246 - Creating Meaningful Customer Experiences: The Power of Custom Boxes in Marketing with Custom Box Agency's Mark Stern

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.

Mark Stern, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO and founder of a company called Custom Bock Agency. Which can be found at customboxagency.com. And what I find really fascinating is that you design custom boxes that your clients can use as part of their marketing and outreach, whether you're in professional services business like me, or maybe a fitness coach or whatever. You can design boxes that can connect your clients to their customers in a really unique way. Did I get that right?

You did, you did. We anchor everything on the customer lifecycle. So if you think about like the customer lifecycle, you acquire a customer. So the activities on how people can first find out about you to buying your products and services, or is it a delivery? You bought my product and service. So this is about delivering a better experience. Or is it retention, which is all about— usually we say retention's recognition. I want to celebrate you for hitting a milestone or introducing the next piece to extend ultimately customer lifetime value. So this idea of acquisition or delivery or retention. Those are the 3 campaigns we look at. And with any business, there are certain industries that we have played really heavily in. But we'll delve into your business. And if you're looking for an acquisition piece, we can build out a box experience to acquire the customer. That's delivery. We can build out a whole experience around providing a better onboarding to getting that first quick win or retention. How do we celebrate? How do we introduce the next piece in the equation?

So you were with Deloitte for many years as a consultant. How the heck did you get out of corporate and into doing this kind of a business?

Oh gosh, it's crazy because I, I grew up in Alabama and I was told that there's one natural progression to happiness in life. And that is you graduate high school, you go to college, you graduate college, you get the job. Then eventually you go back to grad school and then you get the dream job and family, white picket fence, and life is great. And I, uh, got my MBA at Duke. I graduated in, um, business school in 2012. So we were the class that when the economy burst in 2008, a lot of people lost their jobs in 2009. Typically when people lose their jobs, what do you do? It's really easy to go back to school. So 2010, it was just a crazy time to be in that world. And they weren't really giving out a lot of scholarship. And so I graduated in 2012 with $165,000 in student loan debt now with a minimum 2-year commitment to a consulting firm. So when I was at Deloitte, it was, they own everything you produce in and outside the firm. So there was no, I want to be an entrepreneur with a side hustle because the firm owned everything that you produce. And they did that as a result of what happened with the Enron scandal. They really were protective of the IP and the insights that you get access to. And so to answer your question, what made the leap? I went to a conference that I had no business being at. There's a company called Mindvalley.

Oh, sure. I know who they— I've been on a couple of their podcasts.

Have you? Yes. And so Vishen Lakhiani, and I came across it because someone recommended a book, which I was intrigued by the book, which made me like research more on YouTube. And then I came across this— at the time it was called Awesomeness Fest. They've now rebranded to A-Fest. Because I don't think people love the name Awesomeness, right? But it was 250 entrepreneurs from all over the world coming together and they're like, it's TED Talk speakers meet Burning Man parties. And I'm like trapped in corporate America. I tried to get all my buddies to go, but finally it was just at a low point while in corporate America going, I have all this student loan debt and I don't even know if this is the right path that I need to be on. But when I went to this conference, I knew no one and it introduced me to the world of online entrepreneurship. I didn't even know it existed. And so back in, this was in 2013. So when I was exposed to this, it was like the bubble of the world. I thought I was crushing it in corporate America, doing everything I was supposed to as a kid. And now you just showed me a different way to have a fulfilling life and came back and it shattered me a little bit because I'm going back to my reality, but I was introduced to this new reality and Deloitte took care of me. I had an amazing time there, but in 2013, leaving that world, with as much student loan debt as I had. I thought it was the most irresponsible thing. And there was like a mindset story in my head that took me till literally 2018 before I finally had the courage to say, I keep investing all this money in the online entrepreneur space, I keep going to the conferences, but I'm not diagnosing what's really going on. And what was really going on was, although I love my job at Deloitte, there was a disconnect between me and like the heart, the, the gut telling me that there's something bigger and the pinnacle of it, and this is for me the biggest part, was when you're in that environment, you don't slow down. Your brain is just nonstop work, work. The only time you get to slow down is between Christmas and New Year's because everyone takes off between Christmas and New Year's. And that Christmas, it was 2017, had this weird premonition that if I don't leave this job, it will kill me. And came back and it was January 3rd, 2018. Had no idea what I would do. As a business owner, but was like, you've had this desire. If I could release the energy of Deloitte or corporate consulting, I can free up the mental capacity to figure out what impact do I want to create. And that's where I put in my notice. And it was a 5-month notice just because I told the partner, I will stay as long as you need me to. I will finish out the project, but I got to move on. I've got to explore this. And Deloitte's wonderful in the sense of if you go out and explore and realize Deloitte is your forever home. They will always welcome you back if you're a good performer. But it was what I needed to do to ultimately cut cords with corporate America and try the game of online entrepreneurship.

