Rewrite Your Script | 34 Strong Co-founder, Darren Virassammy (Podcast 207)

Take the time to sit with yourself and dig into what are your core drivers, what are your core values? What is the script that you're following? Is it your script or is it somebody else's script? The 2122 year old script of me went through college, I got a good job, I was getting a good solid income, I was climbing the corporate ladder. Whose script was I followed? I had never really thought that I had the power to write my own script.

Our guest today is 34strong's co founder and COO, Darren Burasami. As the co founder of 34strong, TEDx speaker and someone who's obsessed with seeking personal greatness through connection with nature, Darren is uniquely positioned to help those in corporate America and individuals reach the potential they desire. Darren works hard on his own personal development through his hobbies, passions and personal life. As a father, husband, avid basist and black belt, he believes downtime is just as important as work time. And amazingly, this is actually the very first in person live podcast interview I've done and Darren and I are sitting in Barbados doing this interview. So Darren, welcome to the Second of Command podcast.

Thank you so much, Cameron. It's great to be here.

Tell me a little bit more about first off what 34 strong is and how you got involved in that and then I'm going to kind of go back into your career a little bit and we'll go from there.

Yeah. So 34 strong, what we do is we focus on creating great places to work just across the United States. Predominantly we work through creating strengths based organizations. For those of you that are familiar with the Clifton Strengths Finder Assessment, it's one of the tools that we use as a starting point. But we get into creating organizations that focus on what's right with people, strengths based, focused, and then also how to create cultures of engagement where employees are actually engaged in what they're doing and having actually sustained that for the long term. So the other question that you asked was about my journey into the 34th strong. Well, I think the fascinating part about that, Cameron, is my journey was born from being actively disengaged in work. Like I was in a position where I felt the pain of being an employee that had checked out. It was fascinating in right around the time my daughter was born. My daughter was born in 2012 and that December, my wife, my daughter and I took our first family trip together, just the three of us. My dad was four months old and we went to the big island of Hawaii. And one morning she was laying in my lap after we took a walk, I just took a sip of coffee and then she laughed out loud for the first time. That was one of the most amazing and terrifying experiences of my life. And the reason it was amazing was obviously because, well, she was laughing out loud for the first time, which was truly epic. I'm, I'm like, that's so cool. She's got all this potential, she's going to do all these things. It was terrifying, Cameron, because in that moment I realized this girl has all this potential. I started thinking, she's going to walk, she's going to talk, she's got to play soccer, she's going to do all these things. And then I had to look in the mirror and say, what happened to my potential? What am I doing? I'm living a life. And here I am with the two most important people in my life, my wife and my daughter. And yet I was commuting 100 miles one way to my job.

Wow.

Four days a week I'd be leaving at 5, 5:30 in the morning, getting home at night and she's just getting down from bed and I'm like, this is no way to live. And it was fascinating because I think this actually happens to a lot of people. I had gotten really good at something I really didn't like. I was a senior project manager for a commercial construction company in the Bay Area in California. And I had promoted, I had moved up through the ranks, but I did not love the work that I was doing. It was not engaging at all. And I was actually starting to disengage in that role. And at this, this, I came back from that trip and I knew something had to change. I was teaching at a local college in the Sacramento region at that time. Just one class, just basics of business to just introductory college students. I really have come to believe in divine timing more and more. But what happened? I came back from that trip, Cameron and the college told me, look, we have a lot more classes you could teach. We've had some transitions. You can come on board as a full time instructor and, and we'll pay you about 40% of what you're currently making. And Crazy only said, yes, I'll do it. And I cut a deal to stay on with the project management gig to transition out of that, help hire my replacement. We were going through a software rollout and I knew that I wanted to do something different than what I was doing it before I knew it. Within two months of that period, a mutual friend of my business partner and myself actually said, you Two should sit down and have coffee together. I think that you're similar enough and yet different enough where you can be aligned. Because he was thinking of 34 strong. He had gone through the Gallup certification process to become a Gallup certified strengths coach. And we sat down, we had coffee, and three, rest is history. That was back in 2013.

Okay, so when you were so actively disengaged at work and, and kind of doing that crazy long commute, it's hard for me to picture you as disengaged. You're like one of the most engaged and energetic and positive. And I mean, I've only been in Barbados this trip for three days and I saw you at the gym two days in a row. And I mean, you weren't at the gym. You were destroying the gym. Like you crushed that place. Were you disengaged in your personal life as well? Or were you living a good personal life but disengaged at work?

