took.[00:55:46] I mean, it, you know, There just needs to be discipline. I mean, there's in that goes to even our children like Eric and I battle all the time, like, Hey, on a good way, like, how do we, how do we discipline our children? And you [00:56:00] know, this was two years ago, spanked a lane in the, in the store. And this lady looked at me like, you know, I had cancer and I was like, you know, he's not listening.[00:56:11]I'm his dad and this is what's happening. And I just thought, are you kidding me? Like, What's wrong with that. I got more weapons than you could shake a stick at, but guess what? I turned out. Okay. [00:56:21] Michael Moore: [00:56:21] We call that an attitude adjustment in the more household [00:56:25] Luke Reed: [00:56:25] you do. Absolutely. Yeah, it's just, it's it's I dunno.[00:56:28] It's it's crazy. What, what people are willing to accept or not willing to accept. And it's, it's sad because I think a lot of people have a very skewed vision of reality. [00:56:41] Michael Moore: [00:56:41] No, I would agree with that. Well, coming on up on an hour here of just a really insightful conversation, Luke, I mean, we want to, first of all, the world needs more Luke's.[00:56:51] I mean, thank you for, for what you're doing that, that passion, that vision, the drive, the really knowing, [00:57:00] being reflective enough to know what, why you're doing, what you're doing is, is just uplifting. I think are, I know. Our listeners are gonna gain a lot from that. And so here's, we're kind of wrapping up and there's always, we use this a lot on the podcast.[00:57:16] There's that saying? If it's not what you know, it's who, you know, and then I heard another one that it's not what you know, it's, who knows you. And so, as we think about the medium of this podcast and then going out to our listeners and expanding from there anything else you want to share on what people need to know about you and then.[00:57:35] Go ahead and plug away. I mean, if you weren't, they want the best hand sanitizer [00:57:39] Luke Reed: [00:57:39] on the market, tell them how to get it. quantum.com [00:57:45] Michael Moore: [00:57:45] www.dot [00:57:48] Luke Reed: [00:57:48] dot. That's actually not even a website. I'm just being silly, but no, I mean, it's, I just want people to do the right thing and I want you to be passionate about what you're doing and lean on some, [00:58:00] you know, the Craig gross shells of the world.[00:58:02]life-changing spiritual leader. Lean on people that are like literally there to help you not to Pat themselves on the back. If you get successful, it's really cool when you can all stand on top of the mountain, but if you're up there and you're by yourself, it's that lonely spot. So it's, it's choosing who raises with you and making sure that you're all walking together, but now it's been, it's been fun.[00:58:26] I'm really, really appreciate the opportunity. [00:58:29]Bob Wierema: [00:58:29] look, it's, it's been so great to just listen to you and most lives asking the question about the mentoring. Cause I might tell you, you got to mentor me. I took so many notes from our conversation and things that you said that just resonated. I mean, I love the passion in your [00:58:43] voice.[00:58:44] And I just keep [00:58:45] imagining you talking about that group that you have sitting around at your conference table in your office and how much, you know, how empowering that is to all [00:58:54] Luke Reed: [00:58:54] those people. And like you said, [00:58:56] let them show their, hear their voices and put things out there. I mean, [00:59:00] it's just, it's awesome to hear and I appreciate your time and coming on today.[00:59:04] Yeah. Well, thank you. I really do appreciate it. It was fun. When did you do it again? [00:59:09] Michael Moore: [00:59:09] Amen. There'll be a round two for sure. [00:59:11] Luke Reed: [00:59:11] Yeah, there you go. Around tail[00:59:23] Michael Moore: [00:59:23] thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the climb. If you enjoyed the episode. Please consider subscribing. And if you know someone who you would think would enjoy the podcast, feel free to share this with them. Thanks again. And we'll see you on the next episode. [01:00:00] . 

Connect with Michael and BobThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/