123 - The Most Effective Strategies for Building Trust and Leveraging Technology in the Legal Industry with Lighthouse's Ron Markezich

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Ron Markazich, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO of Lighthouse, which can be found at lighthouseglobal.com. And there are just so many things that are fascinating about you. I can hardly wait to get into this. So welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Doug.

Uh, let's, let's start off with your backstory. I know a little bit about your backstory because of our Authority Magazine interview and, and what is on your website, but I think people will be really interested to know how you went from school to consultancy to being in the highest ranks of Microsoft to now doing what you're doing. Uh, it was, it's quite the trajectory. So tell us a little bit about that.

I'll, yeah, I'll try to tell you the quick story. We're covering, you know, almost 30 years of story, but I, I went to school at University of Notre Dame. I was the first major in management information systems in the '80s. It was a brand new major and I ran track and cross country at Notre Dame. I was actually gonna run professionally and got an injury my senior year. And so took the only job offer I had, which was Andersen Consulting, now Accenture at the time. And I, moved to Chicago and started with Accenture, thinking I might work there a year or two and then go back and get an MBA or pursue running. But I loved working. I loved the culture. I loved the environment. I loved the clients that I had. And so I spent about 9 years at Accenture, and that actually landed me at Microsoft. I came up to Microsoft in 1995 as a client. And one of the nice things in consulting, you see lots of clients. Worked in the Philippines. I started an offshore development office there. I worked across the US at different clients, and I came up to Microsoft to help with the launch of Microsoft Network. So this is when AOL was the dominant player.

And I remember at 200 baht or something like that.

That's right. That's right. And so if you remember back to '95, Microsoft Network launched at the same time as Windows 95. And so you might see on the internet, there's crazy videos of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and people dancing on stage. I was at that launch. We had Jay Leno emceeing it, and it was, you know, the launch of Microsoft Network and Windows 95. But I came up to Microsoft as my client, and immediately I realized, wow, this is a very unique and special place. Everything moved super quickly. Everyone was super focused on, delivery on clients on this ever-shifting change in the ecosystem and the industry. And so I just got hooked. I ended up taking a job as an employee at Microsoft in 1998. So I spent 3 years in Seattle, moved my entire family up here in '97. And then, well, actually, I shouldn't say my entire family. It was only my wife and soon-to-be son. She moved up when she was 7 months pregnant, had our first child in Seattle. And I, I joined Microsoft. I actually joined Microsoft in, in IT. I ran our finance IT organization and really kind of just spent 24 years at Microsoft doing a variety of roles. I was Chief Information Officer. I started the incubation team for what we now know as Office 365. We actually started that in the IT organizations, a long story there, but I, then spent pretty much the rest of my time at Microsoft building out Microsoft 365 and Office 365. I did that running the incubation. I went over, ran US enterprise sales. I'd never carried a quota before, and I went to US enterprise sales. My first quota was $5 billion, and over 5 years that grew to $8 billion. And the thing you learn at Microsoft is that the numbers, you kind of have to add digits to the end, zeros to the end, they're very big scale and numbers. I rebranded. I went to marketing and led the rebrand of Office 365 to Microsoft 365, led the Microsoft Teams launch, led some of our premium capabilities, and I ran our deal desk at Microsoft where we did negotiations for all of our large enterprise deals across all of our cloud services.

Wow.

I joined the board of Lighthouse about 3 years before I became an employee at Lighthouse. It was very intentional. The prior CEO knew that he'd be retiring at some point. They wanted to try out a board member that might be a candidate for the CEO, and I wanted to try out the company if that was a potential candidate for me to move. And I spent 3 years on the board and then moved over to Lighthouse about 1 year ago as the CEO. And I had—

I was gonna say, what, what, what had you already—

had you left Microsoft by then?

No, I was still at Microsoft. So I, in fact, I, my last day at Microsoft was September 30th and my first day at Lighthouse was October 1st.

Wow.

So I went right away. But a couple things attracted me about Lighthouse. One, you know, I had done every role at Microsoft. If you looked across the company outside of gaming, I've always been an enterprise corporate person, but I did IT ops, engineering, sales, marketing, finance. And so I felt like I kind of spanned the whole environment at Microsoft. But also, you know, Lighthouse is about 1,000 people, about $300 million in revenue in an interesting space, a space that has not benefited a lot from technology in the legal area.

As a former trial lawyer, I know exactly what you're talking about.

