Inspire yourself in tough times at EO Alchemy
Bill Gallagher delivers a first-person motivational talk about finding inspiration during crises. He recounts his father's mental-health decline (suicide attempts in 2005, overdose death in April 2008), their reconciliation, and the emotional journey to forgiveness. He also tells the business turnaround of Lori Bond jewelry (he became CEO in 2002; faced a bank-initiated shutdown threat in 2004; rallied his team, renegotiated with suppliers, landed QVC and major sales; then navigated the 2008 recession by radically refocusing design and securing supplier support). He presents a practical reflection framework (What? So what? Now what?) and shares a workshop anecdote about a woman who reconciled with her mother after 30 years and healed her family.
Chapters
Get up here, bud. Hey, everybody. So in the summer of 2005, I got a call from the emergency room that my dad had tried to kill himself. And he was being released and transferred to a psychiatric facility for what they call a 5150 home. It was the first time that I'd ever gotten a call like that. And unfortunately, it would not be the last time. When I was a kid, my dad was just the biggest guy for me. He was my buddy, my dad, you know, he taught me how to surf and to play and to live a life of adventure. He was always encouraging me to go for it, whatever it was. He was just awesome. He was my best friend, my dad. He was an entrepreneur and a professor of linguistics. He spoke about 17 languages passively. He was a best selling author, he was a bestselling author. He was a terrific speaker, and he did so many great things. But then as he got older, he began to have a series of setbacks in his career and his life. He had a number of failed marriages and so on. And I began to distance myself from my dad. How many of you have ever had or watched someone or something have a slow decline in your life and then started to put your distance or ignore it? Thank you. So it got so that I avoided him as much as possible. We kept our things short. I wouldn't help him with his business, I wouldn't help him move. I wouldn't help him with his life changes. I did not leave him alone with the kids, his grandkids. I would not leave at his house. So I, you know, I had not want to dealt with any of the things. When I got that call, I was doing my best to avoid it, but suddenly I had to deal with everything. My dad, you know, I had to arrange for getting him into rehab and then into living situations and, you know, just a whole range of things after that. And, you know, it was not like what was I going to do to find inspiration around any of that. There was nothing there that I wanted to do or deal with. So I searched myself. And the inspiration that I found at first was providing leadership for my family. I would help us to handle that. So we went through all that kind of thing. And one of the next things that came up is after all this, he wanted to live with us. He wanted to move into our guest house behind the. We have a guest house behind our house. And I talked it over with my family and my wife, and it did certainly seem like it would make things easier for him, but I didn't for a second think that it would really change anything. I didn't think that he would not try to kill himself again if he was living in our house or anywhere else, that it was not a fundamental shift in anything. So we said no. And we then began to learn all the kinds of things that were okay with us and the things that weren't. One of the things I had to learn about for the first time was bipolar disorder and what was enabling behavior and what was not and go through that whole process. So we began to set our things with that, and we worked out a kind of uneasy relationship. And I remember a really interesting time came a little while later, and at a really unusual moment. We were by the pool with the kids and the family. My dad was there on a great Sunday afternoon kind of a moment, and I just lost it. I just screamed and yelled and swore at him for everything that he'd done. And I really let him have it, let him know how I feel. But, you know, the interesting thing is, in the next moment of being really honest with him came all of the love and appreciation for who he was, who he'd been in my life, all of the great things. And I made my peace with everything else too. And actually after that time, we started to get closer together. We started to communicate more. You know, all this stuff was still going on, but the love and the affinity and the connection was back between us. It was a really, really great thing. In April of 2008, though, I was awakened at three in the morning by a call from my sister that my dad was gone from an overdose of pain and sleeping medication. But I know that when he went, that he loved us, and he knew that we loved him too. We. This choice of his to go in that way in that time was really just his choice. It didn't have anything to do with this. My dad was not someone who lived by anyone else's rules, and he certainly was not going to die that way. This is a picture of me and my dad. I love him and I miss him, and most of all, I forgive him. I want to tell you now a business story. You've heard the Lori Bond jewelry mentioned and so on. And I'm here today with my wife, Lori Bond. Together we own a jewelry company that she founded some 22 