I think I was unintentional disengaged in my personal life. And I think what happened in that moment, that's such a profound question and nobody's ever asked me that.

So I wonder if the work was starting to bleed in, hurt you personally as well, or.

I think if I didn't have that moment with my daughter, that's exactly the path that I was headed on, which is why it was so terrifying, because I looked at the path that I was on. It's kind of like if an airplane's off course by like a degree, right. And it's taken off from New York heading to San Francisco, and it's one degree off to the south over the course of the first 60 miles, it's barely noticeable. But if you travel the whole distance. Exactly. You're like 500 miles off course or something like that over that distance, and that's massive. But on a day to day basis, you don't realize it. You don't realize the tax that you're actually paying is your family's paying that tax.

That's kind of what I was wondering.

And that's what was going on. I didn't. I have to think I realized that at the time.

I was wondering if your daughter's laugh, if you were like, wow, she's happy. And why am I not happy? Like, I wonder if that kind of was the wake up call.

I think it was the fact that I've grown over the years. Like, I feel like I'm a pretty resilient person, which is cool. But I think sometimes you could put on this cloak of resiliency, which sometimes is a bunch of bullshit because we, we just put it on, say, just rise up, just deal with it and then we actually don't deal with it. I had grown into a place in the construction world. I would say all of us would describe it as. You would just armor up. You just go into the day because you knew that in the way that the dynamics were in that respective, respective space, it was in commercial construction, there was always this delicate balance between architect, general contractor and then the client and who's actually responsible because nobody wanted to get stuck with the cost of the mistakes. You were constantly playing the game of C Y A cover your ass. Right. And that just got exhausting. And I think.

How many years were you there?

So in that company, I was there for about five years. My total time in construction before starting 34 strong was about 10 years. I was in residential for about half that time and then in commercial and I. And they were very different experiences.

So what do you think you pulled from those experiences that you still use today? What were the skills you started to develop back there? As much as you might have hated the job or were dying inside, where do you think you grew and what did you pull from those?

I think I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for those experiences. And let me say that in the world of the two elements of construction, I had the residential side and the commercial side, I had some of the absolute best teams that I've ever worked on in my life where I saw how things come together and how you're able to get things done over the long haul. When you're on a community and you're building out a project of homes that was in tract housing that I had started in fresh out of college. But when we got that working and people were listening and respecting each other, it was like clockwork. We had targets and we were just blowing past them because our team was so aligned. On the flip side, I was able to see exactly the kinds of leaders that I never wanted to be and create the emotional connection. When we talk about leadership and people growing into managers, times people as you know, you've got your investment in your leaders course. Right. And there's some people that get into leadership roles reluctantly.

Yeah.

But they don't think sometimes necessarily of the toll, the power that a manager has over another person's life and the emotional baggage that it carries. I remember as a 23 year old, you know, a year out of college, going into a job at A on the residential side, I was on a team that was amazing. And then I got transferred to another team and my boss on the second team within the company, he was such a card nose and so challenging to deal with. He just made everybody just felt like craft. I remember Cameron, I was healthy. I'd come home and I'd be leaving the job site, driving away in my truck and thinking, just miserable because I had to leave, knew I had to come back. And three days a week, in the middle of the night, didn't drink much, didn't do drugs. I'd wake up at two o' clock in the morning and I'd throw up. Wow, middle of the night, brutal. And that was. That went on for about four or five months. I never had any gastro issues or anything and never have since. And that was happening. So that toll and those physical elements of what that felt like and that awakening, that happens many years later, about seven years later, and actually more than that about eight, nine years later with my daughter, I don't look at those rough experiences as something that I'm upset about. I'm thankful because it's made it very clear in the work that we're doing, what we're transitioning. And when we can see a manager starts to shift the ripple that that has to a parent going home, being a better mom, a better dad, a better student, their community. That's, that's why I do the work that I do. And that's why my business partner Brandon Miller and I, that's why we started 34 strong wasn't just for the cultural transformations, it was for the ripple effect for the next generation.

