063: John Ratliff - It’s Lonely at the Top: Your Work and Your Mental Health

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done. I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to Docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxataalent.com Bill G. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today.

All right, Today's show is all about depression, mental health and all the range of emotions that we deal with as human beings and as entrepreneurs. Heads of companies, you know, they say it's lonely at the top. Well, we're about to give you access to go through and address some of the things that you may be dealing with this great show. I'm so happy to have John Ratliff for the show today. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and Gazelle's business coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with us today is John Ratliff. So John is a longtime veteran of Scaling up the Rock habits, an early learner in in the world of Vern and and that work. He applied the work with his prior company, Apple Tree Answers, growing from a very small business to I don't know, six, over 600, nearly 700 employees, couple dozen offices around and eventually selling that business. Along the way they discovered and dealt with a key thing like many of our clients do, handling a key issue that affected their industry and that was the high turnover in a phone answering business. And they did it by engaging their employees in a completely radical way, dealing with people with kind of a make a wish type program. John exited his business, sold it successfully to a strategic buyer and today he is a managing director with STS Capital Partners, a company that specializes in in strategic sales that give you far, far, far better valuations in the transaction than you get through a typical private equity type sale and exit for the business. So I'm so happy to have John on the show. He's been around. He's been around the Gathering of Titans reunion program. He's around our Gazelle Scaling up summit. He's in Verne's world all the time and he's decided to talk about his own experience. So welcome to the show, John.

Great to. Great to be here, Bill. I appreciate it.

That's nice. And you're in a kind of a beautiful spot there today, aren't you?

Yeah, this is, this is my office, which I don't spend a ton of time in, but it is, it's a beautiful spot.

It's nice to be. And tell our listeners, viewers, where the office is.

So we're in a Philadelphia suburb. It's in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, about probably 20 minutes from Philly.

I thought you were in the. In the oceanfront location.

No, yeah, no, I'm not in Marathon today. I'm in our. I'm in our home office, unfortunately, in Philly.

Got it. All right, so. So thanks for having us on the show. We're gonna get into it. I think probably a great place to do is if you'd sort of share your entrepreneurial journey and then through that tell talk about the kinds of the changes in emotional state and stuff that you had to deal with and then give us kind of your story. Yeah.

So, you know, it's interesting. I, from the mental health side of things, I didn't even probably realize it at the time, but, you know, that's been going on since I was a kid. But right out of college, I always knew from the time I was, you know, a little, little kid that I didn't know the word entrepreneur, but I knew I wanted to be a business owner. And right out of college, I kind of did what most graduating college seniors do and took the summer off. And I had a buddy who had just finished his first year of law school. So we had a very entertaining summer. And by about September, my parents said, hey, are you ever planning on getting a job or are you just going to live here at home forever? So I went to work for a little wireless phone retailer, and it was an all commissioned sales job. And I did that for literally about five months and decided that I could do it better on my own than I could working for someone else. So I opened a little wireless phone store in Media, Pennsylvania, another Philadelphia suburb. And then about six months later, I opened a second store in Paoli, Pennsylvania. Those two started to do really well and grow. About a year after the second store, the guy that I had originally worked for called me and said, hey, have you ever thought about selling your company? I think I was the ripe old age of 22 or 23. I said, no, but let's get together and talk about it. So we ended up, we made a deal for him to buy that. That I started first and then I found myself in need of something else to do. So my landlord in the second store had one of those little old traditional answering services where you write messages on pieces of paper. And he said, hey, why don't you open one of these down in Delaware? We won't be competitors. You're in another state and I'll get you set up with my equipment guys. So I had no better idea than that or no original thought on what to do. So I opened this little mom and pop style telephone answering service in an apartment.

Used to be a lot of them around.

Yeah, there were the industries, definitely. Thanks to some guys like me, it's definitely been consolidating over the years. But so, yeah, so we opened that or I opened that down in Wilmington, Delaware, which is another Philadelphia suburb. And you know, I started completely from scratch. And the business was 24, 7, 365 and I couldn't afford anything, people to work for me. So I was answering the phone around the clock and trying to make sales during the day. And fortunately we didn't have a lot of customers, so there weren't a lot of calls to answer in the beginning. But it was an incredibly taxing business in those early years. And you know, when I look back on it now, I think it may have been a way of me sort of avoiding confronting what was going on with me personally. Everyone says, oh Yeah, I worked 100 hours a week, but I literally was one of those people that had to work 100 hours a week because the business was 24, 7, 365.

