Episode 312: Becoming a Changemaker with Alex Budak
In this Above the Business podcast episode, host Bradley Hamner interviews Alex Budak, author of Becoming a Changemaker and professor at UC Berkeley. Budak shares his journey from Silicon Valley to India, where he discovered social entrepreneurship and founded Start Some Good. He discusses conscious capitalism, the importance of viewing leadership as an act rather than a title, and the need for every individual to give themselves permission to lead. The conversation delves into experiential teaching methods, especially a "go‑fail" exercise that forces students to seek rejection to build resilience. Budak emphasizes a values‑driven framework: be clear on your why (core values) and flexible on your how (tactics). He introduces the concept of dispositional flexibility—balancing optimism and groundedness—to navigate fast‑moving changes like AI, using lean‑startup experimentation. College football realignment serves as an analogy for proactive change‑shaping versus passive survival. Throughout, Budak stresses that change is inevitable, but by cultivating the right mindset, skills, and values, anyone can become a changemaker without abandoning timeless principles.
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What if you could step out of the day-to-day and see your business from a whole new perspective? Welcome to Above the Business, where we empower you to rise above the daily grind and embrace a higher way of business ownership. It's time to build your business by design. Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hemner, your host. On today's episode, we have Alex Budak. Alex wrote the book Becoming a Changemaker. And as you'll hear me in the episode, I talked to Alex. We've touched on change quite a bit over the years, but we've never really done kind of a deep dive of what it actually means to be able to adopt and embrace and to lean into change. We come at it from a lot of different stories and analogies that hopefully will kind of get you to be thinking and shifting of your mindset as to what it actually means to be able to lean in and adopt change in an ever-changing— in fact, quickly, rapidly changing economic and business environment. I think this episode is going to be great for you. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Alex Budek. Alex Budek, welcome to the podcast.
Oh, Bradley, thanks for having me.
Excited to have you. Well, before we hit record, you and I were talking about some college football. We'll probably integrate some college football into our discussion today. But before we get into any of that, we always start with background and origin story. Love to hear how people kind of got to where they are today in their journey. So So why don't you share yours?
Well, I was born and raised in the Silicon Valley Bay Area, so kind of born and raised amid entrepreneurship and innovation felt very comfortable for me. But it wasn't actually until I got outside of the Silicon Valley bubble that I kind of found my voice as an entrepreneur. I was spending some time working and living in India, and that's where I got introduced to a concept called social entrepreneurship. That's basically the idea of using the tools of entrepreneurship, but to try to fundamentally solve a social challenge. So kind of entrepreneurship plus impact together. And that's where that lightbulb went off for me. It's like, ah, this is what I'm meant to be doing. And while there, I was doing some work with a grassroots organization. So a small little group working with girls from local community, using sport as a tool to teach healthy habits and leadership. And I realized that there's people all around the world that want to do good, but just too many barriers getting in the way. So that led me to found a company, a small business called Start Some Good, which helped early-stage entrepreneurs, sort of impact entrepreneurs, get started. And what an amazing experience. I learned a ton, as your listeners can appreciate. It's also really hard and really exhausting and a roller coaster of good days and bad days. I've learned a ton. But then I started realizing that, you know, each of us can be agents. Of change that don't have to necessarily be an entrepreneur. That's one great way to do it. And through a lot of good luck, I found my way back to the Bay Area, to UC Berkeley, and I basically made a pitch. You know, sometimes we have these magic moments where we just kind of go for it. And so I went for it. You know, I'm not a traditional professor. I don't have a PhD, but I love teaching. And so I found myself in a meeting with an assistant dean, and I sort of pitched them on this idea for a class I'd always been thinking of, thinking of for about a decade. And the idea was becoming a changemaker, sort of how can each of us lead inclusive, positive change at any level. So I made this pitch and fully expected them to say, nope, no way, for plenty of reasons. I don't have a PhD. I hadn't taken a business class to that point. But to my surprise, they said, yeah, sounds interesting. Put together a syllabus, show it to me, and we'll go from there. And so I shook the dean's hand, walked out of the door, Immediately Googled how to create a syllabus because I had no idea what I was actually doing. But that started this amazing journey, which was teaching, which is really what I fell in love with. You know, it's like at my core, I'm a teacher and I feel so grateful to get to do it. So just coming up to today, you know, I spend my time teaching at UC Berkeley. So I teach undergrads, graduates, and executives. I teach leadership, impact, entrepreneurship. I recently wrote a book called Becoming a Changemaker, and I do speaking and consulting for companies really all around this idea of how can each of us lead change from where we are.
