Go Slow to Go Fast with Brian Beutler

Anyway, I'm joined now by Brian. Actually, I didn't ask how you pronounce your last name. Brian Buetler.

Yep, you got it. Perfect. Actually. Really well done. Happy to be here, Bill. Look forward to the conversation today. Awesome.

Brian is the founder and CEO of Alianza. So they're a cloud communication platform for telecom providers. Like if you are a telecom, telecom provider and you're looking for the whole back end, I think that's what they do. And he's dedicated to working on this category and that kind of thing. But he also had another company before getphone that he sold to AT&T Ilustra. And then he's done some interesting things there, partnerships and so on. He's a graduate of university BYU and lives in byu. Loves the outdoors, that kind of thing. We're going to talk about his lessons learned both as a CEO and then also as an active member of the Utah County Sheriff's Office, their search and rescue team. So, Brian, welcome to show.

Yeah, happy to be here. Look forward to it. It should be a lot of fun.

So where did this love of mountaineering? I'm guessing if you start, if you live in Utah, you can't help but love a little mountain.

Yeah, I mean, I guess it started when I was a young kid born here in Utah and geez, I can still remember like learning to ride a bike at probably three or four years old, riding down the street, looking at the sunset over the mountains here in Utah and just being awestruck at how magnificent they are. And they just. Utah is very much unlike every other what I would call urban area in the sense the mountains are so accessible. Like, I don't know of another urban area in the United States where the mountains are literally out your back door. So they kind of tower over the valley. And you see the seasons change by how the mountains look. Right? It's covered in snow during the winter. In the fall, it changes colors. There are reds and oranges and yellows. In the springtime, it's this blast of green. And so you just come to not just kind of orient yourself in the seasons, but I would also like orient myself in my day based on. And where I was kind of oriented in the valley based on how the mountains looked. I can still remember being a, you know, a teenager, young teenager, and visiting my grandparents here in Utah. And for those of you that are familiar with Utah, there's like, along the urban corridor, there's Salt Lake county, which is like, you know, where the state capital is, and University of Utah and Then south of Salt Lake county is Utah county. And about 40 miles south of my grandparents is where I lived. And I remember that I would ride my bike. This is crazy, seems crazy today, but I would ride my bike to my grandpa's house to watch tennis with him. And the own. I didn't know his address. I didn't know where he lived. I had no cell phone. So I would just get on my bike and I would ride and I would know my grandpa's house, location, his address, based on how Mount Olympus looked from my vantage point as I rode my bike. And I just remember knowing, like, how to orient myself based on the mountains. And so there was, like, this early affinity and attachment to the mountains, but then also, like, just great memories and childhood experiences of being in the mountains and kind of just feeling both big and small at the same time, standing on top of a mountain or wading in a river. And just as my life, I think, has gotten more complex over the years, that has been one constant thread that has kind of woven its way through my life is just spending time in the mountains.

I think it's a really interesting thing you point out there, the. The whole importance of early memories and experiences, right? Like, I. I lived in the Midwest for a little bit, but growing up, I lived in Hawaii and San Francisco and Zurich and Jerusalem and. And some. Anyway, some different places. And when I went to the Midwest, I went to Chicago. I'm like, oh, my God, this place is. I'm so uncomfortable here. I, Like, I can't orient myself because I need to see and smell where the ocean is, and I need to be able to see the hills around me. And I live in the hills outside of San Francisco today, and I found myself uncomfortable with it and just like, the way that we are with environments, with people, with all. So many of those things start as early, early memories, right? Like, where we feel good, where we feel safe, the kind of people we feel we can play with, right?

Like, I love this notion of, like, early childhood memories really imprinting on us and making an outsized impact. I remember a handful of years ago, I returned to Texas, where I spent a lot of my youth growing up. And I had a business meeting in College Station. And after that meeting, it was only about 35 or 40 minutes from the little town I grew up in called Huntsville. And I hadn't been back in, well, probably close to 20 years since I'd been back to this town that I grew up in. And we grew up on a little dirt road outside of the city Past the fairgrounds kind of. And then you drive onto this dirt road out to this little house. And so that's where I went. So I was just kind of naturally drawn there. So I decided I want to go back and I want to see the house I grew up in. So I drove this rental car parked on the road and opened the door. Immediately was flooded by sights, sounds and smells. Right. And the sounds, I could hear the mockingbirds and the cardinals for two birds that we don't have in Utah at all. So I hadn't heard these sounds in ages and heard the cicadas, which we don't have in Utah. And I could, you could just smell the piney woods of Texas. Something I don't get here. And I was immediately drawn back to 10 year old Brian. And I just think that's so cool how like you said, like these early memories really do imprint on us. And you can go 20 years and, and think those memories have been forgotten or dormant and all it takes is a smell or a sound and boom, we're back.

