How Values-Driven Leaders Build Businesses That Truly Flourish with Jean Moncrieff

Welcome to the Flourishing Edge, the podcast where we share weekly tips on making flourishing your competitive edge. I'm Ashish Kothari, your host and each week we'll dive deep with flourishing experts, change makers and executives to share best practices that can help you unlock higher performance through science based interventions. Let's step together into the edge of what's possible and live, work and lead with more joy, health, love and meaning. John, it's so lovely to have you, my friend, on our Flourishing Edge podcast.

Ashish, great to see you. I'm so glad we actually got to pull this together and excited for today. Let's do it.

Yeah. Well, look, you and I had a chance to meet almost like three, four weeks ago now, Jean, and what a coincidence that you were actually here for a small Giants events and we had a chance to meet and we were singing off the same sheet of music. And so I've just loved getting to know you. Look, I want to start with this question. In your journey, was there a particular moment from starting a business, running a business to everything else that you've done, was there a particular moment when you realized that building a great business meant something very different than simply building a big business?

I think that moment, I'm not sure if it was any one single moment, but there was a time that it, for me, it was just about chasing revenue. I had this kind of, I absolutely love the work that Richard Branson does and who Richard Branson is, and he is kind of one of those people. And I think I got confused with, screw it, let's do it with, let's just chase the number kind of thing. Go, go, go. And probably the wakeup call came for me when I realized that I'd been chasing the number. I'd built this thing, we're generating revenue, kind of 20 million 200 odd people working in the business. And I thought, time to sell. And I kind of realized that it wasn't worth what I thought it was worth. And that probably was the beginning of the journey for me that was spending my life chasing output and then suddenly realizing that what I'd actually been doing wasn't the right thing. And I was very fortunate at the time. I was part of the small Giants passport group. So we were going behind the scenes at different businesses back in 2012, 2013, with folks like Rob Dube, Bo Burlingham, and a whole lot of other great people. And I think that woke me up. I suddenly realized everything I thought about what I was doing wasn't really, I mean, when I started the business I was more connected to my purpose. The purpose was about making a difference in South Africa because I'd grown up in the country, we'd gone through apartheid. My best friend couldn't get on the same bus as me, couldn't use the same toilet as me, couldn't go to a movie, go to the beach, you name it. He just wasn't allowed. Cecil wasn't allowed to go anywhere with me. I had committed myself to making a difference in South Africa as we kind of went through 94. And then it just kind of got into losing that sense of purpose and pursuing the outputs. And it took something to wake me up.

Yeah, no, it is true, right? There's so many people who start businesses because of an itch, because of a clear mission, purpose, wanting to make a difference, and then somewhere along the way they lose sight of that. It just remains these words on a wall. And you're just chasing metrics, financials, revenue growth, social media, following ratings, what have you. And you forget those vanity metrics. What did you start in the. In the business in the first place? So look, you've talked a lot about the challenges, you know, all the way from being a founder, an executive leader. What were some of the biggest. One of them was chasing revenue. But what were some other pitfalls or survival modes that you found yourself in or you've seen other founders, right, who slip into as part of growing their businesses?

Like, I guess leadership is the one thing that comes to mind for me, always. I mean, there are a few things, but if you're going to grow a business intentionally, you need to surround yourself with people who are a lot better than you. And my friend Richard Brian, who is from Denver as well, put this really well. He landed up taking over the family business in Bristol at 28 years old. There were, I think, two generations before him, his grandfather, his father, and then him. And his dad landed up in hospital and he was in Denver at the time. He just met his now wife and he gets a phone call from Bristol and says, look, son, your father's in hospital. You need to come home. And he said to me, jean, I got there and I realized that I was the cleverest person in the boardroom at that time. And it was only once I got to the stage where I was the stupidest person in the boardroom that I knew we were actually making a change in this organization. And I think as, as founders, as leaders, that growing your leadership team at the same pace as the business, obviously the mission, the people, the vision is really Important. But then there's this fundamental thing about business owners that we try and be the center of everything and you've got to build this, this really great team around you. And I think for me, I've been through at least sort of two times in my business life where that's almost got to the point or has got to the point where the business has crashed. I came out of school, went straight into building this Internet business. We were building web content management system back in the days we called it database driven content management. And we were youngsters, we had no formal training. We just come out of school and started building this Internet business. And the leadership team was kind of a democracy. There was no clear vision, money was being thrown at us, we were worth a ridiculous amount. And then everything crashed and it all fell apart. And that was kind of the first time. And then it sort of repeated itself. And I suddenly started to realize that the core issue here was me as an individual holding things back or a team of leaders that weren't really cohesive and couldn't work together properly. And that was a big challenge. I don't know if I've answered your question there, but I think those were like for me, the big wake up calls around building and scaling a business.

