Scaling a Non-Conventional Business | Gary Torrens, COO of SOMA Breath

At one point when we had about 8 or 9 people in the company, it was pretty easy. I had everybody reporting to me and then very quickly got to like 20, 25 people and then I was just lost. I didn't know what to do because it was a very flat organization. My whole day was basically like everybody's PA. That's what I felt like. What I've been working on more is like communication skills to be able to communicate not just with the team properly and effectively and motivate people. And that's something that I'm actually learning a lot from the new CEO that we hired, which is Jason. He's amazing. Excellent guy.

Jason Campbell is the reason that I actually got introduced to Mindvalley. Most early stage managers' solution to every problem is hire more people. How do you push back on them when they want to hire more people? But your gut's saying, I don't know if we need more people. I think we need to say no more.

So I—

Gary Torrence is our guest today, and he's the COO of Soma Breathwork. He left the corporate grind in Canada for the serene beaches of Koh Phangan, Thailand over 10 years ago, and his journey has been anything but conventional. He's got an honors Bachelor of Science specializing in physics and an honors Bachelor of Arts specializing in economics and finance. And he took a leap of faith, left his corporate job, packed his bags, and bought a one-way ticket to Thailand with only a few hundred dollars in his pocket and nearly $80,000 in credit card and student debt. While he was there, he met Niraj and they co-founded Soma Breath, which is a company dedicated to harnessing the power of breathwork and mindfulness to transform lives. They now have a global network of over 4,000 certified instructors who bring life-changing benefits of Soma Breath to communities across the globe. I first got exposed to them about 5 years ago at a Mindvalley University event, and they're so good at what they do that they've created an app. They run retreats all over North America and actually now around the world. And they've certified over 4,000 practitioners, and their focus is on growing that to tens of thousands of protect— practitioners globally. You'll love this episode. We'll see you on the inside. You can also watch all of our Second in Command podcast episodes on our YouTube channel. Okay, a quick note before we continue. Today's episode is sponsored by our trusted partner, Next Level Growth. They work with CEOs and COOs who are growing fast and starting to feel the strain. Seeing some priorities slipping, execution slowing, and even leadership being stretched thin. Next Level Growth guides leadership teams to get aligned, establish real operating rhythms, and execute better without burning your people out. This is practical operator-level work, not theory. Check them out. Proactive always wins over reactive. Details are at cooalliance.com/partners. That's cooalliance.com/partners. /Partners and go check out Next Level Growth. So Gary, welcome to the Second Command Podcast.

Yes, thank you for having me.

Yeah, really looking forward to this. I got exposed to your company, gosh, about 4 years ago now. I was at a Mindvalley event in Estonia, Mindvalley University, and saw your, your CEO and your business partner Niraj running a session and he kind of blew me away. But I didn't really think of it as a business. I just thought of it as this charismatic guy on stage doing a breathwork session for a whole bunch of people. I was like, hey, peace out and thanks for the cool session. But this is a real business. Can you walk us through what Soma Breathwork is and, and how the organization kind of runs and makes its money today?

Yeah, absolutely. So I understand exactly where you're coming from because it's, it's not a very common business to, um, to sell teaching people how to breathe, right? Because it's something that actually many people don't breathe properly. That's the reality. I was one of those people when I was working in the corporate world in Canada that I wasn't breathing properly and I started to get a bunch of anxiety and, and stress. And when I learned how to breathe, it really helped me with that. So the way that Soma Breath functions today is we actually do retreats around the world where we take people on deep experiences through breathwork.. So they, they end up having emotional releases. They end up getting more in contact with what their life's purpose is. Like, it's a, it's basically a way to enter deep meditative states without having to sit in a, in a temple for, you know, 10 days in silence. It's a much quicker way to get to those states and to be able to get the benefits from meditation much faster. And our main business model at the moment is actually certifying people in our techniques. So all of our techniques are based off of like pranayama, which is from India. These are ancient breathing techniques that have been around for a long time. And Niraj, who's the, who's like the brain and the, the face of the company, he actually used to be a pharmacist and he really understands the science of what's going on here. So he's not just teaching the pranayama techniques, he's teaching the science that goes behind it. So combining the scientific aspect of it, these proven breathing techniques that have been around for thousands of years and combining music with it as well. Because Niraj is also an amazing music producer. Bringing all of these things together is what created Soul Breath. So it's a unique spin on these ancient breathing techniques to make it more accessible for people, make it more fun because, you know, if you just do the breathing techniques alone, again, it could be challenging just like meditation, but when you add the music to it and the guidance,. It makes it so easy to do and, and people just keep coming back because it's such a fun thing to do. So that's our main business model is teaching instructors. We have an app as well and we do the retreats. That's, those are the main things that we do currently.