Yes, you're back. You're reminded of things. Smells are particularly strong. The sounds, the sights, all of these things. I think smells are really strong. Like the smell of the ocean. I feel really good. Like, and I, I, when I'm in town in the Bay Area, I'm. I do a thing called wing foil surfing. And so when I get in the water, I'm like, and I fall. The first time I get a little of that seawater in my mouth, I'm like, oh, I'm at home. Like, I feel good. This is right in the world. Like it's cold water here, but it's fine. Like it's fine.

So great. Love it.

It's salty and, and I feel like, oh, it's good there. Like, you know the feeling of all of that. And I think the interesting thing, you're going to talk about tempo and our patterns and that kind of thing, but the way we interact with people in the world, all of those patterns start very early on in life. And then we, we like, we develop strengths from them. They can also be limiting in some ways, especially if you haven't taken the time to do the self awareness work. Like you can end up with some in some traps.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, so let's talk about this. What, so you don't. Do you still actively hike? Are you up in the mountains?

Absolutely. Every week I'm in the mountains in some form or fashion. Right. Whether it's recreating solo mountain biking with my Kids, my family, my wife, or doing mountain rescue as part of, like you said, the Utah County Search and Search and Rescue team. I have six kids that range in ages from 7 years old to 17.

To 17. Yeah, that's a big range. Those are profoundly different life stages, 7 and 17.

As we are acutely learning as the older ones age now into teen years, we're realizing how different it is from where we've been.

Yeah, that's a, that's a whole thing. It's interesting to me to look back on it now. I'm a grandpa today. My kids are in their 20s and definitely. But you, you can remember like. Oh, you know, I. Oh yeah, you were like that now. And now seeing the little one grow up, you, you're reminded of the. Oh yeah, I remember when you were like this and you were like that and she was like him and like that.

Yeah, totally.

So talk to us about, then share about this mountain rescue thing because I think it's at the core of the lessons that you've learned there that you've applied as CEO in with your companies. So share about that.

Yeah, so I'll give like a little bit of background. So grew up with this love of the mountains and kind of, I think I felt slowly over time as life got more complex as I grew into adulthood, got married, had a family, did a startup, did kind of a big pivot on that startup and started to scale the company, as a lot of us do, we push things we want to do down as the obligations on what we need to do pick up steam. And I felt I got to this point in my life where so much of my life was looking at what was going on at work, what was going on in my home. And I'd kind of lost touch with some of my passions and loves in life and wanted to find a way to get back in touch with the mountains, but not just in a way that was self serving. I also felt this desire to like connect with my community, to give back to my community, to show up to help when people needed it. And kind of through a series of different events, got drawn into this mountain rescue and search and rescue team. And Utah County Search and rescue I think is a really unique search and rescue team because the topography is so varied. I mean we have a massive freshwater lake, Utah Lake, we have, you know, 11 12,000 foot foot high mountain peaks, we have whitewater rivers, we have deserts and kind of everything in between. So we get everything from kind of avalanche rescue work, what we call flat water, still water rescue. Swift Water Rescue. And then we have a lot of what we do we call steep angle mountain rescue, which is like you're roped up in harnesses, you're on the side of a cliff, you're in, you know, very high stress situations. And it's one of the things that both drew me to Search and rescue and also overwhelms me on being a part of Search and rescue because really high stakes. And in many cases, helping people that are having the worst day of their life. And so to be able to show up spontaneously with another group of volunteers, that has nothing to gain from being a part of this team other than just helping their community. And helping a stranger is something that has really been super fulfilling for me. And so. And I didn't. I. It's really interesting, Bill. Like, probably, like a lot of, I'll call it, like charitable community oriented endeavors. We may start those endeavors wanting to give back to a community. And we end up getting back more than we ever anticipated. Being a part of Search and rescue has taught me lessons, has brought me perspective. I think has made me a better husband, a better father, a better CEO, a better member of my community, and I think has helped me gain humility like you talked about, like, in a way that makes me show up at work with the greater realization of. On the best days I have at Alianza, I probably walk away from those saying, hey, it's probably not as good as it seems. And on the worst days I have at work, I can walk away going, it's probably not as bad as it seems, right? There's everything gets measured a little bit by the ups and downs that you experience. And boy, on search and Rescue, do we experience a lot of those ups and downs.

You know, that's a good reminder. There's lots of ups and downs in life, right? And your business, ups and downs coming up short. Having a failure, having a collapse of a business or a failure of some initiative or that kind of thing can feel significant, can be. Can be humbling, can be demoralizing, can be embarrassing, right. And can be scary in terms of their implications. But life and death, kinds of things like dealing and worrying about your children, going through emergencies, seeing people right on the edge of life, being in combat, all these things are much, much more troublesome. It's useful to remember who you are, how you react in the face of those things. When you have a banker, you know, try to shut you down or.