So you're saying that in some ways that served a purpose. The working hard gave you something to throw yourself into and avoid other things.

Yeah, I really think it did. And I don't think I thought about it that way at the time. I think one of the things from a mental health perspective that's really important is sleep. I picked the business that provided the most possible sleep deprivation you could possibly have. The way I had the office set up, I had a bedroom with a bed and I would sleep in there. And there was a buzzer next to the bed. When the phone would ring, the buzzer would go off and it would wake you up and wake me up and I'd have to kind of stumble out and answer the phone. I started the business in the summer of 95 and I'm pretty sure I don't remember the entire year of 1997. I was so sleep deprived, but I. And actually I had kind of my first sort of, like, epiphany turning point moment in that sort of 1997 range. It's a great story. It was about 4am on Monday morning. So Sunday night into Monday, I had not slept more than two hours the entire weekend. I was the only person there for the whole weekend. Fortunately, the business was growing, so we were starting to get more calls and had more customers. But the downside was there was less time to sleep in between those calls. And I was literally at the end of my rope. I was at the end of my rope physically, emotionally, personally. I destroyed a lot of relationships and was probably in the darkest place I had ever been. And it was 4am Monday morning, and I'm asleep. I'd finally fallen asleep probably an hour before, and the buzzer goes off again, and I woke up and I was smart enough to set it up where I had to get out of bed, walk across the apartment and sit down at the desk to answer the phone so that I could at least sort of sound a little bit awake, even though I was completely, like, catatonic asleep. And in the process of walking across the apartment, I had to walk by this little closet where we had all of our telephone equipment. And without even thinking about it, not even again being catatonic, I walked into the closet and I reached out, and our equipment looked like half of a filing cabinet. And I reached out and I grabbed that piece of equipment, and my plan was to rip it out of the wall, throw it on the ground, and go back to bed and be with the business.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Literally f this business, I'm done.

I was done. I was at the end of every possible rope you could be at the end of. And so I reach out and I grab it, and I had one of those kind of like, I guess, epiphany moments where they say your life flashed before your eyes. My business life sort of flashed before my eyes, and I literally almost got a glimpse into the future. And I knew that kind of in that moment, if I stuck it out and I really kind of like, doubled down and reapplied myself and maybe changed our strategy a little bit, that there was going to be a great outcome at the end. I had no idea at the moment what that meant. We certainly had an outcome I could have never envisioned in 1997, but I knew that if I just could get past this sort of like, hamster wheel that I was on, that things were going to work out on the other end. So I have that moment. I get complete clarity One of the few moments of clarity I had early on, the funny sidebar that people think I'm making up, but from my lips to God's ears, this is what happened. I then walked out, I sat down and I answered the phone. And we had a limo company that was one of our first clients. It was called Delaware Express. And I said, good morning. Thank you for calling Delaware Express. The guy on the other end goes, oh, sorry, dude, wrong number. So the call was a wrong number, but it was the moment where I know, I know you can't make that up. When the universe calls, you gotta kind of pay attention.

It's time to change something.

Yeah. And I did not realize that at the time, but that was absolutely one of those turning point moments. But. And things were bad for years to come after that, and there were lots of challenges, but that was the first time I really sort of got to a place of, like, I'll call it the ultimate despair place, and was able to have a moment of clarity that sort of pulled me out of it. You know, it's interesting. I talk and I hid this up until very, very recently. And, you know, it's 2017 and we're talking about 20 years ago. But, you know, I, as. As, you know, I battled depression from the time I was a kid, through my teenage years, through all my entrepreneurial career, until really very recently, and kept it a secret from pretty much everyone in my life. It was one of those kind of things that I carried around but never wanted to talk about. I describe my personal experience with depression. It's kind of like wearing a blanket around your shoulders, and you're always aware that it's there. Sometimes it's heavier. Sometimes it almost feels like it's soaking wet. At times it's not very heavy, but you're always kind of aware that this thing is with you. I think a lot of my personality was sort of a manifestation that was my ability to try or my. My attempt to try and hide this from the people around me.