Okay. I love this. In fact, my, my partner, I have a, a business partner on my book Vivid Vision and Jennifer Hude runs what she calls vision-driven events that she incorporates a little bit of breathwork and a little bit of visualization, a little bit of music and has people kind of visualizing their company in the future, which is Another tie-in as to how I got connected with Mindvalley years ago was Vishen had read my book Vivid Vision and loved the concept. So I didn't realize that you're also certifying people and in this skill, when you're certifying them, do they pay an annual fee or a licensing fee or an ongoing, or is it just kind of a one-off certification model? How does that scale into your business?

So they have the option. So initially they just pay the one-off to join the training. And we have a few different trainings depending on how deep they wanna go. So there's ones where they just learn the, the basic technique that we do, which is like a, what we call it is a Soul and Breath Journey. It's like a 30-minute to 1-hour breathwork session with multiple rounds. That's the most basic training. And the highest training is, we call it Transformational Coaching. So, and Transformational Coaching is where you learn basically a whole library of different breathing techniques. We call it the inner pharmacy. It's breathing techniques to activate different parts of the, of the body basically. Like if you want to reduce inflammation, there's a breathing technique for that. If you want to reduce stress, there's a breathing technique for that. There's so many, yeah, there's so many different amazing techniques that you can use to influence your physiology and, and basically help your nervous system reset as well. And then on top of that, keep going. Yeah, once you, once you do the training, then we have a membership called BIG and what that stands for is Breathwork Instructors Global. And inside of that membership you get music. So we make new music every month because music is a core part of what we teach. So every month we make new music and that gets put into BIG. You also get marketing support. You, we get pitch decks to, to pitch to corporates because a lot of our instructors actually do breathwork sessions for corporates. You get pitch decks to pitch yoga studios so you can go and teach at these places. Templated marketing material like flyers, banners for social media, templated videos. So we have a whole package to help you grow your business and that membership, we make it a very low cost. We really want people to be a part of it and it brings you, it makes you part of the community as well where instructors get to network with each other and do really cool collaborations with each other as well.

It's almost like a franchise model in many ways, which is amazing. What's, what, what is the cost for people to get involved in something like that?

So the basic training starts at around $1,500 and then the highest level training is $6,500. And then the membership is $29 per month. And basically we actually modeled it off of Zumba. I don't know if you're familiar. Yeah. Zumba is like a massive, they're the kings of this, of this type of business model of the instructor certification model. They have like something like 500,000 instructors around the world. And we're good friends with one of the, with the ex-CMO of mine, of Zumba. Okay. And also the current CEO. And they've kind of helped us in the early days. Like, you guys need to think about a recurring model that helps your instructors become successful. That's the most important thing. So like one of our main missions is actually to make the instructor successful because we know that if we make instructors successful, they're going to be out there in the world. Teaching these techniques to more people. And that's the ultimate goal of Solo Breath. We want more people to experience this cuz it just helps make the world a better place essentially. Yeah.

When you were explaining the big membership, what kind of twigged my memory was, that's how CrossFit actually grew. All the CrossFit locations and the reason they all have different names like LA CrossFit and CrossFit Uptown and whatever is you license the use of the name CrossFit and you license the systems and some of the marketing tools, but then they let you run it on your own. So it's not quite a franchise, right? But it's also— it's not just a free-for-all, read a book and go kind of be on your own. But you guys are priced really affordably. I wouldn't have guessed that you're only $29 a month. Is that— is that because your goal is to get into the thousands of facilitators versus trying to extract a lot from each facilitator right now?

Exactly. Well, hundreds of thousands. Yeah, that's where we wanna get to. Currently we have just over 4,000 facilitators around the world. So yeah, the, the plan is we want to get a lot of people into this and we wanna make the membership very affordable for sure. I like that. We want more people to join it.