years ago. In 2002, I took over the company as CEO, was really inspired to do it at the time. But two years later, in 2004, the bank came to us and they offered us new terms that would shut us down almost overnight. And I had no idea what to do. I'd been completely inspired a couple years before to take over the company, but now I just felt trapped. And we were going into our slow summer sales season, and it was no time at all to be able to refinance the company. So we talked with them about it. And how many of you have ever felt trapped by your business or some other. It's all too common for an enthusiastic response. So it's, you know, it's an all too common reality. Well, I felt completely trapped. I had no idea what to do. Although I'd been inspired, I now go to a very different place. So I had conversations with them, and here's what they said. They said, look, if you can't refi. If you don't know what to do, then you should just sign over your house and shut down. It'll be better for all, and you can get on with the rest of your life. Fuck that. You know, that wasn't my first reaction. My first reaction was, oh, my God. And all I could see was that if I screwed this up and I lost the house, that my wife would leave me and I would lose my family and my kids. That's what was real for me. Now, these guys, they didn't care about any of that. You know, they were just like, hey, whatever, it's business. So I looked to myself and I thought about all of it, and I realized I really, really did want to quit. I knew how to start a business. I knew how to restart a business. I had no idea how to deal with this, but something about it bugged me. So I searched myself again, and I looked for where I could find inspiration. And I thought about my kids. And what's the lesson that I wanted to teach them about dealing with adversity and challenge in life? And that completely changed everything for me. So I did something that I've never done before. I went to my entire team, all the people around me, and I opened up about a really big, hairy money problem. I went to the team, and I told them everything that we were dealing with. I told them all the things that we had. I told them all the things the bank had said. And I told them I had no idea what to do next. But I gave them a choice. I said, you can quit now, and I will not hold it against you. I will help you find another job. We will get you unemployment. Or you can join me in this fight, And I promise you, I will not quit. They will have to shut it down and lock it up and bring the sheriff in to take it all away from me. So it was really great. Nobody left. Everyone stayed and joined in the struggle. It was an amazing thing. I didn't know what to do. But in opening up with people and sharing with what I was dealing with, things started to happen. I found a way to force a settlement with the bank and the team found a way to change the entire strategy of the company and to sell off old inventory and free up cash. And then we started to land all kinds of new accounts. We got on QVC for the first time. It was an amazing time. I've never been more proud of a team. This is a funny picture of that team. They were celebrating the engagement of this woman who was on our team. Hilarious. Ridiculous. I've never been more proud of a team than myself. We set record profits and record sales. The next year, we landed big new accounts. It was just an amazing thing. I'm going to move forward now four years to 2008. Somebody spoke, Hunter just spoke about the surprise that we all got in 2008. How many of you, you started your company right around 2008? Okay, a few. And how many after 2008? And how many of you have been through or went through this or other serious global economic setbacks? All right, so it's not, you know, this was not a kind of a thing that was unique to us. This was something that was to us as a company, like the bank thing. This was something that was happening to all of us, all over the world. And we make and sell silver premium designer jewelry, and nobody wanted anything like that in 2008. So it didn't take a lot of inspiration to cut costs to slightly things to lay people off to get. That was pure survival. But when a game is up, when a game is really up, you've got to invent a new game to play. So we looked around and we thought about our history. We thought about what was happening in the world. We thought about what mattered to people, what people were buying now. And, you know, before then, we used to do 12 new collections a year, over a thousand new styles. It was design, sell, produce, make, mark down, move out, close out, repeat, two designers, all that stuff again and again. We were completely exhausted by it. But we looked at the things happening in the world and we had some ideas. We now, though, had no money, reduced staff, all kinds of things. So we did some very bold things. We picked a couple of our ideas, and we bet everything on those. And then I went to our suppliers and I said, I have no idea if we're going to survive. I don't know if I can pay you. I don't know if we'll ever pay you. But we will remember if you help us. We will remember if you work with us. I got 90% off some of our biggest fixed costs for a year. I got all of our staff to give us 20% pay cuts and work extra hours. We went to some of our biggest suppliers and we said, hey, you know, we