Absolutely. I can still remember early on in my career, I'm probably going back 10 or 12 years. I remember it was the week of Christmas, and here I am with my young family. Probably at the time, we had four children, and we were taking them downtown Salt Lake City to see the lights. And our plan was to ride the local tracks train from Utah county to Salt Lake. Because you got young kids, you got to ride the train at Christmas time. Right. It's like, it's awesome, super fun. And I remember I'm there with my wife and some other family members, and we're kind of making this trek. And here I am on the train platform getting told by prospective customer that we had gotten all the way like it was. This would have been a big, kind of monumental deal for the company. Would have changed the trajectory of kind of the early growth path we were on. And we'd gotten all the way. We had a contract fully negotiated. We were ready to sign. And I got a phone call, which I was expecting to be kind of a celebratory phone call, that we got it done. And he informed me, we've made a different decision. We're going in a different direction. We're not going to be able to sign this after all. And I remember as a young founder.

Drama moment like that could be unlike rushing, absolutely crushing. What's the one about the generations and the billions and the like? There's a. There's a few of that that.

Any. Any of us, yeah, we put blood, sweat, and tears. I mean, it's like anything else in life that we invest in. We attach emotionally. Like it's just part of the process. Right. And I remember being so crushed, just completely demoralized. And I think one of the things that maturity, time in the saddle, and life experiences, including what I've experienced on search and rescue gives, is just a perspective, like I said, that things are never quite as good as they seem, and even on your worst days, never quite as bad as it seems.

Yeah.

One of the big, big lessons of life that I've learned is continual, sustained effort and progress in the right direction applied over long periods of time yield amazing results. And so often we get caught up in kind of the, I'll say, like, the instant kind of gratification. I need it here, I need it now mentality, whether that's in business or in relationships or really so many different areas of life. But what we have to remember is, like, play the long game. Like, if you play the long game, you keep showing up and you make sound decisions, you work hard, you work smart, and maybe you get some luck along the way. Good things happen. But I love the old adage of the harder I work, the luckier I get. And I also like the adage of the 10,000 hour rule. And I see this a lot in young entrepreneurs now because I still mentor young entrepreneurs, like to lecture at the university still, and go back and rub shoulders with folks that, that look like me, you know, 15, 20 years ago. And I'm just constantly reminded about patience and how in entrepreneurial ventures, patience is a virtue, like, just like it is in life and not expecting immediate results, but kind of paying our dues. Learning is so important. And so often entrepreneurs will get frustrated. You know, they'll have a, they'll miss the financials, the market around them will change, they'll do a down round. And that demoralization caused them to like, tap out, where it's just like, oh, just keep with it, just hang with it. Because the longer you stay in any one industry, the more expert you become. I don't remember who said it, but there's a quote that says success is largely a matter of hanging on until everybody else Lets go. Yes.

100. 100. Jillian present. Although sometimes what you're like, you put in your 10,000 hours and sometimes you get good at something you didn't expect to get good at. Sometimes you don't become the best at the world at the thing you intended to do, but something else entirely. And you have to be able to sort of have a wider perspective and notice what's going on. Because I've put in time at things and then ended up in a different place than I expected to be.

Yeah, that's life, right? Sometimes it takes us down these twists and turns we don't expect, but you roll with it, you make the best of it. You constantly try to look on the bright side and good things happen.

Is there a rescue or a training mission that really stands out for you that you'd like to share about?