And what did people see on the outside then?

You know, that's a great question. I guess you'd have to ask some of them. But looking back to me, I was often one of the life of the party guys. Perfect, funny personality. Well, I thought I was funny anyway, but kind of larger than life in a lot of sort of settings and jokester.

Expressive.

Yeah.

Did you drink?

I did. I drank pretty significantly through my 20s and 30s. Yeah, I was definitely a drinker all throughout. And it was. If you had polled any of the people that were close to me and said introvert or extrovert, they all would have said extrovert. And I would tell you I'm a painful introvert. But again, the way I sort of hid that and kind of, I guess, attempted to mask all this other stuff was in very extrovert, introverted ways.

I'm totally like that. I think a lot of. I pretended to be an extrovert, right. And. And I could be very expressive, demonstrative in certain public settings when I was set up in a particular way. But in reality, I could only manage it for a short period of time. Now I'm much more clear. No, I'm an introvert and I can take the stage, I can do certain things, but I am at my core, you know, like, to retreat.

Yeah. You know, it's funny, I was. We had a party at the house. I think it was around Christmas time. And my. My mo. When we had a party, I could. I could handle about a half hour to an hour. And then I would sort of disappear. And whether it was, you know, my bedroom or just somewhere by myself, and then I'd come back. And now I've been telling the story of how. And I'll get to it with you how, you know, I overcame this depression thing that I've had going on forever. And someone said to me, they're like, wow, it's the first time I've been in a party with you where you're not like vanishing every hour for 20 or 30 minutes. We always wondered what that was about. And, you know, and that was completely from the whole introvert, extrovert. You're right. You can only fake it for so long and then it becomes painful. And as I share that now, people are still shocked when I say I'm a total natural introvert.

Well, I'll share a couple things along the line because I did a similar thing and I didn't recognize it as any kind of a mood disorder. I don't know if I would call it depression in my world was something else, but it definitely is in the world of something there. So I had started and grown a piece of business at Sprint that was a half a billion dollars. And. And I'd grown that. And, you know, I was hot shit. And I was 27, right. And I was. So I think back about some of the stuff I pulled with people, some of the obnoxious things I said. Eventually I got fired, right? So it was only half a billion dollars. It was not. I mean, that's a lot of money for Some and not much for others. In the, in that world, it wasn't that much money and it wasn't that much minutes carried in that phone company's world, but it was the vast majority of the operating profit of the company. So I walked around with all kinds of swagger and lorded over people they were too stupid to realize who actually controlled the profit of the business. And it was me, this under 30 kid. And I got fired, right? And so I got fired and I'm like, oh, I know stuff. And I'm going to start a new business. So I started this specialty consulting boutique to do special market research with international and ethnic consumer research. So I started this thing and I was struggling and I was failing and I was whatever and. And I had no money and my girlfriend dumped me and I lost my house. My girlfriend in many years dumped me and I lost my house. And I moved back to California and I was trying to get this business going and I was having little bits here and there, but it wasn't winning, right? And at night I was waiting tables.

Yeah.

To pay the rent, right? And I came out to my car in my black and white waiter effing uniform, right? And waiting is a fine job, don't get me wrong, but for who? I'd been flying around the world in the country, you know, running a half a billion dollar business. It was humiliating to do that. And I was making the best of it. I walk out to my car and my windshield is broken, and it's been broken for months. And I looked at it and I began to cry and I went back inside and I said, this ends now. I have to do something to shake it up. And I, I put myself in a course and I put my rent money up, right? And I'd done these courses to sort of reset myself, and I put my rent money up. And so I had no way to make rent the next month. And I thought that that was a bold way. Like there's this poem about, you know, throwing your hat over the fence or being all in. And there's this idea of being fully, fully committed, right? And, and I knew that in doing it in that way, I was fully committed. So I called in sick to work. I put all my rent money up, and I go into this weekend course and I'm like, dude, I'm here for a breakthrough. I need a breakthrough because my life does not work, right? And in very short order, I pulled it together. I didn't recognize at that point how sad, how defeated, how, you know, the, the space I was in, I was journaling at that time and trying to. But I was lonely and hopeless and you know, unfortunately I had a lot of people around me and. And I'm also capable of really kicking ass. I didn't think about it until years later when my dad's sort of bipolar and alcoholism became unmanageable. His life began to unravel and he, he ultimately he took his own life. And in examining that, I had to start to see, wait a minute, I have highs and lows now. I don't think anybody would call me bipolar, but I started to recognize the same kinds of tendencies that led my dad down that path. Like I suffer that. And all around me, the entrepreneurs, the CEOs that I deal with, they deal. And we all pretend like it's all cool.