You know, I don't think I've even had any of our guests on the Second Command podcast talk about the ripple effects that the business world has on people's personal relationships and lives. I've talked about about really caring about people and then they'll care more at work. But I've never heard people talk about how the business can send those negative or positive ripples back into the workplace. Do you teach your leaders and employees about that? Like, do you talk about that or is that something that's more internal for you?

Oh, no. This is at the core of what we actually explain. I think Gallup has found, Cameron, that at least 70% of an employee's engagement in their work is tied directly to their manager. So who you put in your manager roles, your productivity, your profitability is going to ride or die by that. And by default, that engagement is going to ripple into how they show up at home and when they're able to go home and be better versions of themselves at home and they're more engaged in their family or their community with their loved ones, guess what they bring back into the office.

Right?

It comes right back. So there is, Gallup has a lot more of the data and some, some of the statistics on that, but there's basically a loop effect between workplace engagement and overall happiness and well being life and it's, it's massive. And, and when we're in a state where we're feeling a level of engagement and happiness, it's not a function of, hey, people are going to have to love their job every day. I want to clear from that. Like, we step into some really treacherous situations and it's called work for a reason. Sometimes, sometimes it's rough, but when the teams are aligned, you have the confidence that you can pull through and we have to invest in our wellness and happiness and they are correlated. It matters. And you have that power over people and it ripples over into their health. There was some study years ago that was done about heart attacks on Monday mornings. Like people are more likely to have the heart attack while on a Monday morning because of the Sunday night scaries that they have. They start, you can measure people on a biological level and their chemistry and you start seeing everything starting to shift on Sunday for the wave going into Monday. And people are more likely to have a heart attack. Like there's, there's a heart attack spike and it ties in right to that.

So my ex wife and I were talking about this around probably 17 years ago. I was probably four or five years into wanting thunder God junk. And I think it was a Monday morning and I was super excited, getting ready to work and she was like, wow, you're so lucky. You love what you do. And I said, well, what do you mean? She goes, well, most people don't like their jobs. And I was like, what do you mean? I'm like, it didn't even make sense to me because I'd been so happy in my career for so long. And she talked about three or four of our friends who actually hated their careers. And I realized that, yeah, I never heard them talking about it. I didn't realize that, how, how hard it is for people on that. I guess I've just been super fortunate. But so the work that you're doing on building these, these cultures, these company cultures, and we're going to talk about this about 34 strong is critical. What lessons did you pull from the College teaching side of things, or when you were teaching her, even though it was only for a few months, was there anything you, you gleaned from that experience? Cause that's really rare.

Well, I actually did that for more than a few months. That was actually. I was actually doing that. It was a crazy period in life. Cameron. So in 2013, we started 34 strong. I was doing the college teaching gig for that whole year. I was still working about 15 hours a week with the construction company and then moonlighting to try and figure out how to build 34 strong. So 34 strong, the concept was there in 2013 and we formally really launched in late 2013, 2014. But teaching, I taught for about four years. It was personally so rewarding because some of the components that we were building at 34 strong, I was able to actually work with students and test it out in place. One of the things that was really powerful for me was we actually had a lot of vets that were coming out of the military that were going to the school and that we're going through the struggle of transitioning into civilian life. And one of the hugely rewarding things for me on a personal level was getting to a place with all students, but particularly with the vets coming out of different branches of the US Military. Some had just been, you know, foot soldier, ground soldier, some of them were coming out of Special Forces. But getting to a place with many of them where they actually felt like, I can talk to you. Many of them after 1/4 or 2/4 said, I've been really struggling with this. So the fact that I feel like I can talk to you, you'll listen and you'll open up some perspective on how to use my relevant experience and strengths that I had maybe when I wasn't war, when I was on the battlefield, and how to actually apply that in a civilian manner and just hitting those switches and show them. There are parallels here. You're. You're not completely alone and letting them know, I never served the day in uniform, but I'm willing to listen and going through it, that told me that I was on, on the right path with, for me personally, with the work you were doing with 34 strong. Because that hit home and from a culture standpoint, it was Heald College at the time and they had been one of the best workplaces in America on Fortune for multiple years in a row. I've been around since 1861, so I experienced that. I saw what a super high performing team was. My colleague in the business department, never forget Working was for Robin Arthur, absolutely amazing person. She was like my work life. Right. So we would call ourselves work spouses, but we had each other's back through course development, course design, different, different shifts. So I experienced so much stir that rippled into what organizations could be. And like you, you're like, Monday's coming. I'm excited to go to work. I realized that was the model for me. At the same time I was in the construction, saw this juxtaposition of seeing this is what a work can be like. Because I was doing that part time while I was in the Doldrus construction, many people there, and I was like, I could either do something about that and have the chutzpah to go out on my own and. And take a jump into that, or I could sit on the sidelines. My business partner and I met, and he was. He was built very similarly, had dissipation. We sat down and we really connected on that.