Yeah. I would guess that at some point you're gonna have a couple of different tiers of membership too. You're gonna have different facilitators globally who are almost like with TED, when TED launched the TEDActive program,, and they were able to run the TEDx programs. I mean, sorry, you, you could only run a TEDx in your first year with a maximum of 100 tickets. And in second year, you could run your TEDx in the city with 300 tickets, but you had to prove through running a couple of successful models that then you could be running a TEDx with 1,500 people coming. Um, is that going to be part of your model as well, where you have, you know, a platinum facilitator or a Platinum Partner Program, or I'm putting titles in your, in your, your, your, your mouth, but are you gonna have different levels or do you think it'll always stay at this $29 per month-ish range?

I think the different levels is determined by which training you did. So if you, if you did the Level 1 training, you only get access to specific types of music and certain marketing material. If you do the highest level training, you get access to more things. You, and also you're allowed to list list your classes on our website. So we have a directory so that people can find classes in their local area. And if you're a Level 1, you could only list Level 1 classes. If you're a transformational coach, you can list one-on-one trainings, which you can price at a much higher rate. So, so that's really where we, um, where we allow people to do more things based on the amount of training they did, not based on how much they're paying for the monthly membership.

So I had a friend, Austin, who was supposed to be flying into Vancouver next week to run a breathwork and a big huge session for us and he had to cancel. He's going to be in Europe and can't make it. So I would be able to go on your website and find someone in Vancouver for Thursday morning, March 19th, and, and find a facilitator who could probably come and run a session?

Potentially, yes. Um, we don't like— we're, we're really trying to push people to use it. For some reason it's not being used on the directory side of it, is not being used that much, but that's something that that we're really trying to get more people to use.

Wow, they're crazy. I mean, for me, that's the natural place that I would go. I think that would be the— it's almost like EOS when EOS launched all their facilitators and EOS integrators globally, or the implementers going on the EOS website. You saw the implementers, you saw the cities they were in, and you reached out to them. It just became a natural feeder system for that. So yeah, that'll come.

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure.

You know, one of the first times I ever got exposed to breathwork was Chip Wilson from Lululemon, who's also from Vancouver. And he was saying that he will, every time he gets to a stoplight when he's driving his car, while the stoplight is red, he does the 4-4-4 box breathing. And then when it turns green, he just continues driving again. But he uses the stoplight as a chance to do 30 seconds or a minute or 2 minutes of breathwork. And he does it routinely at every stoplight. I thought that was kind of a cool a little technique. But I, I love what you guys are saying where you've got the, the inner pharmacy of breathing as well.

Yes. Yeah. So even in our app, we have a section called inner pharmacy, and it's basically a bunch of different therapeutic techniques.

Okay. So you've, you've clearly got the IP, you've got a really good brand behind you with Mindvalley, and you guys have become a really big part of that community. I know that you're kind of plugged in, and we'll talk about this in a second, that the founders and some of your team are all living over in Bali, which is kind of the the ecosystem of spirituality right now. Yes. Or, you know, I guess they're in Austin, Texas, but I'm curious what it's like running the business. What are some of the complexities of running Soma Breathwork?

Well, over the past few years, there's been a lot of competition popping up. There's been a lot of new breathwork brands coming out. So trying to keep up with that has been quite complicated. And, and also managing a remote team. We don't have an office. We have employees all over the world, mostly in between Asia and Europe and a few in North America. So trying to coordinate meetings with everyone together at the same time, it's very complicated, especially being in Asia. You get the short end of the stick and you have to do the calls at 10 PM usually, 10, 11 PM. So that's been quite challenging. Also staying on top of people. Luckily, like we have a really good team and we're able to trust the people and most people on our team are very passionate about what we do. So, so we trust that they're actually putting, they're going above and beyond with, with their work. But that has been challenging over the years for sure. It's been very challenging to find the right people, give them the tasks, hope that they're actually gonna go forward with it and do a good job with it and not have to get into a state of micromanaging people, which I've made that mistake before and I'm hopefully will never make it again because that's very stressful.

Do you get it? Do you get any sense that for some of the 5,000 or 4,000 facilitators or certified coaches you've got that the $29 a month isn't enough for them to take it seriously?

Uh, potentially. Yeah. I've never thought of it that way. Like we've always been thinking, let's price it affordable to get people in. Maybe some people do see that and think, what can be in it for that? Like for that price, it can't be that good.