Yeah.

And we joke and we drink and we act out romantically and sexually and we do all kinds of crazy behaviors to try to compensate and cover up.

No. And I think we've almost. I had this conversation literally a week or two ago. I think we self selected into an entrepreneurial lifestyle because of a lot of these things. And you know, as you said, you couldn't make it at Sprint and you got fired. I'm completely unemployable. I couldn't make it anywhere. And I knew that early five months into my first career, I knew I was unemployable. But I also think that it's our unwillingness to accept the status quo and our ability to see opportunity where other people see problems. It's one of those Ned Hallowell, I love how he talks about ADD and ADHD is you were given a Ferrari, but it has bicycle brakes. And I think it's a lot of the same things that make us really kind of successful as entrepreneurs that also sort of trap us on the mental health side. The burning question for me is always how can we harness this gift that we've been given? Whether it's the ability to be overly optimistic in the face of massive pessimism or see opportunity where no one else sees any, or all these things our brains have been wired to do that I will say normal people maybe don't get to do. How do we take that opportunity but harness it in ways that aren't self destructive? And I think depression certainly is a self destructive outcome. I'm like you, I probably wouldn't classify myself as bipolar, but certainly the highs can be way too high and the lows and you live and die with every outcome as an entrepreneur. So every customer loss is the Worst thing ever. And every new customer gain is pretty good, but you don't look at it as rational as maybe you should. But it's also a gift at the same time to be wired the way that we are. So it's kind of a double edged sword, I guess.

I definitely, I think the gift of this conversation, of my experiences of yours and so on is starting to see and recognize and accept some of the things tell us about your epiphany and the book and.

Yeah, so it's kind of a crazy story. I sold the company in 2012. We had an incredible run. We grew it like you said, almost 700 people, 24 offices in the U.S. successful by every measure, had a great exit, exited for over three times. The industry averaged multiples, literally check every box on it was a success. But when I depression was with me the whole way even I probably ignored it at times, even though I always felt it. But it was a complete secret from people around me. But after I sold the company, it wasn't that we didn't have the company anymore, but it was more just a lack of purpose and direction and kind of an idea about what I was doing. I started saying yes to all kinds of crazy stuff. I found myself doing free consulting pretty much as a full time job. And I was really. Because I didn't have a clear sense of who I was or where I wanted to go. I was kind of like a leaf blowing in the wind. And that really sort of accelerated this cycle of depression. So from 2012.

So let me underscore that because I don't think everybody maybe heard that you sold the thing, you exited, you had a shitload of money and now you're, you're especially depressed.

Yeah, I would say that was, you know, that was the second real sort of darkest period was.

I'm laughing at the irony of that. Right?

It is. I mean, yeah. And what's, what's most ironic is, and I think this is another thing as entrepreneurs that we really battle with. And you know, I have some antidotes too, but you can't, no one wants to hear that. Like you can't tell other people that. You can't say, oh yeah, this is the darkest period of my life. Because, you know, we just had an eight figure exit and I don't have to work anymore. And you know, your friends who are lawyers and school teachers and working for other companies, they can't even relate to that. So you really become isolated because before you could at least have some of these conversations around, hey, it's really hard. But now you've exited. You literally have nothing to do. You wake up with a clean agenda every day, and you're at the. The worst point of your life. And talk about lonely. There are very few people that can even comprehend the conversation around how hard that is. So you get even more and more isolated. And I think I got into a sort of a perpetual cycle of that.