I guess there's a story that I'd love to share which is kind of almost coming up on two years ago, maybe like 2021, 22 months ago. It was November of 2022, and I got a call out on an afternoon to go help with a plane crash in the mountains just east of us. So it's one of those, like, I can look out my window and I can see where the plane crash was. But it is an hour drive over rough roads. It's a, you know, fairly technical descent down to the crash site. And I'd had a senior executive that had just flown into town for an interview or kind of a later stage interview, job interview. And I just thought to myself, you know, this is. They tell us on search and rescue, like, hey, we, we have enough team members to account for. You know, it's not like you're on call and you're expected to show up to everyone. So I passed on that call, turned it over to the team, and they went up and ended up doing a recovery of two bodies and a rescue of one. So they ended up helping and finding one survivor and getting them out and probably saving his life. And that evening, as I was just catching up with some of my team members as to what had happened, the sheriff's office put out a page and said, hey, tomorrow the National Transportation Safety Administration is going to come in and they're going to do an assessment of the plane crash. Do we have some. We'd love six or eight volunteers to help escort them in, set a rappel line to get down into the crash site and make sure they can do their job and then get out safely. So I kind of raised my hand and said, hey, I'd love to come along. And had never been able to witness that type of analysis before. Kind of an expert that understands aviation, aviation mechanics and aircraft dynamics in a sense that they can come in and recreate what had happened. And so as we got these boat, we met up with the investigators, we repelled them down into this area, set rope lines, helped kind of walk down and get to the, the crash site. And I asked if I could just kind of be a fly on the wall and just listen if I wouldn't be too intrusive if I kind of just listened to, as they kind of did their work. And it was really interesting, Bill. There was two of them whose job was to assess the aircraft itself, to rule out any sort of mechanical failure. Right. So they're, they're opening the fuel tank, testing the fuel, testing the fuel in the carburetor, see if there's any water or other contamination that would have caused the plane to go down. They're looking at the ailerons and the rudders and they're testing all the lines, they're examining the engine block and, you know, three or four hours worth of tests on this plane to see if it was mechanical failure. And then you have the other two that are, you know, 400 yards upslope on the mountain looking for clues of what had happened. Right. So they're kind of over overlaying information that they had got from weather, airspeed, but also radar to see the path that the plane had taken. And at the end of this, they're kind of, I mean, they've got iPads out there looking at every tree branch that had been clipped, you know, 100, 200 yards up mountain. They're looking at little. Every little debris of the plane on the ground, flagging it, GPS marking it, putting it into a system on their iPad. And I, and I remember just like, like, I love watching people who have mastered their craft that are just really good at what they do, no matter what it is, right? And it's. This, to me was like an opportunity to watch, like, some people that were really, really good at their jobs. I mean, the, the lead investigator had been at his job for over 35 years, right? He had done this like, old grizzly investigator. And I remember as we were kind of getting back out of the canyon and back up to the four by fours that were waiting to take them back to the airport, I just in, during one of these, like, pauses where we're all kind of catching our breath, I said, hey, so how long does it take to go back and analyze the data and look at everything and determine kind of what happened here? And he said, oh, we already know what happened, Brian. Like, now it's just, it's formalities and reports and, you know, we got to go do the kind of grunt work now, but we already know exactly what happened. And I said, oh, I'm all ears. Like, explain to me. I'm super curious. And he said this. You know, we're kind of piecing together all the information. And essentially what had happened is these guys made a series of wrong choices that got them into a box canyon with a headwind. And as the headwind was coming at them, there's really great lift over the wings, right, because the wind coming at you. But they got to the end of this box cannon and realized they didn't have enough elevation to clear the. The mountain pass on either side. So he decided, let's do a U turn, head back down canyon and ride it out. Well, the problem was as soon as they went to turn, the aircraft, instead of the wind coming over their wings is now coming across the wings. You got what they call wind shears. Like, it really would have started to shake. They would have made the complete U turn around, but now they would have lost all their lift. And he's like. And in that moment, the pilot had a decision to make. The pilot could, number one, lean into that situation and the fear. And he called it, what's called getting light in your seat. Because you're literally gonna grab, you know, your elevators and push down, down as hard as you can. Because even though you're descending and you're losing lift, the only way to get it back is airspeed over your wings. So you actually go into a nose dive. Well, that's really scary because now you see the ground coming at you. But he's like, but this is what you have to. You have to overcome your fear and lean into the situation. And he would have gotten wind speed back over his wings, and he would have been able to pull out and just essentially coast down canyon. But he's like. But he didn't in those moments. And there was like. He's like. We analyzed the flight recorder three different instances. They would have heard the stall warning. And every time, the stall warning, instead of, you know, going down mount, decreasing elevation, increasing speed, the pilot pulled up because he got scared. He didn't like seeing the mount come at him. And so he would pull up, wind speed, would halt the plane, would stall, lose elevation, and on the third time, they crashed into the side of the mountain. And as I drove home that night, I just remember thinking about that situation and about how so often in life, when confronted with our fears, with scary situations, the things that don't go like we hope they're going to go, we run from those, we avoid those situations where the real learning takes place and the real success takes place. And sometimes the survival takes place is when we lean into the fear, we lean into the difficult. We really embrace it as part of the journey. And sometimes it's necessary for survival, sometimes it's necessary for learning. But that was one of those instances that brought me back to, I would say, grounded me in some of the challenges that I was going through and realizing I. I shouldn't run from these. I gotta lean into them, even appreciate them for what they are. And the journey that I'm on, it's interesting.