So you get to your limitations of your own leadership and you fail to build a good leadership team and attract people that are better than you.

Yeah.

How do you do that in a context where, you know, you're a small business, you're growing, there is not too much money to go around. You know, how do you actually, what are, what are some things that you've seen work in? Being able to attract talent better than you and to get them to care about the business as much as you do?

I think that comes back to having a purpose that's attracting that talent. I think it's quite surprising what you can pull off when the mission is bigger than just sort of making money. The purpose is bigger than making money and it pulls people to that purpose. And I have a good friend at the moment who's built up a business called Sustained and they are focused on building a system that takes a look right from the kind of grassroots up at how sustainable things are, from the people that are involved in the process to the ingredients to all those kind of things. And he's managed to attract a team of 10 odd people who really want to be working on solving this problem in the world. They did get some funding initially, but that ran out that it build a pretty fancy system. Those people have Stayed and almost kind of invested their own money, their own time into solving this problem. I think that mission, that vision, that sense of purpose at the beginning pulls people into the business and they kind of love coming to work to work on this problem. So I think when you're very small, that's actually works to your advantage. And then you hit like a revenue plateau or something and you lose momentum and you start chasing the money instead of chasing or following or pursuing your purpose. I think that's where things start to kind of wobble.

Yeah.

Or you get stuck.

Or you get stuck. Yeah, I mean it's. The talent is such a critical challenge. Right. So like, look, I want to dig a little bit into small giants because as you know, I, I love the community, I love the work, but not many people know about it. I didn't know about it till three months ago. And I only discovered it because first I read Another way which talked about small giants. And then I got into small giants and I read the book and I loved it. You know, this notion of businesses that, you know, that are, that operate differently, funded differently from larger ones. So let's get into that. Talk a little bit about the core mission. What is small giants? What is the core mission of the community and why does this really matter if you're a small and medium business?

Right now the core purpose of the small giants community is to connect sort of like hearted leaders and to help them to grow as leaders. And that's really our core purpose. Every day we're getting up, we're trying to connect more leaders together and we're trying to help them to grow themselves and to grow the people within their organization. And these folks are purpose driven leaders. They're guided by their values. So values play a very big role in how they build and think about their business. They deeply rooted in the community and the community helps shape their business as much as they kind of giving into the community. And I think as, as leaders they think slightly differently. So they don't typically kind of pursue the typical exit scenario or they don't pursue the typical kind of a business operating system or the idea of franchising their business out. They try and think about things differently, taking community, their people and their own personal purpose into mind and how they grow and build that business. For me, I came across the book probably around 2010 or so, had read some of Bo Burlingham's other work and I think the book that he's just done with Dave is phenomenal. And he wrote Finish Big as well, which is another great book. So Beau's kind of been this common denominator in all of these books for small and medium businesses that really are purpose driven leaders who kind of hold their values very tightly or very close to their values.

Yeah. So this ethos of values based, purpose driven. Right. And really learning from each other, really evolving our own operating system. So this concept is very clear. Prioritize purpose over growth. Right. Is it really core, one of the core tenets. Tell me a little bit about why is it so important and how to actually apply it pragmatically. Right. Because the business needs to make money. And if you even say I am purpose driven, I want to scale my impact. There is an implicit impact story which comes with growth. So unravel that, like, you know, break it down a little bit for me around prioritize purpose over growth. What does that mean for you and how do you practically make that operationalize that?