So that's super cool. All right, I've got a question on. On working with vets. And so you said you've never served the day in uniform. I'm Canadian. We don't generally know people who have served in the military. There's about 110 per capita in Canada are in the military versus the U.S. and then we have 1 10th population, so it's about 1 in 100 less people that we would know. So I actually don't even know anyone in Canada who's ever been in military, which is really weird.

Yeah.

So we don't have the experience of, in Canada at least of having vets to come and work for us because just like nobody's in the military, we're kind of like the Swiss. It's really weird, but there's a huge need for this in the US with so many vets coming out. How do you bring a vet successfully into an entrepreneurial organization or into a company? How do you onboard them in a way that you. You get the best out of them, you honor them, you respect them. Maybe not honoring so much as like, hey, you're a. You're a vet. We're proud of a war. But how do you honor them as a human and what their needs are, what their differences are? Is there any thoughts around that?

Yeah, you know, I can only speak from my experience in the classroom, and I also have done work over the past several years with the Honor Foundation. They're based in San Diego and they have multiple campuses all across the US and they're expanding internationally and the Honor foundation, just to give A little bit of context and what they are, who they are. They have served predominantly the SOF community. So that's the special operations forces. The bulk of their, their cohorts thus far, Cameron, have been Navy SEALs and the support groups for the Navy SEALs. And they have these cohorts that go through and they help them to transition into civilian life. I've worked with, not directly with those groups, but with the organization itself to help align their culture through scale. And it's a group of many vets. Let's just put this way, when I've been there with the 20 people, never heard my cult. So safe in my life is the facility. So I'm here and you're just some amazing human beings. What I think is really important is to remove a lens of what is seen on tv. We see people, you see these movies of, oh, this person's a. They're a warrior, they're a soldier. They've. They've gone through. It removes the human elements of who they are, what they are and going through.

All right, so you and your partner were starting off building 34 strong, and he took the CEO role, you took the COO role. How did you decide on what parts of the business to run? How did you guys divide and conquer on that?

It's fascinating and I think this was a tell of our partnership earlier along. There was literally no debate about it. It was just as we were mapping, envisioning the company, both of us actually came to the same conclusion. I had had years of project management experience, systematizing, growing out, scaling for companies from over a decade in construction and directing a purchasing department. It was very much creating the systems at scale. He had been more of a solopreneur, excited visionary going through. Pasas hadn't necessarily gone through the process of scaling and organization in going through, but brilliant ideas and in going through and a complete Energizer buddy. I mean, he brings so much energy to the table with an idea. Just by talking and hearing him speak. You might have thought you should have done something back in 1982. And he's just literally verbally processing an idea out. And I can bring that sometimes, but his level of doing that so powerful. So when we actually looked at how we showed up and interacted, we. We realized that was a better title for him. And for years it was just the two of us and a handful of support staff. For our early years, we often operated like cousin. As we've grown and scaled. That's one of the things that I feel like has been Important. And that's why when the CEO alliance is. That's been growing. And I've always followed your work for years and going through. But when I saw that coming up, I said, I really need to put on my big boy pants now. What, what where the company is growing towards. And we're in a season right now of really defining this is what a successful CEO role looks like. This is what a successful COO role looks like. And that's how we decided that. And just keep this in mind, too, Cameron. We were doing a lot in the earlier years of the delivery, the design, the build of content and going through. So there's been this journey of letting go of some of the facilitation side that we've done, some of the coaching side. I mean, you're a master facilitator, coach and all of those pieces. But when you're in the business chair and you're operating, you can't be in that space. But that's. That had been in the past, some of that. We were the primary economic drivers of the company.

All right, so we'll talk a little bit. Kind of the growth you're getting from the CEO alliance and what you've done, your own stuff. But I want to go into what do you believe makes a really strong company culture?