I saw. I'm a pilot not with a huge amount of hours, and I've done a little bit of mountain flying and mountain flying training, and I'm certainly well aware of the dangers of a box canyon and the relative wind coming down the hill and things like that. But. And I think there's something interesting, like you have instincts and inputs that are sometimes all what you expect, and then the situation flips a little bit and they're reversed. And, you know, if your big fear is looking at the ground, as a pilot, you want to see horizon, not ground. Unless you're planning to land, then, like, avoiding that is really hard. But the only thing that matters in flying a plane is airspeed, Right? And if you don't have airsp, there's too much. There's too little and too much. The airplane breaks. And most of the time you don't have to worry about that. But too little is a real problem, especially if you're close to the ground and you can. And. And then, of course, to recover from a spin or a stall, you've got to push in and. And look down and then embrace that before you pull back. And. Yeah. Like.

Yeah.

You can just imagine the terror of that. Their last moments as they're trying to get out of a thing and. And there's. It's a happy day and they're going along, and then all of a sudden, shit gets weird and.

Yeah. Yeah. And Bill, think about, like. Like, for me, the lessons learned in this. When I have a hard day at work, I can either run towards the fire or I can turn and run away from it. When I have a really tough experience with my teenage son, I can avoid and go focus on other things in life that are more interesting, or I can go lean into that and I can learn from it. I can listen, I can try again. There's just so many applications for this that have been. Become real for me about not avoiding the difficult things in life, not avoiding my. Not staying away from my own fears even, but, like, run towards those fears and as an opportunity to learn and grow and be better.

Yeah. You know, I think that you may notice about yourself that when something goes boom, you in. In any sense, like real or. Or like conceptually, when things blow up, do you run to it or do you run away from it? Right. And there. There's some people in there. You're just wired to go to it, to investigate, to put in. Some people just want to run to get close enough to see it. I think that's not the same thing as running to interact, to help and that kind of thing. And if you are that person, that's a good. Like, not everybody in your team is that right? Like, and sometimes they need someone to follow into this idea of going slow and going fast. How does that show up? Is there a particular episode or part of your training or an event where you saw this going slow and going fast in the rescue?

Yeah. I love this mantra on the team that I learned really early on. They say us. They tell us on the team. They say slow is smooth and smooth is fast. And I remember, like, one of my first rescue missions, I got On I was in a Canyon in Alpine, 15 miles north of where I'm looking out my window right now, place called Horsetail Falls. And there was a gentleman that was lost. It's dark, it's cold, it's a really treacherous canyon. And I remember there was a, you know, five or six of our teams all spread out looking for this individual. This individual had called 911 and asked for help, and then their phone had died, and so there's no more contact, so we didn't know exactly where we're going. And in these canyons, sometimes you can't get a really good GPS read on where they're located. But I remember it's. It's dark, it's cold, it's rainy, the rocks are slippery. And through the darkness, I spot this guy on the other side of a gorge. And as a young, you know, newbie team member, I got really excited and I said, I'm gonna go find. I'm gonna go get down to this guy and I'm gonna see if he's okay. And what did I do? I started just heading straight down the side of this ravine. And I remember one of the more experienced team members that I was with just over the radio was like, brian, take it easy. Slow down. And at first I was like, what's he telling me to slow down for? Like, we don't know the condition of this guy. We don't know how he's doing. Speed, time is of the essence, and he's just like, no, no, slow down. Like, you making it there 30 seconds faster is not going to change the situation. You having a fall, something happening to you, and now we have two rescues on our hand. Change the entire dynamic of this mission. And that has been a mantra that, like, has stuck with me on the sides of mountains or snow fields or. Or lakes, which is just. Sometimes we get in these moments where the adrenaline's hitting us, things are really exciting, either going really well or going really bad. But going fast is when we make mistakes in life. And sometimes what we need is just to take a big, deep breath, to slow down, to relook at our rope system, our repel structure, relook at our GPS and our compass, reorient ourselves, make sure we're on track. Because you can go as fast as you want. If you're not on the right path, it's not going to get you where you want to go. Right slow, reorient. And it's something that I think, like, you know, bringing it back to, like, business and entrepreneur. The Entrepreneurial journey. It's really caused us to, I think, well, let me put it different. It's caused me to double down on planning and alignment with my team as a prerequisite to execution of great results. Like it used to think, like, hey, just go fast and make a lot of micro adjustments along the way. And I think especially, like, the more mature the company gets, the more mature our team is realizing that, hey, slowing down, making sure I'm aligned with the people around me, making sure we're all headed in the right direction, and then freeing people up to go and execute independently, as has been a really big part of, I think, the journey that we've been on over the last three or four years and really helping us take our company to the next level.