Yeah, I think the interesting thing is that the growth is almost the output, the profit, the revenue, the sort of out the outputs of what you're doing. Whereas these are the sort of internal things that. So when we think about purpose, when small giants kind of first came to be and the community first started forming, there wasn't a lot of research and there wasn't sort of anything definitive in terms of this idea of ROI on purpose or people even. This was what, 15 years ago. And I think when we look back now, we can see that it's had a massive effect on many of the businesses within the community. Co founder of the community, Paul Spiegelman had this idea of. This is called a circle of growth. So you have a very clear purpose of where you're going, you're making, starting to make revenue, but you reinvest that revenue into your people and you put your people first. That then kind of feeds into the relationships with the customers. Because if you're looking after your people really well, the relationships with the customers are far, far better. And those in turn turn into higher margins. So in the industry that Paul was in, which was a kind of healthcare basic call center, Beryl Health was seeing much higher margins than any of their competitors because of what they were doing. And then again, they were reinvesting that money. So we're staying on their purpose and reinvesting in their people. And when he went to sell, the business was sold for a multiple of 22 times, I think, which was unheard of in the industry at the time. I think it was around 7 or 8. There was no kind of real evidence of this back when small giants started. But over the years there's just more and more stories like Paul's where companies that have clear purpose invested in their people and put their people first and the relationships with their partners, with their communities and with their suppliers has paid massive dividends in terms of the growth and the outputs. The other thing is I think a lot of the small giants are very intentional about their growth. So they're less opportunistic about growth. They want to grow, they want to build those businesses. But it's not this chaotic growth kind of hustle growth or factor growth or whatever. It's very intentional growth. This is where we want to be X years down the line and this is sort of the pathway that we're going to follow to it. And the along the way there are difficult decisions that have to be made, but they lean on their values. And Tom Walter from Tasty Catering tells a great story about during COVID where they had to kind of cut back and they were thinking of letting folks go and the whole organization decided to take a cut so that they could keep as many people on board. And then some of those folks were out looking at opportunities and coming back and saying, hey, we're in an industrial park, one of the biggest in the US and there's cars in all these buildings, but they can't get food. Let's go out and look after these folks. And what Tom said to me, it was like having 60 CEOs working for him, thinking about the challenges every single night, living the values of the organization and looking after each other. And I think it's in those dips and the down times where so many business owners kind of think to let go and go and focus on revenue and that not stay true to purpose and values where they actually carry you through these. There's just so many examples. Yeah. Of how this is.

Yeah. No, as you know, as you know, I mean this is something that I so deeply believe in. You know, I've been reading so much in the space, you know, for Happiness Squad. We are a purpose driven business. Right. I left 25 years as a partner at McKinsey because I was really driven to democratize flourishing. I wanted flourishing to be accessible to everyone. It didn't matter if you were a for profit or not for profit, if you were frontline or if you were a senior leader, if you were an essential worker, you know, teacher, doctor, nurse, or you were in private equity, consultant, et cetera. And really starting with finding like minded people who are, who believe in that. Right. I mean, our ways of working today are so broken.

Yes.

20% of people are thriving, 22% are burnt out. So, John, this is these, these principles, you know, are they so resonate with me, Right? This is kind of. When I read that book Another Way, it was, it was almost three years into starting Happiness Squad. And the principles of that book which are also informed so much by the small giants work by bo. Right?

Yeah.

Ring true. Right. So principle number one, purpose driven. We are all about how can we help democratize flourishing? How can we really help transform ways of working so that people can flourish through their work, not outside of it. And work doesn't become one of the biggest sources of suffering for people. And that's where we are right now.

This is such a fantastic kind of purpose and mission that you folks on. Because, you know, I, I kind of sit on the underground in London and you just see the faces of the people almost looking like kind of zombies or they can't wait to get out of work. They, you know, they hate Monday. It is just so many folks. I think the question is how we change this. It feels like it could take whatever.

To change, but it will take a while. That's why I decided to dedicate the second half of my life to it, John. And it's actually even worse. This week was one of those moments, another one of those moments when I realized how badly the system is broken. You know, recognizing this in 2020, 2021 is what led me to start Happiness Squad and leave. Because I was like, I can't just focus on the top people who can afford to hire and spend so much money on it because there's so many people who can't. Right? Especially the small medium businesses. This week was another one of those moments. And I'll give this stat to you. You know, one in three. And this was based on a conversation with Andrew Sorent which led me to discover this work. One in three Canadian workers are facing food insecurity. They don't have enough to eat. There's this work done by Zeynep Tan. She's at mit. She created a Good Jobs institute where she highlighted this huge gap that exists, at least in the US between companies paying minimum wage and the big gap versus living wage. In one particular stat, she said, if you're in Cleveland and you are a single father or a single mother and parent with the child, the minimum wage would be approximately $16, $15 to $16 an hour. The living wage is 29 to $30. So there's a $15 gap. And this is doesn't even include cell phone bills, taxes, hospital like emergency, something that comes up. This is just basic and there's that big of a gap. And so people are having to work double jobs, they're not stable. And so I think those people who are able to take public transportation are kind of this next level and they're miserable because they don't find meaning. There are people who are just not even able to, even they work full time, are not able to feed their families.