Or maybe it's a way to weed out which ones are really gonna turn it into a business. And then which ones are just in it to be a part of a community and they kind of like it. And it's a, a skill that maybe they use with some of their friends. But it would be interesting to know of your 4,000, which ones are really serious about turning it into a business in their market? Would they want to be on your website? They want to be marketing it, like, versus the which ones are kind of the hobby, you know, stay-at-home mom doing a Tupperware party once a quarter kind of breathwork. Yeah.

We have, yeah, we try, we try to gauge that a lot with, through surveys and, and actually part of what you get in Big is we do these live calls every week. So like a, a one call about marketing, one is a meetup with Niraj where it's, it's basically called a virtual classroom and people can ask him anything they want. And in there, that's where we get the, the data of like what people are actually doing because that's where we hear the stories of what people are working on. But it's challenging to stay on top of that for sure.

What, what's the focus for Soma Breathwork in the next 12 months? What are you guys trying to build out? Is it more certified facilitators, or is it, is it getting more of those facilitators doing more work deeply in their market? Because you're not really incentivized on them. You don't have a royalty stream, right? You don't have a percentage of the upside. So you're not really trying to drive them all into business, or do you have some, some tie-in there?

That is the plan, actually. Like, what we want to work on next is to develop the app better. So we have a, like the initial version of the app, which it, it's okay. It's like basically Calm but for breathwork. Yeah. So it's an on-demand system. We do do some live calls on there as well. So if you're a member of the app, you get access to a few live calls a week. But what we want to do is we want to actually integrate the Find an Instructor directly into the app. And when we do that, the instructors are gonna have their own login where they can go and list their classes, whether it's an online class or an in-person class or a retreat. They could list it on there, they could bill their clients directly on there. And at that point, that's where we would be taking a percentage, like a small percentage of their classes as well. So that's where we're moving towards, but we need to find a good app developer and do a partnership with them to be able to create that.

So it's not, it's not all calm and easy breathing when you're trying to build the business. I, when you're building, when we were building 1-800-GOT-JUNK, I remember back in the early days, we looked to find some of our— we called them the Millionaires Club. They were our biggest franchise partners. And it was how do we find the biggest franchise partners that we could bet on, that if we gave them more of our time, they would really grow their business. Net-net, we would then make more money and they would make more money. And it wasn't by excluding the others, but, you know, we had 330 franchisees. We can't really give our time equally to them. So it was how do we pick the top 30 out of the 330? Do you have a group of— do you have a kind of a core group that, you know, are the ones that are fully committed in turning this into a business? Like, do you work with them? We used to have a franchise advisory council where some of our franchisees were a part of the kind of the inner circle that we would spend more time with and they would give us ideas. Do you work with any of your, your 4,000 that way?

We do. We do. We have a few instructors that we know that they're doing really good things in the world. And we try to work with them much closer. And part of our plan actually now is to focus on a few key cities where these instructors are located. One of them is in Toronto, for example, and we're gonna do an event with him. So we're gonna actually promote it on our website and help him fill it up. Like, we want to have events all over the world full, but to begin, we need to focus on a few key cities. We're thinking Toronto, Austin, London, a few others.. And then from there, these instructors, they can do regular events that we help promote from our website, not just from the directory, but actually like official Soma Breath events, Soma Breath sponsored events. And then once we build up the communities in those different cities, then they can start offering in-person teacher trainings. Because especially now with the way the world is going with AI and people just don't know what to trust anymore online, we see that there's a, a huge desire for people to meet up in person and actually do events in person. And there's a lot of people that want that. So we are working with, with some of these top instructors that we see that are actually out there getting deals with corporates, doing regular sessions in their city, building community and helping them really expand. And then that will actually help us expand. We know that, you know, by law of osmosis, right? Some of those people will come back to Soul Breath and wanna become instructors as well.

Yeah, I've brought, I've brought in 3 or 4 different instructors over the years to do breathwork for our COO Alliance. I've had, Sam Skelly came in, a guy named Colton came in, Donnie. 3 or 4 have come in and run breathwork sessions for all of our SEAL Alliance members at our events. And it's always one of the highest rated sessions because it's so different from what people experience. You know, no one like, you know, you kind of mentioned we all know how to breathe, but then we realize we actually don't know how to breathe. We, we can breathe, but we're not breathing efficiently. We're not— or we're not using breath as a, I guess as a scientific method for doing specific things. So yeah, what are you focusing on right now? What's the kind of core when you wake up in the morning? What are you focused on inside of the organization?