That's awesome. You know, it reminds me of two things. One is when Steve Jobs made his, one of his many famous quotes when he said, you know, to go out and make a small dent in the universe. And I think about that quite a bit. Let me ask you real quick. I wasn't going to ask you this until you mentioned something, but are you familiar with conscious capitalism? That's the first time that I'd really heard that concept of entrepreneurship and impact of the way that you put it. I thought it was really good. And just your thoughts around that. Is it a similar type thing. For many of our listeners may not have been familiar with that, but I know that's one of the first times I really heard about entrepreneurship for good.
Yeah, it's a great way to think about it. And so like, founder of Whole Foods is one of the people that's kind of an advocate for that. But yeah, I think that's such a good way to think about things, you know, that I'm a capitalist, I think you're a capitalist, but we're also thinking about, you know, what can business do that's also good? And I think having that lens of consciousness, or I use a lens of impact, but it business can be this incredible force for good. And I think sometimes people want to just throw all business and capitalism out and say, no, no, no, we need to rethink new models. No, I think we just need to tweak capitalism a little bit just to say, look, let's do good. Let's pursue profits. And let's also take care of our community, our stakeholders. And, you know, it could feel kind of fuzzy. It could feel like, oh, you know, this is some guy coming from the Bay Area talking about these things. But I think the data are actually clear that it's a competitive advantage. I spend a lot of time teaching and mentoring Gen Z, and there's a recent study that found that 70% of Gen Z only want to work for companies that embody their values. So in other words, doing good things in the world. So it's a competitive advantage for recruiting, for getting the talent that you want. And also more and more customers are saying, we want to work with companies that are doing the right thing in the community, having the right values. And so, you know, I would argue As a social entrepreneur, we sometimes make a moral argument saying, yeah, business should be a force for good. But conscious capitalism almost makes a business case. It says, yeah, you know, even if you should do it for moral reasons, even if you don't care about that, it's good business too. And so I think the data in the case is actually very clear that conscious capitalism, impact entrepreneurship are powerful lenses.
You know, this past weekend I was in Auburn and one of our most famous alumni is obviously Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. Was on campus this past weekend. He tends to come down for the Auburn-Alabama game every year because it's around Thanksgiving. He has some time off and he has family that's still, you know, in the South. And it's easy to bypass and say, well, that person, he can make a difference, right? Because of his role in the company and how big it is, the largest company in the world, etc. I can't make that type of an impact. Well, no, not at that scale. I'm probably not going to. But to the people, whether it's this podcast, my team, the customers, the clients that we work with, we can actually make a tangible impact. And it's just simply good business. Thoughts on that?
I think it's so important. What you're hinting at is one of my biggest critiques of business schools is that we tend to talk about leadership through the single heroic leader. So we tell the story of a Martin Luther King or a Tim Cook. And there's a place for that, right? We need these once-in-a-generation type of leaders. But I think when we tell those stories, it causes so many of us to look around and say, you know, that's just not who I am. Maybe I'm not that courageous. Maybe I'm not an extrovert. Maybe I'm not that brave. You know, does that mean that I can't be a leader? I can't have impact? No, of course not. But I think for too long we've conflated leadership as a title instead of leadership as an act. So if you think about it, there may be only one CEO of Apple, maybe only 5 executive vice presidents. But each and every one of us can practice acts of leadership. We can lead from wherever we are. I think once we make that cognitive shift, whether we're 18 years old or 80, we can start thinking about the world in a brand new way. You know, so often we're waiting for someone else to give us permission to be like, okay, yeah, now you can be the CEO of Apple. Now you can have your huge impact. But you're waiting for that permission. You know, it probably will never come. One of the most important things you can do as a leader, as an entrepreneur, as a changemaker, is to give yourself that permission instead of waiting for someone else to say, yeah, you know what, I'm going to step up, I'm going to do things. I can lead from wherever I am. Instead of getting into this comparison game and saying, well, you know, my company is $50 million, it's not $1 trillion. Well, $50 million is really impressive. That's an amazing opportunity. You have an amazing lever for change. And rather than comparing, you say, well, what can I uniquely do that Apple can't? You know, one example is probably many of your listeners, they have a big impact in their community. You know, maybe they have a strong community, whether that's a certain group of people that they serve, or maybe it's a local business. And that's something that a company like Apple can't quite touch. Sure, they can have global impact, but you can go really deep in your community and that's really powerful. So I think instead of comparing, if you think about what can I uniquely do and give myself that permission, it opens up a lot of doors.