You think about what kind of drives us is that we're looking for where can we find the cheapest people to bring into the business and are we going to go and offshore and use the Philippines or whatever it is and find the cheapest people over in the Philippines or do we find the cheapest people there or do we produce there for the cheapest? We've always got this how do we find kind of the cheapest way of producing what we need to produce to keep up with the competition. And I think it goes back to that. We're just chasing those revenue numbers, the output numbers, and thinking about that rather than like what's the purpose of our business, what are we trying to solve here and how do we find.

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The best people who are aligned with the values of the organization and we're going to work to solve this problem. And I think we've sort of grown up in this materialistic world, consumerism and just more, more, more. And that's, that's kind of in my mind just driving this thing. And I'm not an economist or anything.

It is, it is it for sure is. It for sure is. And I think this would be a good experiment for us to run, John. And I think it is actually even more deeper than that. And so she talks about in this book a little bit and I think I'm inclined to believe with her. I think there is a cognitive dissonance between the senior most leaders versus frontline worker. There is a cognitive dissonance of the suffering that their choices of how to run operations, how to pay, how to set schedules is causing. There's a fundamental cognitive dissonance. And so I think people are not moving. You know, most manufacturing sites have 30, 50, 70% attrition. Retail frontline. 30, 50, 70% attrition. And the story, most people tell us they're just unreliable workers. It's so hard to find a reliable worker. But maybe the story. Yeah, maybe the story is that they don't make enough. We're not paying them enough, so they are not able. So they have to do two jobs or three jobs, which makes them unreliable because they're just trying to do the best that they can. And so this notion of really. And that's what her work, you know, talked about doing something different. She gave this beautiful story of this executive who, you know, this company supports a food kitchen. And, you know, one of the days he went to volunteer there, and the person who runs the food kitchen said, are you aware that a third of our customers are your employees?

Wow. Yeah, it's great.

And he's like, I'm sorry, what? He's like, yeah, you know, they can't. I mean, there's another story of another company where they found that they offered.

This amazing third of the people run. So, sorry, I might have missed. But they come from the organization and they go there to help. They're not actually customers.

They're not. So it's a food kitchen.

The way around. Sorry, I got that. I thought they were helping. Sorry.

Okay. They were. They. They fund the Food Kitchen. They are one of the people who kind of contribute to the Food Kitchen, which is beautiful. And so they think, oh, you know, from all of this, I'm doing a service and I'm actually making a difference. And the food kitchen person says, you know, a third of our people who come eat here are actually your employees.

Yeah.

Because they have food insecurity. Right. There was this other example of a story where they had this amazing benefit package, but a big chunk of the people couldn't afford to actually have the package because they didn't make enough to pay. Even their component of it, that's the level of suffering. And when you are fundamentally disconnected from that. There was this other stat around, I think, 54 million people in the U.S. the median annual pay. The median annual pay based on the number of hours they work times the minimum is about 19,000.

So repeat that for you.

It was about the median annual pay.

Yeah.

For people was 19,000. Because even if you pay minimum wage, but if I only give you 500 hours or 1000 hours, you have to figure out a way to make the rest. So then how can you get somebody reliable when that's all that they're paying? And they're having to figure out a way to close the gap. So I think there is a fundamental cognitive dissonance where instead of feeding attrition as, oh my God, there is something fundamentally wrong in the way we are paying, we are running our operations that are not making people stick. We make it that it's a people problem.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, I mean it's a leadership problem as well, isn't it?