So right now I'm very focused on marketing, on growing the marketing department and just getting back into, we had a lot of change over the last year. We've been really trying to scale and we've, changed all of our tech stack. And as a result of doing this, and we, we also changed a lot of people in the company as a result of doing this, there's been a lot of chaos in the marketing side. So I'm stepping back in, I'm trying to put process back into the marketing department because it's been a bit of a chaotic year over the last year, year and a half. So I'm trying to help get that back on track, get back into proper project management so we can achieve a lot more campaigns. We can pump out more products as well. Another thing that I'm starting to focus on now is as well as to translate Soul Breath into other languages. We really feel like the breathwork world is expanding massively and we see some breathwork companies popping up in different languages and they're just destroying the market because they're, they're getting all the, all the people. Like in Spain, there's a new company that popped up and they're filling out theaters with like 300, 400 people doing breathwork events. Wow. We have, we have a big audience of Spanish people. We have a lot of Spanish instructors. So it's the natural next step is to start translating it into different languages. So that is something that I'm working on as well.

When you get it translated into Italian, let me know. I'm close friends with, and I used to coach the kind of Tony Robbins of Italy, a guy named Alfio Bardolla. And Alfio, I'm having dinner with Alfio next week, but he runs events in Italy with thousands and thousands of people, and he's also a part of the Mindvalley community now, but he will bring you in. What percentage of your revenue is from retreats? What percent of it's from the certifications? What percent's from the app? Can you kind of give us a sense as to what your revenue breakdown is and, and where you're focused that way?

Yeah, so about 70% is from the certifications and then 5, 6%, something like that is the app. Then we have About 10% from retreats. And then the rest is just from a bunch of like smaller products, consumer products, smaller live events and things like this.

Interesting. I love that only 5% is the retreats. I wouldn't have expected that. And then from the certification—

no, about 10% is retreats. Yeah.

And then from the certifications, what percent of that is the monthly and what percent of that is pay people paying the $4,000 or $6,000 kind of certification side?

Very small percent is the monthly. It's probably about 5% is the monthly and the other 65% is the, is just the certifications, the new clients.

Yeah. So that's got to be your biggest upside then, right? Is getting that recurring revenue machine going so you know what your monthly recurring revenue is.

Absolutely.

Yeah. And how, what's, what's the plan then to, to turn that into that flywheel?

Well, the, we need to get the success stories. I really feel like that's the biggest piece is, and that's why we're working with these instructors that we see are doing really big things because we can show that, you know, through being part of BIG, we're getting these success stories. We've actually launched recently something that we call the BIG Success Challenge because we realize just giving people the flyers and giving people the, you know, the pitch decks and all these things, most people aren't going to do anything with it. But if we make it a challenge and we get people onto live calls every week, and we give them certain things that they need to do. It's more like a coaching program. So we've turned Big more into a coaching program. We've just launched it 2 months ago and we've had some pretty good results from it. We had like 40 people join and about 5 of them took it really seriously and they started seeing amazing results. They started getting more business, actually making decent money with this and able to, you know, let go of their, of their normal jobs so they can focus on this full time. So getting these success stories will hypothetically motivate more people to join Bing.

Oh, I don't even think it's hypothetically. I think it, in fact, I can from experience tell you that if you can get 20 or 30 success stories and even get 10 that are, you know, $500,000 a year businesses and 20 or 30 that are $200,000 a year businesses, you'll be able to turn the entire 4,000 into a real business model. The key is to find which ones are coachable, which ones are serious, which ones really want this to be their, their business and their career. And there's going to be lots that are there. But then it's about giving your grain to your best horses, right? Not, not spending your time with the 3,800 that are, you know, certainly good and nice to be a part of the community, but they're not going to create the flywheel.

Yeah, absolutely.

I love—

we're trying to focus on—

yeah. How many employees on the team currently? And you said you kind of got people all over the place.

Yeah. Yeah. We have about 40 people at the moment. So that's a mixture of full-time and part-time, about 30 full-time, the other 10 are part-time. And then we work with a few agencies as well.