And so I felt like, hey, I loved building out Office 365 and going through all of those pains of convincing customers to believe in the cloud and the cloud is a great thing and you'll get all this benefit. And I see a lot of similarities here. Helping customers, you know, trust technology, leverage technology to create better outcomes, save money, be faster. And so I saw a lot of that as I was on the board, and Lighthouse just had a fantastic culture, a fantastic board of directors, a fantastic team that I had met. And so I started the company about a year ago.

Wow. You know, it's so interesting when I look at your website, I just laughed at myself because I started practicing law in 1977, and was a hardcore civil and commercial trial lawyer for 22 years. And we— I was the first one in our region to start seeing that technology could leverage my work. I was going up against big LA, San Francisco, New York firms on these huge cases involving hundreds of millions of dollars. They threw bodies at the case. I threw technology at the case.

That's great.

And that's why I won. Just as an aside, I learned how to code in 1969 at Dartmouth. I learned BASIC, all-purpose symbolic instruction code, on a, on a huge mainframe.

And it's amazing that coding, even though the languages are different, the architectures, the concepts are the same.

Logic is also structured.

Yeah, how you structure, how you design it, right?

So I mean, I got to say that John Kemeny, who was the president of Dartmouth at that time, had a huge foresight to train us all. We all had to do a at least one class in computer programming of one kind or another. And I was a liberal arts major, but it served me in good stead because 15, 20 years later, now we're getting into this whole networking and microcomputer thing. And, and, and now all of a sudden it's— I'm— so many lawyers were afraid of it, and I embraced it.

Yeah, yeah. Now it's taught everywhere. I had a similar story in high school. Dominic Verso was a math teacher, and he started a class on Pascal and Fortran programming. You know, the early '80s, just like you and Dartmouth, that was unheard of, right, opportunity. But, you know, I'm super grateful to them because, you know, then you start realizing, wow, the power of technology and the scale it can provide, which everyone knows now, but legal still needs to understand it.

Well, and, you know, there are no— there are really no classes in law school. I'm the chair of the board of our local law school, and I've been—

I've taught law for—

I teach locally, and I also teach at Pepperdine University, and there are no classes in using technology, which is kind of amazing to me. So I— and so if lawyers want to learn about how to leverage technology in litigation, they've got to go to CLE courses, which I'm not even sure are very good because they're not very, you know, they're not very much in depth.

That's right. Well, and it's very similar. We started Office 365, the biggest objection customers had, CIOs of these big companies, was that I lose control.

The thing they—

that was my objection. I finally moved to 365 a year ago.

Oh, did you?

Yeah.

The thing they finally understood is it's good you lose control because you rely on an expert to do this for a living that can hire far more expertise than you can, and you basically snap into higher level security capabilities, costs, et cetera. It's the same thing right now with what we're doing, which is a lot of the mindset in legal is what you said is just hire lots of bodies, bring bodies because I've had eyes on it. I can trust eyes more.

More.

And in reality, humans are more error-prone.

And there's an economic incentive here because the more bodies you have, the more you can build.

That's right. And that's where we have one of the things we do, which was we sell to law firms and corporates directly because the corporation should understand, you know, I can get better outcomes at lower cost by leveraging technology. Now there's a lot of leading law firms that we work with quite closely, right, that also get that too and integrate our services into their go-to-market. Because it becomes an advantage for them.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So what is it that gets you excited in the morning? You've been in technology for your whole career. You're in Seattle. You've got— you've made lots of money. You probably wouldn't have to work if you didn't want to, I'm guessing, with all the options you got from Microsoft. So what is it that gets you going in the, in the, in the morning?

Well, the thing— the one thing that attracted me to come to Lighthouse, because I did have to think, hey, do I stay at Microsoft and in the job I'm in, or another job at Microsoft? Do Do you go retire? Not people my age. There's not a lot of people retired my age. There's not a lot of people to go hang out with.

Right.

And I don't think my wife would want me to retire.

Right.

She likes her life during the day. But the thing that really attracted me with Lighthouse is building something, you know, coming into a company that moved from kind of startup to medium-sized organization and build something bigger. And what I've, what I've really energized me as CEO here is creating opportunities for the team, for the thousand people that we have at Lighthouse, creating opportunities for them to grow their career, creating opportunities for them to make an impact for clients and, uh, for their families and for their friends. And in return, then you serve clients well. If your team is happy, if the thousand people at this company are happy, they're thriving, the clients then get great service and great capabilities. It's been a mind shift for me because I think in CEO, I came in, I thought, oh, I gotta just take care of clients. But in reality, I've gotta click, take care of the team who will then take care of the clients if they're thriving.