It's a, it's a massive, it's a fundamental operations problem. And I think it's, it's a good book to read in the community, John. It's called the Case for Case for Good Jobs. It's by Zeynep. But anyway, you know, going back to our principles, purpose matters, people matter. Right. Most of these businesses are people centric. We are really very conscious about who we bring into our Happiness Squad family. They have to be aligned to the purpose first and foremost and have done their deeper work around being able to walk the path because it's not an easy path to walk, as you and I both know.

Yeah.

Third is they are profitable. Right. They have all chosen to be profitable because profits are like oxygen. Life is very hard for this to exist. At least aerobic life without oxygen. But oxygen is not the reason for life to exist. Profits are needed for businesses to survive. And so they need to be profitable so they can continue investing in their people, in their customers. They all have paced growth. So this notion of not growing for the sake of growing, somebody says, I'll give you 2 million, I love your business, go scale it. And the culture goes sideways and customer service goes sideways, they're like, no, I would rather grow at an internal pace of business. And then those notion of, you know, I've always said for us, Happiness Squad will never be sold and it would never go ipo because I want it to remain private. You know, I wanted to take it to a place where it gets owned by the employees. And it's really the decisions are in the context of the bigger service because it is a very complex challenge we're trying to solve. And I think it'll take us a lot of time to go solve that challenge.

And yeah, you know, when you, when we, when you started this, you asked me about small giants purpose and it's been around connecting like hearted leaders. But I think for me personally, one of the things that I see in this community is people like Eric Rieger who want to be a beacon for closing that, that wealth gap. So he's looked to making webit 100% employee owned by 2030. So he believes that, you know, while private equity could come in and whoever, and he gets calls all the time from them, but he wants to be a beacon for other businesses on kind of this model of employee ownership. And I'm seeing this, this trend in the small giants, this employee ownership trend, the open book trend. But I was talking to Sherry from Rael as well, who wanted the original small giants recently. She's second generation and she used the same words. She said, we want to be a beacon or lighthouse on the hill for other companies. And I think going back to that question originally, for me personally, it's about finding more of these beacons and kind of lighting the world up. You know, when you see from space all these, the lights on. I kind of want the small giants community to be all of these beacons around the world. They're showing other companies how to do this differently so that our children are going to these fabulous, purpose driven, values oriented companies. Sorry, that kind of just came back to me.

No, for sure. I think it's, that's it. I mean, you know, we have committed to kind of helping conscious businesses benefit Corps win because I want them to write the future of work. I want them to write the future of work. Right.

Because it's our fish. Right? Throwing one back in at a time, the little girl throwing the starfish in and.

Exactly, exactly. So listen, I want to go back to this, you know, I want to go back to kind of your vision for small giants as you look three to five years out. What is your vision for small giants and just this broader movement that we are talking about, business as a force for good, business as a force for flourishing in the world rather than a source of suffering in the world.

The, the change was very sudden. I took over from Paul about three months ago and I think my vision's probably clarifying, becoming clearer as I get more and more involved and the more conversations I have with the companies in this community. But when I came in, the key thing was how do we sort of 10x the impact of this community over the next three years? So you said earlier you hadn't heard of the small giants before. There are these remarkable businesses that are the beacons on the hill. How do I fix the impact of these businesses in the community over the next three years? How do we turn this into a more global community? So my vision is to create a more global community with 10 times the impact that we've got at the moment in the next three years. Part of that is community. Like, how do we connect more leaders in the community? And that's really important for me at the moment. It's like, how do we. How do we build a much stronger community, a much more engaged community that can have this text impact?

Yeah. And we'll do that through role modeling. We'll do that from learning from each other. Beacons on the hill, as you highlighted. Right. And really a different operating system that these businesses can lean into. Talking about operating system. So many founders and small businesses get caught in the mode of just keeping the lights on. Right. They're constantly firefighting, they're stressed, they're not able to step back. And I'm curious, from all the companies that you've had a chance to interact with, what are some of the reasons they get trapped there and early signs for leaders to watch? Because my belief is once you're stuck in fear, all of the purpose, bigger picture goes out the door because you're at the much lower level of the Maslow's hierarchy of need. Right. And so my question to you is, what have you seen as the main reasons people get trapped there? And what are the signs that they should notice to say, hey, I need to do something. Maybe I need to connect with another small giant. I need to find and have a conversation with somebody. So drivers and science that you need help.