want to start producing new products. And we have no money at all. No money for deposits on production, no money for any of that. And we got massive lines of credit from some of them. So, you know, not everybody said yes to us, but enough did. And then some of the things that we were working on started to hit. Some of the things started to click in. This is where I was with my kids. I was there with the kids. I was on that ski lift in Lake Tahoe with my son when I got this really excited call from my sales team in Atlanta. They were at a trade show. The first time we were at this trade show in Atlanta, and they were calling to tell me that they just broke a million dollars in sales at one show. They were out of their minds. And I started to cry. You know, by now, I cry kind of easily. My son's like, are you okay, dad? You look happy. But I could cry. He's familiar with me now, too. We finished that show five times, a 500% increase of any prior show record that we'd ever done. Unbelievable. We had bestsellers in catalogs and department stores. We started to rock it everywhere we went. And then we went from 40 independent specialty stores to 370 in 18 months. We were completely rocking the whole thing. It was just unbelievable. So I've learned through these events and through other stories like them, a few simple things to restart my own fire, to light myself up when life kicks me in the teeth. And I want to share them with you here because I think they're really easy for everyone to use. And it really matters to me that you all be able to reinspire yourself in a moment. And I know this is the perfect product for that kind of thing. So the first thing that I ask myself is this. What? What has actually just happened? What am I dealing with? How do I feel about everything? What am I afraid of? I forget and embrace the current situation. How many of you avoid looking at things, have avoided answering the phone or opening your bills? Letting it be honest? 1. Yeah. So this first part takes courage in and of itself. Just really Getting all of it. Take it all in. What's just happened? All right, the next thing I ask is this. So what? Now, some of you have seen this kind of progression, what? So what? And you may be familiar with this as a part of some kind of self reflection, but there's another way to ask so what? And that's kind of with a shrug of acceptance, where you let go of everything that you got in what that's like, so what? So you can ask that and say that in that way, when you really get everything and what you get everything that's gone and everything that you're afraid of, all the kinds of things that are running you, that you're worried about, all that. All that stuff that I was worried about my wife and everything. Just take it all in. If you embrace it all and then let it all go. Let it all go. Keep giving it all up, so what? So what? So what's next? So what? They going to kill me? What's going to happen? What if I lose my house? Then what? All right, so you get to a place where you've really taken it all in. You accept it all. You get to a kind of a place of lightness. And that's when you can ask this next question, now what? Once you've really let it all go, when you ask the question, now what? New things start to occur, new ideas and new inspirations will occur for you. I want to leave you now with a story about a woman who was in one of my workshops only about two years ago, and she heard me share my stories and ideas with her. And she realized that day, sitting in that chair, that she didn't have any relationship with her mom. She left the house as a teenager, and she had no contact, no conversation, nothing with her mom in over 30 years. She suddenly saw that that couldn't go on a minute longer. And at the next break, she got on the phone and she called her mom, not her mom. She had no idea where her mom was. She called her extended family to find out what was so about her mom, where her mom was, what the deal was, just to get the story. And it took a lot of courage just to do that. She found out that her mom was very sick. And so she bought an airplane ticket for the next day. The next morning, she got on a plane and she flew to New York. She found her mom in a hospital. Her mom was indeed very, very sick. She sat with her mom that day for a whole day, sitting there with her mom. And she said, I'm sorry. I love you and I forgive you. And although her mom was very sick, she was able to communicate similar messages with nods and hand squeezes and things in return. The love in that family and a big part of that woman was restored that day. She flew home the next day back to her work with a whole part of her life back together. And later that week, her mom died. But forever, that family was healed. That woman, her whole future was made. And I'm so glad to be the kind of person that gets people to do that. So I have an urgent kind of a request for you. Whether you're in a dark moment now in your life, and I've spoken to some of you who are dealing with some pretty big things this weekend, or whether you're simply avoiding something important in your life, like I was, or whether you face some big challenge in the very near future, I urge you to take inspired action. Now, that's a little co. It should be the whole cop take inspired action Now. The only time to take action is now, now, now, now. And then now. It.