It's a pretty scary jump to make. I gave my firm 1 week's notice and left $10 million on the table to become a peacemaker with no plan. I did everything I tell my clients never to do, right? No savings, no nothing.

But the reality is I wouldn't change a thing. I don't think I would.

Exactly. I've never been happier in my life. The last 20+ years, 24 years have been just absolutely— 25 years now. It's been phenomenal. I've helped more people. I help more people in a week today than I helped in 22 years as a trial lawyer.

Wow.

Amazing. Incredible. So how do you get into the box business? I've never heard of anything like that before. What, how do you figure that out?

It was, it started with what's a pain point that I was experiencing when starting to delve deeper into the online realm. And the thing that happens is if you think about, we used to order things, you'd see something in the back of the magazine, you'd see the infomercial on TV and you would see, you would order and it would get mailed to you and you get this box set of resources and materials. And now in the digital age, when you see a lot of these online products, the barriers to entry are so low. I could take my phone camera and film an entire online product course and put it online. And so you see because the barriers are so low to create digital content for content creators or people who create products online. It's so easy to do, which means there's just so much content in the marketplace that it's hard to understand, is it actually good? And I think that there's a stigma that a lot of people see a lot of the content available online and they question it or question whether or not they want to spend money on it. And one of my biggest pain points was when we went so extremely digital, Um, we lost the kinesthetic, we lost the touch. And when I left corporate America, the first thing I did was someone told me about this concept of a virtual summit, meaning I can interview all these people and create my own virtual conference. And someone told me I needed to interview 40 people. So I interviewed 40 people. They were each an hour long. And then I released it when we launched this 5-day conference. And the problem I had with it was I, as a host doing the interviews, I was overwhelmed at the amount of content. And now I'm dumping 40 hours of content on listeners who I ultimately want to sell a higher ticket product or service to. And I'm like, I've just given them so much content and it's hard to navigate and it's 40 different perspectives. I wish that someone in this situation would just send me the key insights, the notes, the things that I needed to get the quick insights or the quick wins or the best practices. So then I can move on my way. And then if I have something to sell them to, if I position myself as their trusted mentor, Hopefully it's just this natural flow to say, okay, I love how this person represents and helps me advance forward in my business. What's it gonna be like if I hired him as a mentor? And what I ended up doing was I created a publication that I took the highlights from all the speakers, and it was just this publication that I put together. It was called Entrepreneur Elements. The event was targeting people who were like me, leaving corporate America, becoming an online entrepreneur. And what I did not expect to happen was when people started receiving the publication, They started doing videos to show it off. And so I would see these videos of people holding up, taking pictures with it. They would open it up and teach from it. Speakers, because I highlighted speakers, it edified them in a really powerful way. So they were showing off their spreads to their communities, which then in turn drove more sales. And I'm like, it was like, there's this whole unboxing that's happening. And this was a publication that I didn't anticipate was happening, that they are promoting my product in a way that if it was digital only. They wouldn't, and they're saving my product because typically when you get a book or a publication, you don't throw it out, typically put it on a bookshelf. So this was like the first intro to say, okay, if I launch something digital, I should consider doing something physical and decided to do a second summit with only 10 people. The topic was how to do high ticket sales. So we called it High Ticket Online, and I took 10 different styles of high ticket selling, interviewed these 10 experts, and then built an entire box experience around it to help people quickly navigate which videos should I watch and how can I lay out my high-ticket offer. And I mailed them the boxes if they purchased it. And what ended up happening was I was getting all these unboxing videos, 3 to 7 minutes each. And then again, now the people were selling my product for me. All this organic traffic was being driven and that was it. I was like, there's something to marrying a virtual or digital or local experience with something physical and actually giving people the tools and resources they need. A big problem that's being solved here is a couple things like when you give me what I need, you remove all obstacles. So I'm ready to get started with your product or service immediately because you sent me what I needed. If you make me print out something, you're assuming I have a printer that has ink, that has paper, that is hooked up to my computer, that I'm organized. If one of those things goes wrong, then all of a sudden you just put up an obstacle that I'll say someday I'll get to it. And when I put my blood, sweat, and tears into producing something, I want people to get results. But that was it where this all started, was there was something that was nagging me about physical married with digital. And then especially coming from Deloitte and an experiential marketing background, it was not about a swag box. We say swag is— swag means stuff without a goal. Stop sending people swag. It's about the intentionality of the experience, but it's getting to the heart of what are the tools and resources that they actually need, and have we set the rules and the context around the experience to really show them a pathway and set them up for success. So that is a lot of what we look at. And it's crazy because it was never meant to be the business. It was the accidental business. COVID happens and all of a sudden everyone needed what we had to offer. And it was not a full business pre-COVID. But once COVID started, there was something about going 100% all in on this concept of custom boxes as an enabler to businesses and an enabler to drive results faster. That was just incredible. And the business just grew from there.