I think a big part of it starts at the top, within alignment, because oftentimes we'll hear the lip service and you'll see it where you want it rippling throughout the organization. But the leaders seem to have their own set of operating principles, their own set of rules. If a company wants to see culture that is strengths based, where we're focusing on what's right with people, seeing a culture where employees are engaged on Sundays, they're not generating, their heart rate's not going up, they're not feeling uncomfortable about coming to work. They're not miserable about leaving work because they have to come back. And when they're at the dinner table and they're asked, how was your day of work? They're not miserable about that. Okay. Or they're not at the dinner table and their son or their daughter or their wife, her husband does something and it triggers them because of an action that they had experience at work. A lot of times, the response that we get on that side, that's not what we want. So we're clear on what we don't want. So what do we want? We want people to. When they're asked those questions, they're smiling. When they're going home, they're not just making a living, they're making a difference. They're aligned with the fact that their organization and their role might ripples into something greater than themselves. So what does this look like from a cultural standpoint? When the leaders are aligned, we feel like they're modeling what they want to have in the culture. They're messaging it and they're mirroring it back. And when they're modeling it, they're modeling exactly what the behaviors look like. We follow Lencioni's model of the ideal team player. I think you're, you're familiar with that. Ideal team players are humble, hungry and smart. Right. And he breaks down what those actually, we try to model that as leaders individually and then collectively within the team. So if somebody is overreaching on the hunger side or if we're as a leadership team moving in a place, are we being a little too hungry and we're going to run the ship aground? We can check each other on that and have healthy conflict. That's because healthy organizations, healthy culture is not the absence of conflict. In fact, conflict makes us stronger. Yeah, it makes us healthier. But we've got to model that, we've got to message it. I think not only in our own organizations, but the ones that have successfully transitioned to where they're sustaining it. Our success rates and our case studies that are written on, on our websites are actually companies that are no longer working this because they're standing up on their own, which is what we always want them to do. And they've written about us and they've gone through it hasn't been. We're doing 34 strong. We've created a strengths based organization. We've created an engaged organization that's come from within. But the messaging, this is the part that gets exhausting. I think it's important because, and I've heard this a lot in CEO alliance and when I've hung out with a lot of different leaders across the board, I've told them that already. I've told them what our vision was. I've told them these elements. And we've got to be a repetition officer. Right. We have to keep repeating that because our teams that we lead might be aware that's the vision or being an ideal team player. That's our vision. But we're not messaging it frequently enough. And it's like going to the gym. Right? If you go to the gym on the 2nd of January and you do nine hours of bicep curls, you're going to be sore as hell. The next day. But if you're like. And then I don't have to work out for the rest of your. That's not going to lead any results.

Yeah.

It's the repetition in those pieces. And when I talk about mirroring it, we're mirroring it back. What that means is if I'm working for you, Cameron, and you catch me doing something right, modeling the behavior of, for instance, what we'd want to see, an ideal team player making a decision, being empowered, you're going to mirror that back to me. You're going to show me. That's what I'm talking about.

Yeah.

You're going to catch people doing the things right. And when those three are flowing, that's where we start creating the cultures of what we'd like to see. And I think Oprah Winfrey, the last thing I'll say, I think she wants that. The more wins that you celebrate, the more wins you have to celebrate. And it's catching people doing those things. Right. But it starts with how that's.

I love that. I love that whole of celebrating.

The more wins that you celebrate, the more wins you will have to celebrate.

I love that. All right, so this is a strange question, and it comes to me because I was recently on an episode of a podcast coming out quite soon called A Little Bit Culty, and I was interviewed on When Company Culture Goes Too Far and Becomes More of a Cult. And you might have actually just touched on a little bit when a company's pushing too hard or going too fast or going too. When do you think culture goes too far or how do companies misuse it? Maybe even not intentionally.

I think the part about culture that's fascinating, whether you want it and whether you focus on it intentionally, you have or not, you're going to have it. So you're either going to get it by intention or design, or you're going to get it by accident. So choose wisely. What if, like, there's a notion that we've been in rooms and vistage and with rooms of CDO is like, I don't have time to focus on culture? You've heard that.

Sure.

Stories.

I really have a culture.