Here's the thing I often ask when doing public talks, and certainly with small teams when I'm coaching, how many of you know the purpose of your life? How many know the purpose of your company? A few in our world know the purpose of their company. Right. Especially if they've done some of the work and they have a purpose statement. Others will call it a mission or that kind of thing, some variation on that theme. They know their why, but very few have their personal purpose, their life purpose.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I. And literally, I'm probably still in that category. I'm still trying to figure out my life purpose. I do know one of. One of my new sort of things that I think is really important is to talk about mental health, which is why we're here today. Yeah. I really believe that it' sand I'll share my story of the epiphany, but I believe it's our responsibility to talk about this because it's one of those things that is a dirty little secret for a lot of people, and it comes with a lot of shame. And I'm sure if your dad had the ability to kind of talk about it in a meaningful way, it may have been a different outcome. But this is something that especially, I think, for men, we look at it. I always looked at it as a sign of weakness. And there's an interesting phenomenon for entrepreneurs where you already feel like you have to have all the answers and you can't look weak to your employees, and certainly you can't be vulnerable. If they think you don't know what you're doing, they're gonna mutiny and everything else. And then you layer kind of a mental health issue on top of that. And I think it becomes, again, I use the word lonely. It's exponentially more lonely because you can't. You just feel like you have no outlet. And, you know, I worked with a couple therapists, and I worked with a great guy who's a who, you know, does a lot of YPO. In fact, he's pretty much almost only YPO CEOs. But again, there's just this lack of sort of, you know, deep empathy or Deep understanding of, you know, what it's like to be in the role that we've chosen.

Tell us about your epiphany and the book being. I want to make sure we get kind of that transformation before we run out of time in the show.

Yeah. So I was at one of, if anyone knows, Joe Polish. I was at Joe Polish's event in Phoenix, which is a roundtable of about 20 people. And it was with Joe and Dean Grazioc. And it was a two day. We do it a couple times a year. It was a two day roundtable. And the morning of the first day, they had kind of put in front of everyone's place a book by Michael Singer called the Untethered Soul. And one of the things that happened from my depression was really after 2012, kind of in that darker period, I lost my ability to read. I'm an avid learner. 40 days a year of learning. And I'm a very avid reader. I would read 30 to 40 books a year. And over time I sort of lost the ability. I would read a page or two, the words would look funny. That just didn't make sense. My brain didn't process things the right way and I'd get frustrated and stop. So they hand this book out and we go through our two days and had a great meeting. And I don't think twice about it. I'd stuffed it in the side of my briefcase. So I get on the flight home and probably somewhere, maybe over Oklahoma, I don't know, I was coming back from Phoenix to Philadelphia. I don't even know what compelled me to do it, but I pulled the book out. They had really said positive stuff about it. So I pull the book out, I start to read and then I look up and realize I'm about 40 pages in, when normally I can read about two. So I thought that was kind of unique. At about the, I don't know, 60 or 70 page mark, I read about this idea or he talks about this idea of energy and how we all have access to unlimited amounts of energy and the only reason that we don't access it is because we've trapped negative energy inside. Like all of our bad past experiences that are negative, we have them trapped inside. And if you've trapped the negative, you lose your capacity to draw in this unlimited positive energy. And he tells a great story in the book around. Imagine if you lost your girlfriend and you're depressed for three months and you're laying around the house and there's pizza boxes around and you can't get off the couch and you have no energy at all. And no matter. You have no ability to create any sort of positive. Whether you sleep or eat or do whatever, you can't become positive. And then she calls and says, hey, I made a mistake. I want to get back together. And instantly you can completely draw that positive energy in, and you're completely back to where you were. Same idea for me was I was really just very drained, energetically. So I'm reading this part about. It's your heart center, and that's where all the negative is trapped. And if you just could relax right there, like, right in your chest and. And experience the negative experiences, but then let them go, then you have this unlimited ability to draw positive energy. I laugh every time I. It had to look to everyone else. I was in first class on an American Airlines flight, and I had to look like that crazy person that you've flown with once or twice, that you look over and think, what the hell is going on with that guy? So I do it. I kind of relax. I'm reading the book. I sort of relax. I have all this negative energy just, like, flood out of me. And now I'm like, like tingling and buzzing and like, all this, like, rush of overwhelming positive. And I realize I'm crying. Like, tears are, like, dripping off my face, and I'm looking around, I'm like, oh, my God, this has to be, like, horrifying for these people. I actually put my sunglasses on. But in that moment, somewhere over middle America, I was able to relax here, let all the negative stuff go in an instant or what seemed like an instant, and just. I'm getting the chills, telling the story now. Just got this overwhelming sense of, like, positive and unlimited. He talks about you have unlimited ability to access this energy. And with all that, the blanket, for the first time since maybe I was 12, the blanket disappeared. That weight on my shoulders just completely evaporated. That was in November, and I haven't felt that weight on my shoulders since. Not a second of a day has gone by where I've put the blanket back on. And I'm a big believer, and I'm sure you are as well. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. And you know, Michael Singer is certainly one resource, and the book is certainly one idea. It was the right idea for me at the right time, but the idea was, it's crazy to trap negative past experience. You're never going to change them. You've already learned the lesson, why hold onto it and block your ability to be Positive just because it's easier to not deal with it than deal with it. Relax, deal with it one time, and then you get unlimited access to good. So that was my moment. That was my epiphany moment. I still, like I said, laugh. I can't imagine being the guy sitting next to me. He had to be like horrified and dying to get off the flight. But that was my epiphany moment for the Untethered Soul. And kind of how I got rid of all that.