And what do the 30 people, what are the 30 full-time working on right now?

All kinds of things. Like we have a few people in customer support, we have developers, we have tech people, ad agency. We have people creating landing pages, project managers to make sure that everything moves along. And then we have a leadership team, of course, that we come up with the strategies and we work together to stick to it because of course that can be challenging. Sometimes we have a lot of ideas come up, you know, especially it's a very creative business. So there's a lot of new ideas that come up all the time and we try to try to stick to what we said that we're going to stick to in the quarter, which can be challenging sometimes.

I know that a lot of some of your early success was tied to, um, to Mindvalley, that, that Niraj and you were a part of the Mindvalley community and that you got some good brand and good exposure there. What percentage of your clients and revenue today do you think would be from the Mindvalley community, and what percent would be from, you know, new markets and new communities and, and just the marketing that you're doing?

I think it's probably around 25 to 30% came from Mindvalley over the past 3 or 4 years. Yeah. Before that, we didn't, like, we were in the Mindvalley community, but we didn't have a Quest yet until about 4 years ago. I think the big boom for us was actually during COVID Okay. Like, we were just perfectly positioned when COVID happened. Because people were stuck at home and we were already delivering these amazing breathwork sessions online. That's actually what started the business of me and Niraj. We're doing it when it was just me and him in the business and there was nobody else. We were doing these live sessions every Sunday and we got a lot of people interested in it. And then right when COVID hit, we weren't that big and we decided, okay, let's just go full power in the online world, in the online sessions, the live sessions, because everybody's stuck at home. And we had so many people joining these sessions and that really helped us blow up. And then after that, Mindvalley came in and of course that gave us a massive boost as well. Once they launched the Quest and they started spending so much on marketing for that Quest, we got a lot of that, a lot of those people coming in to Soul of Breath. Like we usually ask on our retreats, where did you find out about Soul of Breath? And usually around 30% of people say that they came from Mindvalley.

That's actually, that's actually a really good number. I think 20, 25 to 30% is a really safe number that you don't really have all your eggs in one basket and you are expanding. It's also amazing to me how I'll go out and mention Mindvalley to people and they have no idea what the hell Mindvalley is. I'm like, how do you know? Their app is on every iPhone pre-installed and their podcast is on all of the airplanes that you go on these days. How do you— but still, it's such a niche brand that— so I think your brand is certainly going to scale that way. Talk about, about AI right now and what your thoughts are on bringing AI into your organization, bringing some of those tech tools into Soma Breathwork.

I think AI is incredible and we're using it quite a lot for copywriting, for example. Like we've created a Gem, which is basically like a GPT but Gemini version to help the team so that everybody's aligned with what type of copy we write. We're now starting to use it for data, for data tracking. We're creating, we're actually using Lovable as well to create an app for Big. So to create a, a much better music player and easier way for instructors to find the music they need because, you know, to, to get the right music, you need to find the right breathing rhythm for the type of session that you wanna run. And using WordPress, that's very difficult to do. You need to just search through all the music until you find the right one. With a tool like this that we're, we're building from scratch, it's much easier. And this would cost so much money to build with developers. And now with Lovable, we were able to do it in just a couple of weeks. So we are getting more and more into AI. We don't want to go to the point where we're using it for like customer support. We still want that human touch or for sales or anything like that, but we want to use it for more for data and for like these mundane tasks that that require people to basically copy and paste data entry, that kind of stuff. We want to use it for those types of things and for development, of course. Like these are the main areas that we're implementing it.

How about your skills? Where are you growing? Where are you working on developing as a leader?

I think that's one of the skills actually is leadership, is being able to, to manage so many people. Like that was one of the biggest challenges is at some, at one point when, when we had about 8 or 9 people in the company, it was pretty easy. I had everybody reporting to me. Right. And then very quickly got to like 20, 25 people. And then I was just lost. I didn't know what to do because it was a very flat organization. I had everybody, everybody coming to me with their problems. And my whole day was basically like everybody's PA. That's what I felt like. Like I was just replying to answers to everything. So what I've been working on more is like communication skills to be able to communicate not just with the team properly and effectively. And motivate people, but also with Niraj as well. Because, you know, whenever I see problems in the company and I go and tell him that, maybe I don't tell it to him in the best way, and then he freaks— could freak out a little bit. When something's good also, like, I don't know, I just need to work on my communication skills. And that's something that I'm actually learning a lot from the new CEO that we hired, which is Jason, Jason Campbell. He's amazing, ex-Mindvalley guy. And Yeah, he's been really helping me with that. So those are the main things, is communication skills, leadership skills are the two main things that I'm working on.