As far as execution, I think it's really powerful. Again and again, we. You probably notice in some little place or somewhere that you went a little too fast and you got ahead of yourself. You got out over your skis or you got. And. And now you are out of balance. But. But sometimes it's too late, right? You're up a box canyon. I did a minor thing the other day that just reminded me out wing foil surfing, I was a little bit behind schedule. I wanted to get a little session in and then get back to the family because I had the family coming over, the son and granddaughter coming over. And so I'm in a hurry, right? And I go out and I forgot to change out my sunglasses. So I'm wearing my expensive prescription sunglasses, the ones I don't want to lose, not the ones that I wear under my helmet when I'm surfing. And then I put my helmet on, but I didn't buckle it. And so then I get out and I start going along and then the first time I fall, and you know, you fall a fair amount depending on the day, and then whatever. So I fall and I go back and the helmet flies off because it's not strapped on. And the glasses go off and they go off in different directions. And I'm like, wait, which I reached for. And I reached for the. I sort of grabbed at the helmet with one hand and I reached for the glass of the other, but. But they weren't on the leash like my, like my ones that I take in the water are. And down they went. And then I'm like, oh, I lost them. That's awful. I didn't realize that they were the good ones until I got into shore and I. I went in to sort myself out and I'm like, oh, no, those are the good ones. The crappy ones with the strap are still here.

Yeah, we all do this, right? Every one of us has done this in so many different instances in life.

I did. I was on a lake, very similar thing, also foiling, but this time I was on an electric foil on a lake with no wind. And so, and I've kind of got, I've finished my work. I've got a little time to get a little session in before we meet some friends for dinner. And so I put my board together and I strap my thing on and I, I put the, the mast in and I put the battery underneath. And then I, I throw the board in. But in my haste I hadn't screwed in the mast. I just slotted it in.

Yeah, and.

And then I threw it over and, and the mast and the motor and the whole thing, you know, it's like a two thousand dollar part just fell off. And I, for a while I didn't realize it had fallen off. It, it fell off, it went down to the bottom of the lake and I can't figure out how to get. And like got the remote's not working. This thing won't go.

What's the deal?

So then eventually I'm like, let me turn it over and see what's up. And I flip the board over. Like there's nothing here. Like, there's no mask, motor, no coil.

Oh man.

And I was like, oh, now the, the really worst part is I just sold the thing. Oh no. And sold it used. And I'm like, I want to get one or two more rides off it before.

Yeah, yeah.

The great thing is that sometimes they're not fatal. Right. Sometimes these accidents, like you take off in a plane without some problem, you could have a fatal mistake if you play things wrong. In this case, I actually had a friend who's a technical diver and I called him up, I'm like, hey, could you come over and do a little search and recovery practice underwater here? And he came over the next morning and he found the thing fairly quickly.

That's awesome.

So I gave him.

Must be clear water. Good. Looking good. Good lake.

Oh, no, no, he couldn't see hardly at all. He was shuffling along.

Really?

Yeah, he couldn't see. He, he marked off his area, went back and forth and he shuffled around. He found it and so I gave him nice bottle of wine for that.

Heck yeah. That's awesome. Good friend.

Good friend. You know, it's interesting, in some of our coaching, I've coached a number of former special operators, some Navy SEALs and that kind of thing, who are pretty entre by nature, and they talk a lot about this going slow and going fast. Like, there are moments most of the time where they really want to go slow. Slow and quiet, like, deliberate. Lots of training, lots of practice, lots of planning and thinking and that kind of thing. Because then there's moments where things speed up and they then are forced to move with velocity and violence. And in those moments, like, they go badly if they hadn't done all the other stuff, if they weren't slow until they absolutely had to, like, pick up the page. Right.

Yeah. This is why, like, search and rescue, like, we have two trainings a month where we're practicing all this stuff. So. And the reason why you train and you practice repetitive stuff that you've learned a hundred times and you've practiced in the field dozens of times, is so that in those moments when speed is an imperative, that there's some muscle memory built up. And there's another part of this, like, you talk about, like, you know the saying that says, like, if you want to go fast, go alone, do you want to go far, go together. When you have a group of people around you, there are checks and balances that develop and people that have natural strengths and abilities that in a moment where you're moving fast on your own, you can have somebody else check you and say, hey, slow down. That knot, it's not tied off the right way. That anchor isn't properly set. And I think, you know, just, it's. It's. The beauty of having. Surrounding yourself with great people is one of the keys to success in life. Personal life, family life, business life, entrepreneurial journey, life satisfaction, you name it. Like, surround yourself with great people and you'll go far. Yeah.

This idea of working with your teams, well, checking each other, taking advantage of multiple perspectives in any given moment, I think is really useful as a leader. We go and we execute things that are significant and have long ramifications. And if we're all trying to be it like a solo act, there's all opportunity for miscalculation, forgetting one little thing. Right. And whether you're a pilot or a surgeon or a CEO.