That I have heard again, I've interviewed, you know, 100, 100+ CEOs like you, and that's what I hear all the time. You know, hire people, your first, for startups, your first hires are the most important, but then take care of your people before you take care of anybody else and the rest of the business will be fine.

That's right. I've always had this personal philosophy of, of awesome lives. And I think of where I can touch lives, I want to help people have awesome lives. And that could be my family, my friends, but also coworkers, employees within Lighthouse, clients we serve. And so I get up every day to say, okay, how can I help people have awesome lives? And it's not just because of me, but how do I create an environment that people can thrive? How do I create an environment people can do their best work, they can get fulfillment out of their jobs?

And I suspect, because that's— you sound like me, when you're able to do that, there's tremendous personal satisfaction.

Yeah, for sure.

At watching people, it's not about the money, it's not about the job, it's about serving others and watching them grow.

That's right.

And having them grow and move into positions and doing things they never thought they would be able to do.

That's right.

And doing it successfully.

That's right. That's right. And it's a different world now. You have to adjust in a remote-first world.

This is true.

Which is a lot of what we live in. You know, one of the things we've done just to be competitive even before COVID is we, we do remote-first for people. We can hire better talent that way. We give people more flexibility. And so you really have to be intentional about how you interact with people because it doesn't happen so naturally where you come in an office. Microsoft, the whole— my whole time there, everyone was in Redmond. That is where all the senior people were. You're seeing them every day. It takes me a lot back to, you know, my Accenture days where you're bringing people together throughout the world. Now typically back then you'd get face to face, but now, you know, you're doing it remotely and you're finding ways to build those relationships and get feedback and interaction in a remote-first world.

Before the pandemic, I'd been a Zoom adopter about a year after the platform came online. But during the pandemic, of course, everybody had to shift. And one of my core professions is a mediator. It used to be all in person. And one of my, I had a mediation last summer where I had a lawyer in Paris, a lawyer in Florida, a client in Toronto, another client in Temecula, California, and they were fighting over Peruvian avocados. That were shipped to Philadelphia. I mean, you couldn't have done that 5 years ago, right?

No, it's amazing. And the customer's mentality has changed too. I think, you know, before COVID a customer would think you don't really care about them unless you showed up in person to meet them, which was super inefficient. You know, sometimes you travel for 3 days and meet one customer if you're going to Europe. And now, you know, the mentality is much different. You know, they're happy with a 30-minute call and they don't think, oh, you don't really care about me because you're just doing a 30-minute call.

Well, you can also have much more contact with customers.

That's right.

Because, because, you know, you don't have to travel to New York City every, every week to have contact. You can say, hey, let's hop on a Zoom call, have a chat, and you can talk to them as— and people are used to that, and it works.

That's right.

Really powerful. So, so you've developed a lot of skills and attributes over the years. What do you think is unique about you that you're bringing, um, to Lighthouse Global?

I, you know, the thing And this is one of the reasons I wanted to join Lighthouse as CEO. I've performed every function. I've worked in almost every function in an organization, large, across all different, all this, all disciplines. And so what's been really nice here is when we have a marketing conversation or a finance conversation or sales or go-to-market, I can draw on experiences I had over the years at Microsoft. I even dip into some of my experiences at Accenture, you know, because We have a large part of our business is professional services, and so I can draw on that experience. I think, come, you know, a lot of that comes with just age and getting older, but a lot of it comes with, you know, having the different functional experiences over the years, which I think is unique to me. A lot of people, I think, spend their career in one pipe. They find a discipline, they spend their time in that discipline. I've really liked getting experience in just different disciplines.

When you were at Microsoft, how were you able to move from discipline to discipline and not not get locked into kind of one specialty or one discipline.