Well, Jason Campbell is the reason that I actually got introduced to Mindvalley. I'm going to say probably 15 years ago, he started cold calling me and trying to get me to go to A-Fest events. And then he finally introduced me to Vishen. So it's awesome that he's a part of your team. Jason does piss me off, though. He's Photoshopped in real life, man. That guy takes his shirt off and he looks like He looks like he's out of an Instagram ad. It's ridiculous. Like, come on, tell him to put some dad bod weight on that body. He's a great guy. I will give you— I launched a course 3 years ago called Invest in Your Leaders. And it actually covers the core content of what you're talking about. I'll set you up with free access for it for yourself. But it has 12 modules that cover all the leadership skills that anyone managing people needs to be good at. So it's stuff like delegation and time management, project management, handling conflict, priorities. It's all, all the soft skills of leadership that we're never trained in, right? Running meetings.

Yeah.

Is what you talked about is in the early days is more of that command and control where you're telling everybody what to do. You're playing point, a little bit of zone defense, but now you're trying to get results through people, right? You're trying to get results through a layer of managers. And most early stage managers' solution to every problem is hire more people. How do you push back on them when they want to hire more people, but your gut's saying, I don't know if we need more people. I think we need to say no more. Or are you getting good at saying no enough?

I am. Yeah. Because I made that mistake as well of hiring more people, thinking like we need more and more people to take care of all the things that we want to accomplish. So I'm getting much better at doing that, at saying no, we need to figure out how we can do it with our current resource. So yeah, it's been, it's been a challenge to get to that point.

Yeah, I think it's saying no and then sometimes it's saying not now. With Niraj, who's the, your co-founder and CEO, you guys, how did you decide who did what? How did you divide and conquer with, you know, roles and responsibilities? And then over the years, have those shifted at all or have you always just stayed in your swim lanes and you've always done what you've always done?

So it's actually a bit of an interesting story. When me and Niraj met, we met in Koh Phangan in Thailand many years ago, and he was, he had a different business at the time. It was called the Renegade Pharmacist, and I just loved what he was doing. I was kind of just like a hippie backpacking through Thailand trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I left the corporate world in Canada. I was getting too stressed out with it. And one day he was just like, he, we really hit it off. We really became good friends. And he just said, why don't you come over to my house? I'm working on this breathwork stuff. Let's do a little breathwork ceremony together and see what kind of visions come up. Took a little bit of psilocybin as well during this mushroom ceremony. And we made the intention to see how can we work together and make something happen, make, make some big impact in the world. And at the end of that ceremony, after about 3 hours of breathing and going down this crazy visionary flow, Uh, he, he was just like, you know what I really need? I need somebody who can just take care of all the data, can just take care of all of the— and he looks at me, he's like, all the boring shit that I don't like to do. I was just like, you think that's boring shit? I actually love that stuff. Like, that's what I love to do. I was like, I studied physics and finance in university. That's where I like to be. And he's like, oh, that's perfect. Let's do it. And then literally the next day we started working together and he's just like, he just gave me all the logins to everything he did. He's like, here, go figure it out. I didn't know anything about the digital marketing world. He said, figure out what you need to do. And we realized at that moment, he, the way that he worded it was, he's like, look, I'm the right brain of the company, the creative, you're the left brain. The company is basically a body and needs both sides of the brain. So you focus on all the operational, all the logical, logistical stuff. And he's like, and I'm going to focus on the creative. And that's what we've done this whole time. Now, once in a while, yes, I go into his lane. I like to get creative. He comes into my lane and we kind of bump heads when that happens. But we've, we have a really good relationship, a very good friendship, and we're able to just tell each other how it is and get back on track very quickly when that happens.