I don't really have a company. That's your culture and that shows up. So you're going to get some of those elements either by attention and design, where you have the control, you're making the investments, or it's going to show up and it's going to take on a role that maybe you don't want to have. So make sure you're carving that path where it can get, I think too culty sometimes. I've seen this where the culture, it seems like we can focus on that above just some of the basic capacity of what the business is actually doing. I think there has to be an alignment, what the business needs and the overall organizational objective. If not, you can go down the path. If you're creating a spray culture that's actually, you got to ask the question periodically, is this in alignment with our external brand? So we can think of culture through this lens from a branding perspective, this, I think this is the best way I can articulate this. You've got your external brand, which is what your customers and the public sees and then you have your internal brand, which is your culture, your company experience. Those two brands have to actually be in alignment. If those two brands are out of alignment and you're saying one thing to your, to your customers, but you're out of alignment with what's going on here, or you're so focused on the internal culture and you've created the cult in this of what's going on, but that's not actually in alignment with your external facing brand, that will create some serious ripples because your internal culture, we said, well, why are we doing this here? Why are we doing this here? Should we be doing that? And that can be good if you're allowing those conversations to take place because those two should be checking and balancing each other. And the analogy I like to use, I think there's a healthy amount of tension that can exist between those two brands. So think of the Golden Gate Bridge. You been across there up in California, we've all seen it. Cameron. It stands because the cables are tightly pulled to both sides and that gives it its strength. It's not because the cables are hanging slack, the cables pulling in different directions. And that gives rise to the brilliance and the strength of the bridge. And if we think of our brand, those both of those brands that we have to manage that they're the bridge that we have to stand up. But there's the, you know, there's the north side and the south side of the bridge that we have to have to stand up. There's going to feel like there's times that there's tension through the question that we're asking and it's actually completely needed. So instead of being conflict averse or thinking of it that that's actual conflict, it's not conflict, it's making sure that we're actually evaluating are these in alignment or are we Getting too deep in the culture or are we forsaking the culture of who we are at our core and the values for just chasing after money? That's actually terrible business to go after. I think that Crossroads actually is.

So I want to ask you some more questions about the work that 34strong does with clients. But I want to talk to you for a second about some of the work that you've done on yourself. So you mentioned you joined the co alliance because you wanted to kind of put on your big boy pants and I guess grow. What was it that you were looking for in terms of your own growth? Were you cognizant of what it was or was it just get into a community to see what's there, what I can learn? What were you looking for?

I have been just, you know, an entrepreneur. So I feel like when I'm hanging out with CEOs sometimes I feel like the odd duck, which you've talked about as well, because we're more energetic for both founders of companies and that's. And CEOs that aren't necessarily founders are going through. It's a totally different vibe.

Yeah.

As a founder, as an entrepreneur, I've been in the sales chair. I've been in the marketing chair. I still do a lot of deal negotiation. I love that stuff. Right. I wanted to really dig in as 34 strong is growing and scaling and has expanded our company to really dig into what are all the things that maybe haven't hit my radar. So I'm not playing catch up. We tripled the size of the company from 2020 through 2021 and we did it. And I will confess here, as I've done many times before, we did not have the systems in place. We, we did not. Our team was able to rise and we stitched it together with bubblegum and glue sticks and all of the things and the systems have come a far way. My goal, I think in joining is starting to awaken. What's the stuff that maybe I'm not even thinking about? There's a saying win stands for what's important now. And that's really critical. And what's important right now is getting the team to a point where they can handle the catch up process. I have to do the look ahead. So I'm doing the control burns like I used to use that analogy. And me you were asking for lessons. One of your earlier questions from my project management days, that's what my role was as a project manager. Find out everything that could burn down out ahead. And if I had to create a path. And then. And there was stuff that was in, like do the control burns so we could keep the project moving. That's the role that I haven't been able to do. And that's just from. I don't know what. I don't know. So I want to hang out with companies with. With CEOs that are further upmarket than me, that can help pull along and give me asking better questions and get us as a company asking questions that maybe we haven't been considering. And that's definitely been happening.

All right. Now, I don't remember if you mentioned the word vulnerable or if I did, but where do you think it has served you as a leader to be vulnerable at work? And where has it hurt you or has it hurt you?