Yeah. I got just a sidebar question around one thing I'm curious about, what, how you do this. Uh, obviously I love my, I love my school, I'm, I, I love Auburn. You listen to this podcast any amount of time, you're around me, you know my love for, for college sports and, and Auburn. How do you— when I got my degree in finance from Auburn, there was very little, very little crossover from what I learned in academia to then what I ended up, you know, using as an entrepreneur in my business. How do you, for those people, because you came from entrepreneurship and then went into academia, right? So I'm sure you think about this to where it's not just theory and it's not just in a book, but actually people who go on, take your, your class, that actually they go on to be able to use it in the real world and it just doesn't sit here as in something that they learn but they never actually do something with? What do you— how do you do that?
So important. So I think that there's two things. First is I focus a lot on character skills, not just on tangible, like, rote learning. So rather than over-quizzing someone on, like, what does Carol Dweck say a growth mindset is, we actually go practice it. Because at this point with ChatGPT and other technologies, you can find any definition that you need. It's really about becoming the person that you want to become. And so I spend a lot of time, you know, I'm at Berkeley, so everything is grounded in research and empirical data, but that's not enough. I think you've got to learn by doing. So my class is very experiential. I'll give you an example. I think being an entrepreneur, you've got to get comfortable with failure. Any of the successes that I've had have come only because I'm willing to endure failure, that I keep going even after I get a few nos. The book deal, getting a few nos before I got a yes to everything else. And I think many of your listeners can appreciate that. But I think many schools, the way you teach failure is you get really sort of theoretical. You go, yeah, you know what, it's important to fail. You know, you might look at some research studies. One of my favorite, for instance, is the failure paradox, which shows that those that fail the most also succeed the most. That we tend to see like one successful person, you know, think about like Reggie Jackson, And we don't actually realize how many times he struck out. He hit a lot of home runs, a lot of RBIs. But he also struck out a lot. We kind of forget that. So most schools kind of stop at the theoretical. Here's how I teach failure. Towards the end of class, I put up a slide which just has two words. It says, go fail. And students start kind of looking around nervously, like, what's going on? And then I put up the next slide. I go, yeah, I'm serious. You have 10 minutes. You have to go leave the classroom. And you have to go ask for something and purposefully get rejected. You can't come back until you've gotten a no. Some of the students who are all high achievers, they look so nervous. They start turning red. They tell me that their hearts are beating fast because again, if you're a high achiever, you probably haven't purposely failed or haven't failed a lot in your life. So they go out of the classroom, they are nervous, they shuffle out. When they come back, the energy is off the charts. They come back and they're so proud of themselves and energized. We find that one of two things happens. About 30% of students, they're so sure they'll get rejected, but they actually get a yes.
Hmm.
Think about one of my students. She went down to the cafe and she said, "Hi, could I have a free orange juice?" And the barista goes, "Yeah, okay." And she's like, "Whoa, no, no, I'm supposed to fail. Okay, can I have two?" And he goes, "Yeah, okay. Three?" "No." Fortunately, he cut her off at three, but she came back to class with two orange juices. Wow. And the lesson there is that, you know, so often we're sure we'll be rejected, we don't ask for something, and that's our first failure because we don't put ourselves out there.
Wow.
And then for the other 70% or so of students, you know, they get a no, but they come back, and rather than feeling deflated or dejected, they actually feel really proud of themselves. They feel energized. They're proud of themselves for putting themselves out there. They realize that, you know, no one laughed at them, no one cared that much, and they go, whoa, okay, if I can ask for something I don't really want, Imagine what I can do when I really do want something, whether that's pitching an investor or trying to land a big client. You know, it gives them that confidence. So I think that's the shift I try to make from thinking about, you know, we can intellectually go, yeah, failure's important, but a different thing to go experience it.