So that's pretty good. I love the left brain, right brain. Even on the COVID of my newest book, The Second in Command, I had a logo of the yin and yang logo, and I was talking about the CEO and the COO of being the yin and yang to each other. They're really the partners and the counterparts. So when you bump heads, how do you work through it? What's your process or communication protocol? Or do you just take some psilocybin and go hang out on, on the beach at a full moon party? Like, what do you do to, to reconnect with these? And I was, I was first in Koh Phangan in 1991, 35 years ago. Crazy, right?

Yeah, the real full moon party.

Yeah, yeah, it was.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Now, now it's gone downhill. Yeah, when we bump heads, there were no phones.

Everybody was just there hanging out with each other. There was nobody recording it.

We were just having fun. Yeah, right now, now everybody's just completely wasted out of their minds. It's terrible music. It's a lot of people. Yeah, it's not, it's not a fun place to be. Um, yeah, so when we bump heads, we sometimes it gets heated, you know. Sometimes we, we yell at each other. Like we were literally in each other's face yelling at each other until somebody realizes like, okay, yeah, you're right. Like usually one of us will realize it first. That was more in the past. Now recently when we bump heads, now we have more people to bring into the conversation, like Jason, for example, and another person that we have on the team, Dave. So we're able to bring other people in and voice our opinions. And see like, what does everybody else agree with? It's more of a, like, like voting kind of thing, right? So sometimes, of course, Niraj has an idea that he's like, no, this is what we're doing and that's it. And we just have to go with it. But other times, because he is the, the face of the company, so he's the majority shareholder as well. So he gets to make those decisions, but he's very good at listening to what the rest of us think, what our opinions are as well.

It doesn't seem like it bothers you at all that he's the face of the company, nor did it ever bother me that Brian, was the face of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, I kind of knew what my role was and knew that he couldn't do it without me. Does that— does it ever bother you that he is the guy getting the credibility or the street cred or the brand? Or do you even need that? Would you just rather be behind the scenes?

I like being behind the scenes. I actually enjoy it. So I— and he does do a very good job of like telling people like, oh, I couldn't do it without Gary. So I do appreciate that. It feels— it's great for my ego. Of course it feels good. But at the same time, like, I don't, I couldn't be on stage all the time like he is. And I see him in these situations that are, that I even tell him at the end, I'm like, wow, I don't know how you did that. That's such an uncomfortable situation. I can't believe you just, yeah. Yeah. Where he goes to a place where it's like breathwork should not be in this place, like in a nightclub, for example. And somehow he gets everybody to pay attention to him and do breathwork. I'm like, great. You keep doing that. I'm gonna keep doing what I'm doing. Yeah.

It's unique ability. Well, and just to, to I'll give you a good example of where he shines the spotlight on you. Niraj reached out to me to ask me to have you on the Second in Command podcast because he wanted you to give a voice to what was happening behind the scenes in the business. So I want to ask one, one more question before we wrap. I want you to go back to the 21 or 22-year-old Gary and give yourself some advice. What advice would you give the younger you that you know to be true today, but you wish you'd known when you were a little bit younger?

The advice that I would give to the 21-year-old Gary would definitely be don't rush into university. Go and travel a little bit, travel the world, see what it is that you actually, you're actually passionate about. Don't fall for the, for the lies of the system that like you need to go to university to be successful. At the time, maybe my parents thought that it was the right thing for me to do because that's an opportunity that they missed in their childhood and they thought like, you need to do this. But I feel like a lot of parents at that time in my generation thought the same thing and then universities got oversaturated. So I would definitely tell the 21-year-old myself, go travel, go experience the world, go experience different things and see what you're truly passionate about before you make that decision. I think at that age it's way— you're not mature enough to make a decision on what you want to study to do for the rest of your life. The things I studied, I don't do anything with those. At the moment, and I went into a lot of debt as a result, and it would've been much better to travel, find what I'm passionate about, and then start working towards that.

Love that. Where would you go? Where would the one place be that you'd go to if you were gonna go start your travels? Where would you go first?

Well, now that I know the world, cuz I've traveled quite a lot, I would definitely go to Thailand.

Thailand.

Yeah. Awesome.

Yeah, I love Thailand. It's magic. The food is amazing. The people are amazing. Yeah, it's, It's pretty spectacular. Well, Gary Torrance, nice to have a fellow Canadian on the Second in Command podcast. Love what you guys are doing with Summer Breathwork. Thanks very much for sharing with us today. Really appreciate the time.

Thank you.