Yeah, I think, I think part of it came from my consulting background, because in consulting you're always doing something new, right? You're right. I remember my first day at a client, it was US Sprint in Washington, DC. I'd never worked before, I never coded JCL, and I'm coding JCL, and you kind of have to figure it out. I love kind of coming into something, having never done it before, and learning on the job. At Microsoft, you really had to do it through building relationships. You had to build trust because, you know, I moved over to run our US enterprise sales here. I think I mentioned I never carried a quota. I got handed a $5 billion quota. There took Robert Youngjohns, who was my boss at the time, took him a lot of trust in me, right, to bring me into that role. But I had done, as we were building Office 365, we had done sales calls together, we had met together to strategize on customers and account strategy. And so I built that trust in that relationship. And as I moved around, It was a fun part of the job, which was maintaining a network and interacting with people across the company. It wasn't— I didn't do it because I thought, oh, maybe that person will be my boss at some point, right? I did it because it was more fun in your job to have a broad network and to meet with people regularly across the company. And the side benefit was, as roles opened up and they needed someone, I often got tapped to go into a different discipline.

I probably— it probably hasn't hurt that you're probably a super bright guy too, or that I'm not an expert in anything.

I just can do a lot of things.

Well, there's a— there, you know, jack of all trades, master of none, but there's a certain— there's a certain advantage to that. I mean, when I was trying cases, a few clients would walk in the door and I wouldn't know— I'd have to learn their business from ground zero all the way up, and every time it was different.

Yeah, that's right.

That kind of sounds like the same process you walk into a division or a team that you had it saying, what's going on here?

It's one of the pieces of advice I always give people. It's easier to do early in career, you know, it gets harder. Microsoft, I was the corporate vice president level, that's the officer of the company. It gets harder because those become senior jobs, right? I think my tenure at Microsoft and track record reputation lend itself to me being, having other opportunities. But I always tell people early in career, like, move, you know, if you started in finance, go figure out how to get into marketing, go figure out how to get into sales, go figure out how to get into operations. You know, early on career is really valuable to build those, that breadth of experience.

So where, where do you think Lighthouse is gonna go? It's, it's kind of in a niche market. You're providing cloud services, data services, e-discovery. For people that don't know what that is, in these massive lawsuits, there is a huge amount of information that is typically in emails and data on people's computers, and it's impossible to sift through it. So you probably have to use AI and other high technology things to be able to search through the data to find stuff that's relevant to the case. But it's very esoteric and something that most people, if you had never tried a lawsuit before, wouldn't know or care about.

Yeah, it's not— yeah, it's usually the, you know, the cases we deal with are often on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, but no one would ever know Lighthouse was involved in them behind the scenes.

Yeah.

But if you say, you know, if you ask where we're going, I think of Lighthouse as helping customers manage their risk, their reputation, and their regulations. Okay. I think of it that broadly. And when I think of legal cases, these legal cases are significant in terms of potential cost of the company and brand ability.

Mm-hmm.

And so today, you know, we help customers with their e-discovery, support them on litigation, help them win cases, help them defend themselves. On this litigation. But if you think of where we're going, we really will be helping customers broadly with the risk because the technology we have is super sophisticated at finding the needles in the haystack. And we don't do it through keyword search. We actually do it through generative AI, through large language model, through linguistics, because the problem with the keyword search is you get so many false—

that's right—

positives. When you start structuring it based on linguistics, it gives you far more accuracy and relevancy.

That's really interesting. Uh, just as a side note, uh, one of, one of my early largest cases was, uh, I'll, I'll just tell you a story really quickly. It was a situation where, uh, two partners split their businesses. The one of the partners sent out a 3-page handwritten letter to all of the customers, which was highly defamatory, caused my client to go into bankruptcy and lose everything.. And I remembered at Dartmouth that we had the English professors were using linguistic analysis on in the Hewitt Computer Center. They had programmed it to, to look at, is this Christopher Marlowe's work or is this William Shakespeare's work?

Yeah.

And I remembered that. And so I took this letter to a linguistics professor and we did the same kind of analysis and it was like a smoking gun pointing at this guy, right? Ended up, ended up litigating and getting $10 million for my client.

Oh, interesting.

That was back in the day.

Yes, it's far more, especially when you think about all the unstructured content you're dealing with in a large organization, right? The structured content, you know, in SAP or in your financial systems is easy. It's the unstructured stuff, especially now on the different means you have communicating through Slack, through Zoom, through Teams, Signal, you know, and so you take all that unstructured data, you lose linguistics, but the benefits go far beyond legal because the benefits can go to where do I have hotspots in terms of toxic employee communication, manager to employee.

Oh, I thought about that.

Where do I have IP leakage, risk for IP leakage? So you can start applying it to any of the things that might damage you from a reputational or risk perspective.