Man, good for you for actually having people, uh, to go and experience something than just learning it and hearing it and saying, oh yeah, that makes sense. Uh, you know, to go out and actually understand about failure and, you know, what you may actually get a yes versus going and doing. You know, you, you know, ideas are everywhere. Implementation is everything is like one of the maxims that I say oftentimes. Okay, I'm interviewing you, but I have to tell you this 60-second story that I think will resonate with that. So I took my daughter to a place in town that does pottery. And so I've never done pottery before. She had never done pottery before. And you make either a cup or a bowl. Typically they say, hey, you start off trying to make a cup, but it kind of ends up widening it out a little bit. So it ends up being kind of a dish or a bowl or something like that. And so I was like, oh, I'm going to get this right. I like competitiveness, not with my daughter, but just really with myself of like, I'm going to do this right. And so I'm doing this and I'm making it for people can't really see it. You're really supposed to get it to a hockey puck size. This ends up being a clock, but it's about this size what you were trying to take this, this lump of, of clay down to. And so I'm doing this and, and I get it down to a nice little, you know, puck size. And then you start to try to mold it out to make it a cup, right? So I'm just getting to there. And my daughter is literally on her third one already. Okay. She's messed up multiple times. Clay has gone all over her. She ended up going through— I ended up doing 2. She ended up doing about 10. Okay. Her last one was so significantly better than mine, and it really taught me a lesson of, like, childlike curiosity. She was so not afraid of failure. She was like, oh, whatever. Can I have another one? And she would do it and she'd be like, oh, is this better? And, you know, at times I was like, hey, you know, slow down just a little bit. But her last one seriously was actually 10 times better than mine because I was so fixated on trying to make this one, my first one, perfect. And she was like, oh, that didn't work. Okay, I'll do it again. And she's 9. And that just really stood out to me. And maybe one day I'll show kind of a picture of this, but it was significant how much better hers was than mine.
I love that. Thank you for sharing that. As a dad, that story really resonates with me. And, you know, maybe I'll just show it. I'll throw in one research study that kind of explains why your daughter was so successful. So there's this great study that comes out of Italy where they took entrepreneurs who were in an incubator. So, you know, supporting kind of early stage entrepreneurs.
Yeah.
And they only had one single intervention. They took half of them and they taught them the scientific method. So hypothesis testing, basically, you know, trying things, having a hypothesis and going forward. What they found is that the— compared with the control group who got no intervention, those that had learned the scientific method were 70% more likely to pivot. So strategic change in direction and generate 120% higher returns in revenue. So why is that? It's because we take the sting out of failure. You know, think about you're saying, okay, I'm going to do this one thing. It's got to be perfect. And you know, my dog's going to be judging me if I don't get this thing right, then I'm a failure. I shouldn't go back to the ceramic shop. Your daughter, meanwhile, is going, hmm, what if this will work? Oh, that was weird. It was lopsided on this one. Okay, cool. I'm gonna try it again. Try it again. Try it again. Try it again. She ran 9 hypotheses while you were running 1 or 2. And the lesson there is that when we think in terms of a scientist, we actually take the sting out of failure. Your daughter did not care about her failures. She's probably so proud of the ones that she got towards the end, whereas you are perhaps more worried saying like, hey, if this thing isn't perfect and that says something about me as a dad, a ceramicist or whatever was in here. Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, that's so true. I love that comment right there. Take the sting out of failure. I've never heard that before. Okay. So you wrote the book Becoming a Changemaker, which I was really excited to be able to have you on because we come at business from so many different angles on this podcast. And, and at times, you know, being adaptive to change has come up kind of as a sidebar, but we've never really been able to go deep. Before we hit record, you and I were talking about college football and we were talking about UCLA and Chip Kelly and some coaches and like so much has changed truly in college football the last few years, and that if you are a college football coach that cannot adapt to the transfer portal and to the way things are with NIL— I mean, so much has changed so fast. It is more than arms race now than, than ever before. You're going to get left behind. And maybe that's been the case with some of the, the coaches that had success 10 to 15 years ago. The reason I use that is I want to tee you up is what does it actually mean to really become a changemaker in our businesses with our teams and with our customers? What does that actually look like?