Being vulnerable was always something we were taught not to do. So in the construction industry, it was thought that you can't show your hand, you can't do this. And it created a lot more tension and stress. Unneeded. And the reason I know that is because I had three clients that I can remember vividly where we actually spoke openly. They were our most productive jobs in terms of the pace that we worked at the teams. The way that they were built, they opened faster, which meant that the client was opening those stores quicker. They were more profitable for them and they were more profitable for us. And those were. Those were three clients I specifically remember. But within the industry.

Yeah.

They were unicorns.

Right.

They were complete unicorns in the way that we built those teams. But the rinse and repeat of that, that showed me that's how I want to be. Yeah. But I couldn't be that because of the environment. It's kind of like if you're a cactus trying to grow in the middle of the tropics here, where it's not going to necessarily grow. Your Arizona cactus isn't going to grow effectively here at Barbados. Right. The way that it has served incredibly well through my journey within 34 strong has been there's a level of trust which when people are going to follow you, they need trust, they need compassion. Right. And they want to know that you can connect with them on a human level. So being able to be vulnerable and saying, like we've acknowledged to our team, like, we tripled in size and we are still playing catch up right now because of where we're at and the challenges that I felt personally and being able to talk through that. All it's done with direct reports and within our company is it's opened up the floor of trust. Cameron. One of the stories that I'll share, I'll never forget this day was In March, in 2020, when we made the decision that the best thing to do for the company at the time because of COVID was to furlough every single employee. Well, to get them to the front of the line in the US for an employment because we knew the wave was coming. Hardest day in business, period. I told that story at a retreat that we had this last summer and how difficult that day was for me. And I've told that story, you know, dozens of times. But looking at the size of the company because we grew so much from the small team that we were then, I'm looking and I'm seeing it. I got choked up and went through and I didn't expect that it was. I was totally overcome with emotion. But the thank yous and the accolades that that led to is like thank you. Because people were able to see how impassioned we were with this as leaders and kind of going through and. And that it's real. And. And the final, more recent incident that I'll share with you is one day I completely overdid it on zoom. I was on one of those days where it was like nine hours. You barely had time to get up and pee and get water and. And it was meeting after meeting. It wasn't calls. They were like video meetings.

Sure.

And the next day I had a really hot. I was facilitating for an executive leadership team where it wasn't just something that I could. I could go through. Like I needed to be very present in thinking and my brain was just shot next morning I knew it and I had to throw in the talent, say I got to pull the plug. Thankfully, it was a small enough team and I've worked with and said I got to reschedule this because you're going to be getting a really crappy version of me. But I use it as a learning lesson for the team and it created a level of awareness within our team. To check yourself because we talk about that. This is where the messaging. When I talk about messaging, modeling very we message, take the break, go out, take the walk if you need to. But did model it. And I acknowledge I totally screwed up in modeling that because you're going to see my calendar can say, well, that's what Darren's going to expect of me. Right. And then I totally crashed into a brick wall and it was a terrible idea. And it's led the pacing in my life and it's actually when I'm having those conversations with people. They're hearing it from the lens of, okay, this is guy who's trying to model it and how he's living, how he's going through. And he messaged it because he totally said he ate shit for a period of time. And it was possibly it was a bad business decision for us as well.

I love this. All right, I want you to go Back to the 21, 22 year old Darren. You're just starting out in your career. What advice do you wish you knew back then that you know to be true Today?

Take the time to sit with yourself and dig into what are your core drivers? What are your core values? What is the script that you're following? Is it your script or is it somebody else's script? The 2122 year old script of me went through college, I got a good job, I was getting a good solid income, I was climbing the corporate ladder. Whose script was I following? I had never really thought that I had the power to write my own script. Remembering that we are actually holding the pen to write that script and that we have the power to write that script, I think is really important. And I think Jim Carrey said this, but if I can screw up doing something I dislike, why not screw up doing something that I love? And it's really powerful to be willing to do the work and to get comfortable being uncomfortable because that's where the growth song is going to be. Final piece. When it feels like the world's shitting on you, ask why is this happening for me? And keep asking it because it always reveals itself in time.

That's awesome. Darren Rosami, the COO and co founder of 34Strong. Thanks for sharing with us on the second Clan podcast. Really appreciate the time.

I really appreciate being here.

Of course, you're welcome.

Go to the best organization you can possibly get into and get the best mentor that you can. Work the most amount of hours that you can. If you put that time in early, it's your baseline and it's hard to go up, it's easier to go down.