So how do companies do that? Did— how do they— they just give you— they give you access to the data, or you get the data and then you run it through your system?

That's right, that's right. And there's a lot of work that goes on to make sure you process the data properly, because you can't just say, here's access to our systems, go after it.

Right.

You actually have to process and structure the data. You have to, you know, you have all this duplicates, you, you think of an email string, right? You have just response upon a response. And so early on we have a team that will do the digital forensics, will help collect all the information. Sometimes it's on mobile phones, sometimes, you know, it can be anywhere. Bring it all together. We process that, put it in a format that then they can be queried on for linguistics. And then we hire, it's, Fascinating, some of the employees we have. I was just talking to an employee, he was a professor at Pomona in linguistics, has his PhD in linguistics. He said, I wanted to get out of academia. I had no idea I could go get a corporate job as a linguist. We hire linguists in computer science that will come in and they'll tune the algorithms based on what the client is looking to do. And so there'll be some dialogue with the client. Here's a situation, then they can tune the linguistics algorithms to to direct at that scenario.

I guess it takes a geeky lawyer like me to really appreciate what you're doing. That's really cool. Let's pivot to listening a little bit. I left the practice of law in 2000 to become a peacemaker and a mediator, and listening— I've developed some listening skills that are very powerful, and I found that listening is really the foundational skill of life. I'm just curious about your take on listening and how you've used listening throughout your career as a consultant and then as a Microsoft executive and now with Lighthouse.

Yeah, it's a great question. I think for me personally, I've always been more of a— actually more of an introvert, and I think that tends to be more of a listener as well. I think my, you know, what people call superpowers, right? But I think that's kind of a common theme is taking complexity and simplifying it. And for me, it's always been about Hearing from people in terms of a scenario, a business need, a business requirement, then how do you synthesize that down to communicate it in a simple, simpler way? But then if you look at every function I've been in, for instance, in sales, I think our, the best salespeople in the world are great listeners. And if you look at engineering, often you get a lot of introverts that don't say anything, but that doesn't mean they're not listening.

That's right.

There's, there, there, I think there's engineers that listen intensely and capture everything you say, but have a hard time repeating it back. And there's salespeople that won't stop talking and some are listening and actually are applying their talking to what you're saying.

Right.

And so when I go into a different function, I do try to emphasize the role of listening in the job people are in. And Part of that isn't just kind of keeping your mouth shut and listening. It's also listening, hearing, and then sharing what you heard and how you can help with what you heard, which is where the example of the sales comes in beautifully, which is, you know, what you want to do in sales is help customer with their outcome, what they want to achieve. But you have to understand that first and then bring that back to them to match what you could do for them.

So you're in, you're at I figured you were an introvert. I'm an introvert too. You never believe that. I mean, as a hardcore trial lawyer and everything I've done in my career, you would never know that I'm an introvert, but I am, and I know you are. What do you do when you're in a room? Let's just take an example. You're in a room of engineers, and engineers are typically introverted, not all, but I don't want to over-stereotype. How do you draw them out? You're talking about concepts, and there are 2 or 3 people in the room that are, you know, they're going off. And you got 5 other people in the room and they're all sort of sitting there quiet and you know you got value in there. How do you pull that value out?

Well, I think with engineers you have to ask questions. I mean, I think engineers typically want to talk about, you know, they want to show they know things. There's a value for them to say, hey, I'm smart, I know things. And so, you know, I kind of, I went from leading an engineering team to leading a sales team. When you lead an engineering team, you have an all-hands meeting or a team meeting the, you know, the first seats that are taken are in the back row, and then they work their way up.

I know.

Noll's meeting, the front row's taken first, and they work their way back. But I think with the engineers, you have to, you have to ask questions. You know, I think, you know, they're listening and hearing, they don't always offer it. And so then it's a question of challenging them with, now, how would you solve that problem? Because engineers are problem solvers, they want to know, and then they're willing to share how they'd solve that problem. I think they often need to be prompted.

It's funny, the back rows fill up first. I always, I teach graduate classes at Pepperdine and I always tell my students the first day of class, my A students are always in the front row. Yeah. The rest of you go ahead and sit in the back. That's right.

Like if you go to the Taylor Swift concert, the front row costs a lot more than the back row. But it is different in those disciplines. The salespeople, it's the same thing. You, you have to— sometimes you have to actually do the opposite with them, which is don't talk for 10 minutes and just listen. Now, then when I'm done, share what you heard, right?