Yeah.

You know, some of those things are more life and death, but it can feel kind of life and death when your company fails.

Yeah. And Bill, I mean, this starts, I think, like, for me in business at the board level, like with your investors, like, making sure that you kind of check your egos before you come into board meeting in a way that best idea wins, not whose idea wins, and letting that perpetuate throughout the organization in a way that we can challenge one another, we can check one another, we can ask for clarification in a way that doesn't come across as threatening, but comes across as collaborative and making sure that we've kind of checked all the boxes, covered all our bases. And it's, boy, it's a healthy practice and it's one that as a founder and CEO that's I think, been in the saddle for a bit longer even than maybe I thought I would be when I started this journey at Alianza. But it's one of the great lessons learned, which is like acknowledge the contribution and the perspectives that people around you bring that are very different from you. Because we all have blind spots, we all have just because of our own background, our own life experiences, things that we're not going to see as readily as others who have just had different experiences in life. This is the beauty of building a diverse team, right? You want diversity of ideas and thoughts and experiences and perspectives so that when you make those decisions, you're not making them myopically from a single viewpoint, but you're taking into account multiple perspectives to try to let truth and the best decision kind of percolate to the surface. I often tell my team, I said, hey, this turbulence that you're feeling, maybe even this contention that you're feeling, this is good. Because when you feel this turbulence, the best ideas have a way of rising to the surface and the mistaken ideas and the wrong headed ideas have a way of kind of falling out in that process. But we kind of got to shake the gold pan a little bit before that sifting takes place.

I think I'd like, in a second I'm going to have you talk a little bit about GetPhone and the experience there. But before we do that, I think I want to underscore something you said there that I think is so powerful. You talked about the power and value of diversity there. And I was working with a room full of CEOs some years ago and I had this guy get on a fairly stereotypical mainstream kind of thought about diversity and he had a whole rant about we can't have diversity around here. That's just a bunch of BS and why don't we just have the best? And I'm like, I think you're missing the point that diversity is actually stronger, it's more resilient. If you were to think about like an ideal, like best, and then you have everything the same, then A single virus or a kind of a failure or a whatever will stick out that same everything. It's diversity that makes us stronger and more resilient in the face of infinite challenges in the universe, right? It's not, that's not some set aside or handout for people. It actually makes us better to have different kinds of people from different backgrounds with different strengths, different, different life experiences. Have your team, your board, your leadership represent a greater range. Not a bunch of guys who look like you and I, right?

You don't want a bunch of yes men, right? My wife is a flower farmer. She, she's the founder and CEO of a little urban flower farm. And one of the reasons why she plants hundreds of different varieties of flowers, even though they might not be all the best sellers and the best return on investments because in the year when there is powdery mildew or really bad grasshopper infestation, or leaf hoppers, or different insects, pests, viruses, molds, you name it, the diversity in the flower farm creates strength at the flower farm and you're not going to get something catastrophic that moves through the whole ecosystem. I think it's really similar in business and I guess I got a couple thoughts on this that come to mind, which is just, I think so often we think about diversity as being the color of skin of the people on the leadership team, the gender, the orientation, religious and maybe even professional background. I look at diversity as starting with culture and this idea of psychological safety that you create as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, that lets a diversity of ideas perpetuate with inside your company. I would argue you can have diversity on any of those factors I just talked about, but lack diversity and ideas or free form feedback that enables best decision making. And on the flip side, you can have a company that maybe lacks diversity in some of those other areas, but has very open dialogues where ideas are challenged, where people feel safe to take chances, where people aren't demoralized with failure, but look at it as an opportunity to learn. And that's a cultural types of diversity that exists on top of those and around those other types of diversity, that is really what I think what we're after is business leaders and I think sometimes like we can, you know, try to substitute or proxy for culture by just having diversity in, like I said, in race or sexual orientation, religion, you name it. But if the culture of the company doesn't allow for psychological safety, those differences of backgrounds and thoughts and ideas and perspectives never get a chance to take root and grow.

Yeah, yeah, interesting. So talk to us about GetPhone. You grew that company, you sold it off to AT&T. You had to go through some things to keep it funded and growing before you did it. And now you have a telecom related company. Share with us a little bit about that before we run out of time here.