That's really great. So the book's Michael Singer by Michael Singer, it's the Untethered Soul. The other book by Michael Singer is the Surrender Experiment, which opens with an epiphany in an airplane flying over the country as well. Interestingly enough, you know, in this space, actually, and in the freshness. I'll share something with you. This is a little on plan, but you probably don't know this, but. And many people don't know this, but I've worked with hundreds, actually, maybe even thousands on some level, but hundreds deeply in life purpose, personal life purpose, right? Helping them to develop it, practice it, manifest it, or manifest, maybe not the word, but embody it is the better word, right? And so I'm going to share with you a couple things that I think are useful because you said you. You don't yet have yours figured out, right? So here the thing that the first thing I think is people feel like they need to discover it, they need to go find it. It's nonsense there. You don't need to discover your life purpose. You, or at least not anywhere outside of you. It's something that you actually make up. You make up your life purpose. The only purpose for your life purpose is to inspire you, to motivate you, to fill you with purpose, right? To give you that drive. So if you make it up, if you don't have to go to India or do any other kind of thing to discover your life purpose. If you actually could really just create a it from nothing. All it takes is a little bit of reflection, but it's reflection from a particular place. My favorite exercise for doing this is to stand at the end of your life. Imagine your life having turned out, the ups and downs resolving themselves and the whole thing actually ending well, right? I am inspired and free to consider my funeral. Other people who find that too macabre can consider their retirement party. So. But whichever it is, it's like it's late in life, right? I like to think about my funeral and who's gathered there. You could Also think about that retirement party, who's gathered around. So that's the first thing, you know, imagine the people that matter to you, that you love, the ones you know now and the ones that you have yet to know, right? So I imagine my family and, and their family and, you know, this like, line having continued. And then I imagine my friends and my siblings and, you know, my people that worked with me at different stages for the years. And I imagine this great group and. And then I think, what do I want them to say, right? Because they're going to talk about the best things about me, who I was. And the theme that I wanted to come out is I just wanted them to say that I was a contribution, that I wasn't a taker, that I was a giver. And when I first expressed that, I said, I want them to say that I was a person who led a life that made a difference, that I was someone who made a difference, right? So the purpose of my life became make a difference. And for years that's what I said. And that inspired me. And then I realized that actually wasn't specific enough. So a couple months ago, after many years, I just revived and I've been playing with the revision, but it's fine, whatever form it is. So today what I would say is that my purpose in life is giving everyone access, giving you and me and all of us access to power and freedom in the face of all the shit that life throws at you, that there's nothing that can take you down or out of the game. So you could just make it up, right? And then when it needs to change, you just change it. And it's whatever lights you up. And if you imagine like, like what you'd like said about you, that's a pretty good access to it.

Yeah, that's actually really helpful. And you know, it's funny, I probably have it. It's probably already there. And it's similar in many ways to yours. I just haven't articulated it yet.

So finding your own particular expression of it is okay. It often is some kind of contribution. And if you sort of consider the Maslow's hierarchy, which many of us know, especially in sort of Western business, very popular view. And Maslow studied what was right with people, not so much what was wrong. Sort of the Freudian look at the neuroses. And Maslow said, let's look at people that are, that are doing well and figure out what's right. And like at the apex of the needs was the need to be a contribution to Be fulfilled, to do something that was lasting and. And beyond us. And so after we've, you know, had our exit and put a little money in the bank and we have some security and some toys and things like that, what is it that we really hunger for? And that usually is to. To do something bigger than ourselves. Yeah, so they often sound a lot alike. But. But many people, you know, some people, like, they want to have that show up with children, or they want to have it show up with security, or they want to have it, you know, in different realms.