Uh, I've worked with sales teams before teaching them—

I teach people how to listen to emotions rather than to words.

And when I worked with sales teams, what I told them is for the first 5 minutes or 10 minutes when you're talking to a prospect, don't, don't say a word. Listen to and reflect their emotions. Find out what they're— what the— what this person is really feeling. And if you do that, you can build that trust, you can build that rapport, and then they'll be more— since they know you get them because they've been validated, then they will open up and tell you what they need and be more likely to consider what you have to offer.

Yeah, I think that's— yeah, totally true, where, you know, most of the communication doesn't come through the words, it comes through the context and the emotion, everything, right?

Yeah.

And there are ways to learn how to do that. They're quite easy, quite— it's just the way you structure the data. My emotional data— emotions are data just like numbers on a spreadsheet. Now the problem is we're not trained how to read that data, so it just flies by us as unstructured data, so we can't make sense out of it. I've figured out a way to make sense out of it. And so when I teach people how to do this, there's a very structured way to get this process, so it becomes quite effective.

I, I also use— this is something when you see conflict in a meeting, which I think there should be conflict in meetings. I love this book, Death by Meetings, right? Talks about meetings should be like a movie, right? There's, because you don't go in a meeting without conflict, you want to meet to solve problems, you want those problems on the table, which will create conflict, but you want resolution by the end of the meeting.

Conflict is good.

Yeah.

If you know what you're doing. Yeah.

And if you have resolution where the conflict just doesn't linger for forever.

That's right. And keeping it from becoming personal and keeping it from becoming a fight to be right.

That's right. That's the challenge of trying, you know, when there is conflict, having people state each other's view. So, okay, you heard the two views. Now you state what you heard this person saying. And almost always they completely get it wrong. Of course they do. It's like, no, that was not what they said at all.

That's right.

What they're hearing is creating the emotion in them, but what the other person is trying to say is actually not what you're hearing.

That's exactly right. And that's, that's a, that's a, it's a brilliant technique. I use it myself. And then I add on to that, not only what they just said, but what's their emotional experience while they're saying this? Oh, they're frustrated, they're angry, they're upset, they don't feel heard, they don't feel respected. And that's where we get the, that's where we get the deep validation.

And also, when you're a And I think this is one thing I always have to work on. It is when you are emotional, when you're angry, frustrated, it's hard to listen.

Yeah. So I'll give you a quick tip on that. Whenever you feel angry or frustrated and emotional, just label what you're feeling. I'm really angry about it. I'm pissed off. I'm frustrated. I don't feel heard. I don't feel respected. Whatever. I'm anxious. Label your own emotions. There's all kinds of neuroscience behind this. I won't bother you with all the science, but it's very powerful. It'll de-escalate you.

Instantly. Yeah.

Next time you get a little frustrated, say, I'm feeling really frustrated and kind of pissed off right now.

Yeah.

Say it to yourself and you'll just feel your whole body relax. It's good feedback. Powerful how it works. All right, one more question. I'll let you go. Uh, um, what's one thing, Ron, about yourself that we wouldn't know about unless you revealed it to us?

What's one thing I— I mean, well, you don't know me that well, so I could probably almost say anything, but I have not I am very, you know, I do like running. I ran competitively in college. I thought about running professionally as well after college, except for that stress fracture I had at the end of my senior year. But I still managed. I got to coach my twins' track team. The track coach quit at their junior year, and so I got to go coach their team junior and senior year of track, which is fantastic. And now I've got two twins. My twins are fifth year at Notre Dame. They're actually both at Notre Dame as well, running competitively. And one actually won the national championship in the steeplechase earlier this spring. And so they're very, very good runners. And so the thing that I love is just traveling around the country to visit them or watch their track meets and keep track of that.

You've got to be really proud.

Yes, yes. It's— and it's, uh, and, and also I have 4 kids, and my 2 older ones, one ran in college as well, that my oldest son, um, and the second one did not. But it's— we, the 3 of us, went running, uh, yesterday together. It's fulfilling to see the ones racing competitively and doing well at a collegiate level, but also the other two that do it more recreationally. It's fun to see them do it by choice for exercise.

And so you can all run together.

That's right. Yeah, I'm a little slower, but sometimes they go back.

They'll slow down to let Dad keep up.

That's right. That's right.

Well, Ron, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Doug. Appreciate the time.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me. Me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.