I think I'm gonna go back to what I sort of said earlier. We. We have this sort of mission that we go off on this, this purpose and it pulls us and we, we pull a group together and off we go and we, we start trying to solve for this purpose or kind of solve this, this, this challenge in the world. And along the way, I, I think sometimes you can see success at the beginning, and it's. You kind of go up from wherever you are to maybe a million in revenue or something like that, and you suddenly kind of think, okay, well, how do we go from there to 10? And how do we just kind of keep growing? The challenge is that I think you get to a point where the leadership of the business, the owner and the leaders in that business aren't growing at the same pace as the business. And then it flattens out. And very often, I mean, it can sit there kind of 5 million for two decades. I know somebody who I've just worked with and, and done some research with in my book, which is coming out in April. Carl Saunders had been banging his head at 5 million for almost two decades. When I talked to Elizabeth Glassbrenner from Smiley Technologies, her brother had been running the business, banging his head against sort of 4 million mark for years until she takes over. Elizabeth takes over and she's a people person and she leans into a leadership team and she gets vulnerable and they go from banging their head around there to here, you know, here comes the output from there to 20 million in revenue as the output. So looking at how do we invest in the people, so many examples of it. And that's what prompted me to write the book. But I think how you recognize that this is becoming a problem is you start losing your best people. So you get to this point where you kind of banging along at a number and you, you starting to lose your best people. You as the business owner are getting more and more involved in the, in the weeds and you get into this kind of doom loop and you start spiraling. And I think unless you wake up and say, hang on, I got to pull myself out of here, I've got to reconnect with the purpose of this business and we've got to figure out what the new mission is. I think what was the book that the E myth was really good at talking about how so many of us who are kind of technical come out. We have this idea, we get reasonably successful with it, we build the business up, but then we either stick our heads in the sand and the business starts kind of slipping down, or we take that external input and we think we got to do something here, we hire the right people and we go the other way. And I think it's a normal kind of thing. With most businesses you kind of got this growth curve, it's like an S curve. And then you hit that S and it either plateaus or you're growing your leadership at the same time, including yourself. And you're building systems and leadership teams and you're taking external inputs or you ignore it and you kind of crash and burn. And I think one of the biggest signs is that you're kind of getting stuck into all the weeds, into all the nitty gritty every day and you can't see the kind of wood for the trees, so to speak. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I think it's, you know, I'm curious if you also notice, I think there's so many people are operating out of this fight flight freeze mode all the time. They're so busy, they're so frantic, they're losing sleep, they're gaining weight, relationships are suffering and you are operating. You find yourself operating from that scarcity mindset, that fear based mindset where everything is coming down the business, even if it's, you know, reasonably doing well. And people think, wow, look at that grad business. The founder is struggling. The founder is like waterboarding, right?

And yeah, good way of putting it.

And you're like, oh my God, look at how great the business doing. And they're like just gasping for breath and just trying to keep it all together. And I often find if, you know, if you're listening to this and if you started a business, the business is a projection of you. If you're in survival mode, the business will be in survival mode. And so I often find if you turn to yourself, are you feeling every day excited to take on the day, Are you sleeping every night energized about what you accomplished? Or are you operating from a place of like, oh my God, here we go again, another day. I'm drained.

Yeah, like in Washington.

Irritable. I'm irritable. I feel like there is never enough time. If you're from there, know that you're not in a place and you've reached, you know, John, as you said, you've reached that point where unless you shift yourself, the business will be stuck where it is. If not, maybe even go down as people start leaving you. And so it's a real wake up call to just, you don't have to look at the financials of the business, you don't have to look at the revenue, the profits, the customer said, look at yourself. How are you feeling in this moment right now? And all the research is so clear. When you're flourishing, when you're happier, when you are operating from a place of resilience, driven by purpose, you will operate better, you will have higher results. But you have to start with yourself.

Yeah. And I think it kind of goes back to this mindset that we have about chasing those outputs, the revenue and the profit and, and not you just kind of get into that, that mode and that's what you start chasing because it's what we sort of define as success. We look at the people around us, we look at what they've got, what they're earning and we just start chasing these numbers. And I think, you know, if I look back for me that what I understood was all about it, it was just keep, keep growing. But you don't understand the fundamentals even, I mean I, I not gone and done an MBA or anything, I only did that later. But if you are over reliant on one or two customers and one of them runs into trouble and you got 200 people, you're kind of end of the month chasing money to pay staff, then you kind of getting invoices out, then you just go back into chasing get the next round in pay the and it just becomes this living from month to month thing. And I had that problem. It was alcohol and living a crap life and eating terribly and all that sort of stuff. When that starts showing up, you know there's problems.