No. It's interesting. You say, I had the beautiful opportunity. My dad passed away about three years ago, and I was the oldest son, so I gave the eulogy, and we actually had two different services for him, one here in Philadelphia and one at his home in Chicago. And I got to watch literally one after another after another of all the people you just described. And they all said very similar things, and they said things. Things very resonant with what you said was how he touched people and how he was a giver and how he doesn't even know, but he influenced my career this way. And he's the reason I did this, and he's the reason I did that. That actually gave me some opportunity to really think about what. And his passing was relatively sudden. We had four or five weeks to prepare. But to just see how the stream of people lined up to people he hadn't seen in 10 and 20 years, just to come and say, make sure that they express their thoughts was a very moving experience. And I agree. I like the idea of when you can't influence the ink. What does the ink say about you? And what do people. What do they express at that moment? It was fascinating to watch. So amazing experience for me.

So it's a little on the spot. But do you have an inkling of sort of what yours is now after that?

Yeah. So, I mean, my. You know, I believe very fundamentally there's only two kinds of people, givers and takers. And I really believe that you're in one camp or the other, and, you know, you kind of can't be in both at the same time. And I feel like I've lived my life on the giver side of the equation, and I was always about. Another thing I believe strongly in is deliver value with no expectation of return. And so, yeah, I mean, I've worked with, you know, in ancillary ways, but hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs. I told you, I did four years of free consulting, and a lot of it was around, you know these types of things, strategy and employee engagement. And so I, you know, that kind of resonates with me as well. Like I said, I think I probably understand my life's purpose. I just haven't taken the time to clearly.

So here's the thing that makes a difference. I would practice saying it. So you could just try saying right now in an active fashion, look, the purpose of my life is to be a giver or who I am as a giver. And if you just start saying it in that direct way rather than talking about it, it's a much more active way of speaking and you just start telling people, I just realized that this is who I am.

Yeah, no, I like that. That's. Actually, I didn't know that we were going to be doing a, a two way coaching call. That's very cool.

I didn't know it either. But this is a different kind of a show. So I want to point people to remind people about you and where you are. So stscapital.com you can read about him and his work and the company and all that. We'll have you back on to talk about getting the most for your business in a soon to be future show. The two books are by Michael Singer that we referenced, the Untethered Soul and then the other one that gives some, some context for it, the Surrender Experiment. I recently read the Surrender Experiment and Untethered Soul is next on my list. So it's fantastic.

Yeah, so if you're only going to read one, we suggest the Untethered Soul. If you're going to read them both, we suggest the Surrender Experiment first. The Surrender Experiment's a very easy read. The Untethered Soul is a pretty intense, kind of introspective look at yourself. But yeah, so they've been. We've recommended, Vern and I have recommended them to probably hundreds of people now and the feedback's been pretty strong. So we've actually also had the opportunity to, you can visit Michael at the, you know, at his place outside of Gainesville, Florida. And we've taken two groups of entrepreneurs up there. So we've probably had 20 or 25 people in our CEO boot camp visit with Michael and he does a lecture every Tuesday and Monday and third Tuesday and Friday I think so, or Tuesday and Thursday maybe. So we've had, you know, some groups up there and it's been really positive. So.

So if you'd like more information about any of that, if that hits you, reach out to John at STS Capital and you can find him there. And connect with him there. As always. We have shows like this every week and all things around scaling up, developing yourself as a leader, growing your company, growing your team, developing your business. Business. That's the world of scaling up and that's what our show is all about. So I want to thank John for being on the show. Remind our listeners to go to scalingupbusiness.com where you can find all of our shows. You can subscribe to get notices of the show every week. You can also download a free growth guide start to learn how to lead your company through developing your strategy and planning and lead your off sites. And we've got an overview of the scaling up book there, an intro to get started, not the book itself but anyway you can get started with all that and once again we'll see you on the next show. Thanks again John for being on the show with us.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Foreign. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software powered by Align. It's the official software for Scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app, you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Align. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.