Oh, thank you. First of all, thanks for framing this up in terms of college football. It's a fun way to be able to talk about it. So look, I think when it comes to change, we as leaders, as business owners, we have two choices. So the world is changing faster and faster than ever before. However fast it is now, it will never be this slow again. Choices. We can either kind of bury our heads in the sand and just like hope that we can survive the change, or we can learn to get so comfortable with change that we can actually build the skills, the mindset to navigate, shape, and steer change to make it work more positively for us, for our teams, for our companies. And so then we have that choice. And so, you know, we can talk about from the college football world, I think an example of that So I'm a UCLA alum, big Bruin fan. My— mostly basketball, more than football, I have to say. But you'll see that when you look at my college grades, that I always had a dip during winter quarter. And that's because I spent every night camping out for UCLA basketball games. So I always did worse during basketball season. So I care a lot. But, you know, as a Bruin fan, I'm heartbroken by the close of the Pac-12. We had our last game this weekend. I'm so sad to see that happen. Yeah, but it all happened when UCLA and USC decided to leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten. And it was a very smart move. As much as I want to see the Pac-12 stick, they saw the writing on the wall. They saw that college football is moving towards a couple of super conferences. They said, this is our chance. And, you know, could have just kind of put their head down and said, look, our rights deal won't expire for a little bit longer. We kind of hold on. But no, they were at the forefront of change. They said, we see this trend in the world. And instead of pretending it doesn't happen or that maybe we can just like forget about it or just hold on, they said, no, we're going to shape change. Now, again, I don't love all the externalities for other schools, but for UCLA, for themselves, I like what they did. You know, they saved themselves. They got a lot more revenue and they saved us all a lot of turmoil. So that's kind of the difference of a changemaker. You know, you think about is change something to avoid and just hold on to, or can actually build the skills and the mindset to shape change to make it work for us?
I think that's such a great analogy. I hadn't even considered the conference realignment aspect of it too, as a kind of parallel to what we're talking about in business. Let's just take one. COVID has been beat to death by everybody, but one that is more recent and probably a bigger wave to learn how to surf than to get dumped by is AI, right? And I'm not an AI expert by no stretch of the imagination. I'm never going to come on this podcast and do that, but I have absolutely leaned into ChatGPT and to say, I'm a big Notion person. Anybody listen to podcast knows, knows I love Notion. Notion has AI built in. I use it. I can't say every day, but almost every day to where I'm leaning in and say, oh, you know what? It's a change for me to think, let me go to ChatGPT and see if it can help me with this. We're rewriting some language of emails. We're rewriting some language on some workshop titles. I threw it in there to see what it would give me back. It gave me a few things. So I'm trying to lean into AI as an example. What are some specifically, maybe skills, not just mindset, but what are some skills when it comes to whether it's AI or other changes depending upon our industry that we're a part of, whether it's insurance or something else, to say like, what does it actually look like to lean into something as opposed to like, I don't know what this is, I'm going to sit back and just kind of wait. And then before you know it, it's, it's passed me by. What does that actually look like?
So AI is a perfect thing to look at because many people find it really scary. And if it feels scary, that's okay. Philip Zaccaro, he's at George Mason University. He did interesting research looking at the different types of flexibility. Says there's 3 types of flexibility. There's cognitive, sort of strategic flexibility. There's emotional flexibility. That's varying your needs to meet the needs of others. And there's dispositional flexibility. And that's what I want to key in on here. Dispositional flexibility is the ability to remain both grounded and optimistic at the same time.
Hmm.