Yeah. Don't just keep going. Right. Pull yourself. And by the way, the research is so clear on this friends. So right. It's not that John and Ashish just kind of sitting and saying most people play this if then else game. If I get this, then I'll be happy, then I'll change my life, then I'll do all these things. The research is so clear. That's a never ending game. Right? That's a never ending game. You can choose to be happier, satisfied now and from that place set an aspiration of where you want to go and you will be more successful. Happier people are more successful, live longer, are more adaptable, more resilient. So I think these are habits we have to build. These are journeys we have to take for ourselves. And nobody is coming to save you. Unfortunate news. Nobody is coming to save you. Only person who can save you is you.

I think. You know, something you said the other day to me, which I think is so relevant for the listeners, is we hear all this and we, we hear all these great ideas and then we make this conscious decision to change. But it takes small changes and it takes the ability to kind of get knocked off the horse and just get back on the next day and, and keep going. But you almost sort of. What does your future self look like health wise? What's your definition of success? Not what somebody else's definition is. Not what you're seeing on Instagram or whatever else. But what does success look like to you? And holistically, health, wealth, all of those kind of things. And then how do you sort of pull yourself towards that? And there are going to be times that you fall off, just get straight back on and keep going. And I think a lot of us fall off and then just kind of slip in a whole lot of bad habits again and it's not working. Got to keep at it. You got to keep at it and enjoy it. Yeah, you actually start to enjoy. I mean I've spent the last two work, two weeks working with a coach kind of learning to surf again. I surfed when I was a kid. But a friend of mine the other day said something about Going in the water helps to wash away the emotions. And I felt like that the last two odd weeks working with Paul, him helping me to, to just kind of get back on the board and ride properly, but I've stuck at it. I've loved getting into the water and it's just actually brought so much good to me in terms of like health and just getting out and doing that. So I get a few hours of work done, go for a surf with Paul, come back, go back into it, but just keep at it.

Keep at it. Absolutely. And do it sometimes in community.

Accountability partner.

Exactly. So my friends, just looking at the clock. So let's bring us full circle. The wiser John today. If you were advising yourself from the younger John 20 years ago, what advice would you have given that John?

Such a good question. The reason I went into this was one of my core values is freedom. And when I say went into this, I mean becoming an entrepreneur and building businesses and that sort of thing. And I equated entrepreneurship with freedom and I think many of us do. However, the problem, I think is that I wasn't intentional about what I was trying to build. It was just build something, chaos. So if I could go back and give some advice to myself, back then it was be far more intentional about what it is that you're trying to create, what that purpose is, and be true to your values. I think I did a lot of things that weren't kind of in line with my own values. Be true to those values. And it's obviously a lot more complicated than this. I think you get to an age where you have some wisdom and you keep learning. And I think maybe that's also a key thing. Have a half full glass. Just learn. I think as I went through like 45 or so, I realized that I don't know everything and there's so much more to learn in the world. And just be curious, stay curious. I think one of my core values that's grown a lot in the last decade is curiosity. So it's like freedom, independence and curiosity are probably the top three. And if I look back, be more intentional about what it is that I'm doing. I think that's. And that that helps you to kind of narrow your focus, raise your floor, I guess, as, as Dr. Hardy says, and just really lift the frame and focus on what it is that you're trying to achieve so you're not all over the place. Because we entrepreneurs have this, we call it the kind of syndrome, the shiny object syndrome. And we're all over the place. We're trying to create all sorts of things and that's where it just gets messy. You're chasing revenue, trying to pursue every single opportunity, get intentional about what it is.

You're doing amazing well my friend, thank you for joining.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, I can't wait for you to make your move to the US and so much I'm so looking forward to collaborating with you, growing the small giants community, supporting the businesses and really helping these beacons of light to be the ones who win, who can then inspire, but most importantly rewrite the future of work.

Thank you, thank you Sish. I'm so grateful really for having us on and giving us the opportunity. So thanks very much.

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