Yeah, so I started this company in, at byu. I was a senior in college and you know the, the fastest, shortest degree at BYU to graduate was history. So that was the degree I chose because I wanted to get out of, out of college as fast as I could and. But I wasn't like deluded into thinking that I could provide a great living for myself and my family with a history degree. That was, that's really tough. And so I decided to take a couple classes in the business department. And one of the classes I took was an entrepreneurial lecture series where every week a different entrepreneur would come in and tell their story. Right? All the way from ideation to like growth and product market fit and scaling and eventually like exit and harvest. And it was an awesome experience. I absolutely loved it. So much so that the next semester I decided I'm going to take it again and just audit this class because even if I don't get credit for it, the stories are just so, so inspiring and so interesting. And as part of that class I had the opportunity to enter a business plan competition. And I had this idea for it was really early days of voiceover IP where voice calls, telephone calls were coming off of the copper analog networks and onto Internet connections. And so I wrote a business plan all around deploying those types of services for multinational corporations. And I was the only out of 64 teams, I was the only non MBA sponsored. I didn't have, there was just, it was just me. I was the only BYU student on this team. I wrote the business plan by myself and entered it in and somehow ended up winning the entire business plan competition. And the idea was what spawned GetPhone and GetPhone was essentially helping large enterprises take their voice communications and move it onto Internet connections and off of their legacy copper infrastructure. And so we had four or five years of really strong growth in that company. It was a really exciting time for me as like a young entrepreneur that didn't have much experience and yet there was flaws in that business plan. There was challenges inherent to kind of running a business through the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 and big funding challenges and things. There are challenges we went through that informed how we operate the company today with a sense of frugality, a sense of patience. For things to develop around us. But when we went through one of those kind of big learning experiences, we ended up realizing that there was some flaws in our business plan that weren't going to allow us to scale how we wanted to. So we kind of determined, hey, we got to, we got to partner with somebody else that understands this business and our strategy and that can help take us to the next level. And so in some deep conversations with AT&T, they decided, hey, instead of just partnering, we'd like to own this technology. But they came back to us and they said, hey, like, we, we're going to move this customer base that we just bought from you. We're going to move it to another competitive platform that we've already purchased that we have in house. But they came back to us and said, hey, would you mind operating the platform for us for a few months while we execute this migration? And we said, well, of course we would. That sounds great. They're going to pay us for it. Like, we're trying to transition to what's next. Sure. And a couple months later, they came back to us and said, hey, how about we extend that operating agreement? We have prioritization issues internally. This is going to take us longer than we think. Long story short, three months turned into five years, and they became an anchor customer on what Alianza is today and really helped transform the platform. And so we kind of went from, hey, like, we think this was an interesting business endeavor, moderate success, kind of fire, sold to AT&T at the bottom of the Great Recession, to a company that now, like the ideas that sprang out of that difficulty, really established Allianza's strategy today. And what we are, and it's, you know, fueled the last 15 plus years worth of growth at Alliance. So one of those great situations where you kind of take your hardships, take your lumps and your challenges and your, you know, all the fires that you have to kind of survive through and use it to fuel what's next for you.

It's interesting. I think there's a lot of times that. So I hear flexibility and I hear also, like, is it really a disaster or not? Like you, we have these setbacks, these things, and they feel, you know, your company fails, but then you start another company or you, a relationship ends, but then you start the one that lasts. Like, there are these things that we go through that in the moment, they can feel like a failure or setback, but then in the long arc of our lives and our times and our careers, they turn out to actually be Pretty cool. They led to something interesting.

I just love it. I think it's such a truth. Right in the moment, things are going to feel worse than they really are and better than they really are.

Yeah.

Part of our job as leaders is to have a steady hand at the helm, to guide our teams through both the good times and the bad times. To, yes, to celebrate when things are going well, but when they're not. To exhibit grit, determination, positivity and optimism that we'll get through this. But if we once again, if we just keep putting one foot in front of another for long enough periods of time, we'll get at where we want to go.

What is the lesson or the opportunity of this moment? In that moment, in that moment, like in each moment, what's the lesson of the opportunity right now? What are you going to do with it? The only thing that doesn't make a lot of sense is quitting like everything else is interesting. If you want to know more about Brian's company, Alianza, it's Alianza.com we'll put the link in the show notes and we'll put it on the screen there for you. Reminders to everyone if you want to find out about our work in helping companies grow and scale, how we make it easier and faster. And if you like more fun to grow and scale your company, you'll find us at scalingcoach.com, you'll find all our back catalog of episodes and more. We do a workshop every month where we get you started in seeing how to use the tools and how to shift your mindset around scaling, growing the company. And then of course we have various coaching programs and things like that. So all that and more@scalingcoach.com and so Big Shout out and thanks to my friend and mentor, Vern Harnish who created the whole scaling up framework or the Rockefeller habits that came before it that we rely on and then to the folks at store on who get our show ready, produced, in and out every week and out the door. One of my greatest pleasures is having conversations like this with people like you. So thanks again for watching, for listening. Until next time, keep scaling.