You know, use the COVID example just for a second. We often saw one of two camps. We saw the people that said like, oh, you know, it's, it's no big deal. It's just a little flu. Like, no big deal. Like, let's get back to things. Then the other side said, We're never going to ever emerge from this ever again. Like we have to stay in house. Like, economy's done. I think the right approach was to be a little bit of both, to say, yes, it's real. Yes, it's significant. And the future will get better. And we can do things about it. And so I like going into new technologies, think about change with that dispositional flexibility, not going either/or, but kind of a both/and, saying, yes, AI is changing the world. Let me figure out how I can do it. I think about the first day that we had to switch from in-person instruction to online instruction in March of 2020. And I was kind of figuring out how to teach on Zoom. And one of my students said something really smart. She said, you know, Professor, none of us actually know what we're doing right now. So let's just figure it out. And I found that so empowering because, yes, there's some people building AI models. But most of us, we don't know exactly how it's going to affect our work and our world. But we're trying things. And we're being iterative. And I think we want to have that approach of saying, not that it's going to be the worst thing, not that it's the best thing, but how can it work for me? And running smaller tests. You know, many of your listeners probably know the Lean Startup model. That's the idea of build, measure, learn. And I think that's the right way to think about change is instead of thinking about it as one huge change that it's like my company needs to pivot and we're all AI all the time to know, go, let me see how I can play with this. You know, I have a hypothesis. I think an AI-written email might be better than my other ones. And you try it and you see what happens. You learn from it and you iterate from there. But again, this kind of goes back to the PAC-12 realignment thing, which is that you could like AI, you could not like AI, but regardless of how you feel about it, it's going to change our world. And so you're better suited to actually jump in and start learning it rather than pretending it doesn't exist.
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All right, this is the, this is the question I wanted to ask you. I tend to have typically one main question I want to ask a guest that I kind of hold. This is the one question I have. How do I both lean into change. AI is an example, but other just waves of change that are not AI, other things that are happening. And at the same time, hold on to timeless principles, things that did work 10 years ago. They still work today. Because what I don't want to get to a place is that I'm addicted to change, and therefore I just change everything, even some of the things that were actually working. And so to your point around dispositional, it's like, how do I hold both? This is happening. I need to be able to make adjustments along the way. These are timeless principles I need to hold true to, and I need to be able to hold both. But how do I actually do that? Does this question make sense?
Love the question. And I write a lot in the book about the importance of values. I'm a very values-driven leader. And so the framework that I'll invite you to think about and your listeners think about is to always be clear on your why and flexible on your how. Clear on your why, flexible on your how. So you think about values, think about your why. That really shouldn't change very much. You know, the reason you started your small business, the reason you founded your company, that doesn't really change. That's true to who you are, the core values you stand for, those don't change. But the how does change. I'll give you an example from my own founding of Start Some Good. Now, based on my experience in India, I thought, okay, these early-stage changemakers, they need everything. They need all kinds of capital. They need financial capital. They need relational capital. They need advisors and mentors. They need intellectual capital. They need the advice on, you know, how do you raise money? How do you build a board of advisors? How do you measure impact? And so we started our company, you know, our why was very clear. It was to help changemakers all around the world get started. But our how was really muddled. We had all these different hows. And what we quickly realized is that if we tried to do all those things, we wouldn't do any of them especially well. So we had to choose, okay, we're going to focus on one. We decided to focus specifically on financial capital, sort of changing the way that we think about risk capital for good. And we went really all in there. Then after about 5 years, we had found some traction. And we said, OK, now it's time to focus a little bit more on the intellectual capital piece. We were able to do that because our why remained clear. We were always anchored to that why. We brought in some new hows. Now, as I talk about this, this is like two kind of business lines. But I think that same idea exists. So whatever your core values are, don't change those. Think about how those values can show up in this new world? If your value is, let's say, humility, that's one of my core values. Well, how do you show up with humility in this new world? Sometimes as leaders, we feel this pressure to think we have to have all the answers. But the truth is, anyone who's a leader, unless you're building those large language models, you don't know really how AI is working. You're figuring it out. And so you can actually practice that humility while trying new things and say, hey, we're going to try AI. We're going to do some experiments. We're going to— I don't know exactly how it'll work. I'll practice humility, but we're still going to try. Maybe your other value, one of mine is service, you know, being of service to others. And then you say, well, you know, the way I've always been of service is, you know, through, I don't know, one-on-one consultations. But you realize you can't quite scale it. You need some AI support and you're gonna try some new things. You don't lose that value of service. You make sure that whatever you use, whatever tools, AI, other tech, that it still stays grounded in that. So I think the mindset I would say is clear on the why. But flexible on the how.
Oh, that's so good. I think that that helps to be able to kind of figure out how to hold both at the same time. Alex, it's been great. People want to pick up your book, connect with you. Where would you point them to?
Would love for you to check out the book, find on Amazon, Barnes Noble, local bookstores, and then yeah, connect with me, alexbudak.com. And I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. So send me a message. Let me know you listen to this podcast, who your favorite college football team is. I'd love to connect with you there.
Yeah, that's great. Well, uh, wish UCLA the best. What's the record going to be in basketball this year? How are they going to do?
They're going to start off slow because they got a young team, but I see them making a Final Four run.
Okay, all right, we'll have to check back on that, that prediction later on in the year. Uh, maybe Auburn and UCLA will meet, uh, at some point in the, uh, in the tournament later in March and April next year.
Fingers crossed for that. Thanks, Bradley.
All right, enjoyed it, Alex. Thanks. Well, a few things really resonated with me in that interview with Alex. One is certainly whenever he said taking the sting out of failure, that was one. Number two is when he talked about being able to be flexible on the how, but also being consistent on your why. So staying firm on why you do what you do, but also flexible on how you do it. That was truly one of the main questions that I wanted to ask Alex on this podcast is that, you know, leaning in and adopting change, whether it's something like AI, as we discussed, or the changes that came because of COVID the adoption of more people being comfortable with Zoom, more people with, with being comfortable with businesses not being open, uh, their physical locations not being as open as they once were. I think all of those things are societal changes that people are leaning into and adopting. But at the same time, oftentimes we as the entrepreneur can sometimes start trying to change too many things all at once. And if I had to go back, I would probably ask Alex that question, which is How do we lean in to adopting some change, but then the team not just constantly getting exhausted about change? And maybe it's just asking yourself that question too. I mean, how many of you have gone to a conference, you've jumped on a call, you've joined a program of some sort, and you began or you begin to implement some changes. And of course you implement changes to help get better. Clearly you don't implement changes to go backwards. I mean, nobody ever does that. And we can start to tell ourselves the story that we're changing these things to be better, and we are, but yet we can get too addicted to the change along the way too. And I think that you can hold both. I think that you can hold to principles and the things that are working and give things enough time. And at the same time, not being stuck in your ways, not being resistant to change, not complaining about change. Well, that's how we've done it. Well, that's not how it's done, you know, anymore. And we did end up talking about college football quite a bit before we hit record. And I think that there's a parallel with that. I think there's so many changes going on in that world that in other worlds too. I mean, the NFL, but college more recently, last couple years. And how do you hold on to things that absolutely have helped maybe a coach get to where they are, um, and at the same time adopting some of these new things and saying, well, you know what, um, I've got to be willing to, to see things, to see things a different way, whether it's big changes within, within NIL, whether it's big changes within the transfer portal, whether it's big changes within the way the offense and defenses change, whether it's in basketball or, or, um, in, in football, I think that there's some parallels there to our business to be able to say, well, you know what, that people don't respond to that script anymore. They used to, now they don't. And so we need to look at that and be able to change it. And so I think that At the end of the day, we can hold both. That, that's really what I come down to. My biggest takeaway is where can I lean in, whether it's leaning into ChatGPT, but there's gonna be other things along the way too. And this podcast is kind of representative of that. I mean, we just relaunched at the time I was actually interviewing Alex. It's before the relaunch that all of you have obviously seen now. Of changing the podcast from the Club Capital Leadership Podcast to now being Above the Business. That was a change that was, you know, 4 years in the making, basically, and something that we certainly did not take lightly. And we spent nearly 6 months or so making sure that we get it right. And so if you're listening to this on the drop date of this on Monday, December 11th, Tomorrow and then Wednesday, 2 days this week, December 12th and the 13th, we are hosting the annual. And if you go to above the business.co, above the business.co, you'll navigate through to our site. And I'd love to help you to be able to plan your 2024 annual business plan. What can you do? How do you take a plan that has typically just sat on the shelf? You've done this exercise before, but how do you actually take it and do it in a way that you capture the good from this year, pull it into next year, and then have a business plan that actually works and one that you can believe in? Not just a, you know, exercise that's a good idea, but something that you can actually do. Well, there's some principles, there's some mindset, but there's also some skills and there's even some tools. So mindset, skill set, tool set. There's 3 things. That we can help you to be able to do. Go to abovethebusiness.co and register, sign up. Love to be able to see you in the next couple of days. Really excited about what that's going to be. As always, big shout out to our podcast sponsors, Club Capital, Coach P Consulting, Autopilot Recruiting, and Today App. If you have never thought about recruiting from a different perspective, and what that actually looks like. I invite you to consider lean into that, lean into having somebody on your team as a part of your team, not an employee, but a vendor, somebody that absolutely works with people every single day to help you to recruit and have a pipeline of quality candidates. Go to autopilotrecruiting.com, speak to somebody on their team, and see if this podcast resonated with you. See how working with somebody to help you do that maybe is different than what you've done before, but could really help you to scale your business to the next level. Autopilotrecruiting.com. If you've been a part of this podcast for any amount of time, you know the importance of developing A-players. And so you recruit good players, you've got to bring them on and develop them. I mean, look, as this happens, this episode's talked a lot about college sports. I mean, you get great 5-star talent, but you still have to bring them on and develop them. And they're not just fully baked, uh, college athletes. I mean, they have to come in and get in the weight room and learn how to do things and learn, uh, how to train a certain way. Well, the same thing is really with your team. You got to be able to take your team and embed them into your culture, into the way of doing things, and it's training and developing and giving them access to some of the best tools that's out there. But here's the thing, it doesn't always have to be you, the one that's doing that. Many of you maybe are just not great trainers of your team. You love to coach your team, but you're— maybe you're not good teachers or trainers. And I get that. If you work with David and Coach P Consulting, he can really help not take that completely off of your plate, but absolutely share with your team what is working today, real time in their business. They have a really big team. David has been incredibly successful. He does an amazing job. And for you as the business owner, he does an agency owner call once a month to be able to talk about things that maybe are just for the business owner, the entrepreneur. So you really get the best of both worlds. Go to coachpconsulting.com. I love tech. I do. I love Notion. I love new software. I have to be careful about not being too much of a changemaker in switching softwares. We actually just made a big switch into the CRM that we were using from a really popular CRM to one, to a new one. And I didn't take that lightly. And so I get, the reason I'm saying this is I get the big decision it is to make a switch to maybe a compensation bonus plan software that you've used for years. But the reality is making that switch, if it's something that your team is going to use, if it's something that, you know, you want it to be beautifully designed and you want it to be something that the team is going to love using, you don't want to make that decision lightly. Well, the team at Today@Pro can help guide you through that process, guide you through the setup process, answer some of the questions. Do they have all the features that you're looking for? The answer is probably yes, they are. And you're going to be able to take and implement word tracks and scripts, things that you want your team, your sales team, your customer service team to be able to use. And of course, it's going to be corporate-approved. It's going to integrate with your corporate-approved CRM. So go to todayapppro.com. You know, I can be, as an entrepreneur, I can be emotional in my decision-making at times if I'm not careful. And one of the ways that I have a process, a structure, and a routine is looking at the financials on a certain cadence every month. By the 10th, I'm going to do one thing. By the 5th, between the 15th and the 19th, I'm going to do one thing. By the 20th, I'm reviewing, sitting down and reviewing my financials across the businesses so that I can make really good decisions. If I have things that I want to be able to do, whether it's investment in marketing, whether it's hiring a team member, I want to be able to leverage financials to be able to make those decisions. How is that going to affect my profitability? How is that going to affect what the return on investment is for the team? And I need to be able to have perspective on some of those numbers. How did we do last month? How did we do last year? Well, if that sounds like a skill set and a tool that you would love to be able to adopt, Club Capital, if you're an insurance agency owner, can be able to help you to do that very thing. Go to club.capital, book a demo, talk to somebody on the team, and they can walk you through what they've been able to do for hundreds, if not thousands, of insurance agency owners at this point. Go to club.capital. All right, everyone, excited to have you as part of our big relaunch of the Above the Business podcast. Excited to have you all here. We've got big plans in 2024. Go to above the business. And be able to keep up with not only what we're doing this week, uh, the time that this podcast is being dropped, but also in future events that we're going to be doing. Go to abovethebusiness.co. Art of One, till next episode, lead well. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