And looking at the website, it looks, it looks like you're customizing for a whole bunch of different people, but I'm wondering what the— is this cost prohibitive? Is it just for the people who can really afford a big deal, or do you have it dialed in so that it's pretty affordable? I guess it would depend on volume, how many boxes you buy.

But my— so SwagBoxes, as a comparison, typically I see about a price point of anywhere from $60 to $120 is what I see a lot of people spending on SwagBoxes. My happy zone with our boxes We have— and a swag box may have 6 to 8 items in it. Our boxes typically have about 30 to 50 items in it. A lot of it is because when you start to break down the experience and go— we look at the journey you take your customers through and we segmented it out and it's what do they need? But when it's organized, think about a board game, like everything's inside the box, but it's organized in a way that's easy to navigate.

Right.

And so with that, my happy zone is about $15 to $30 per box, especially when you're getting at scale, 500, 1,000 units up front. It does not need to break the bank. But I like that because I may send you a box when you join my program or buy my product or service, and on it may say that this is box 1 of 4. I can create this open loop that all I'm doing is giving— I may show you the map if you're working with me for a year. If this is a multi-step program, I may show you here's the journey you're going to go on, but you're— you only have the tools and resources you need for the first part of the journey. So I'm trying to minimize overwhelm and just show you progress. If you feel the momentum of going through, then I can introduce the next piece, box 2 of 4. And all of a sudden, the spirit of collection, if you're actually collecting things, people want to close the loop. So that becomes a retention play because all of a sudden, if I want box 3 or 4 and 4 or 4, I know what I'm striving for. I know what I need to do because the story's clear in the box. You just painted a beautiful story for me that I'm going to want to close the loop, which means from a business perspective, you have to keep playing the game.

What's the price point that most of your customers are selling at?

It's a great question. And here's the thing. If it's an acquisition play, we have some people doing a free plus ship, meaning they're not charging anything for it. We have people that have 47 for Challenges 1997. We have people that have masterminds that they charge $25,000 or $50,000 for that they include it. And so the sky's the limit. It's just different strategies, whether it's an acquisition, delivery, or retention play. I'll tell you for me personally, um, we're about to launch a product called 57 Hats. The whole premise of this is, as a business owner, do you understand how many hats you are wearing? Because the first part of delegating roles is if I don't know all the different permutations and roles that I play, like if you're a small business owner, you may be the CEO, but you also may be the head of sales. You may be the website builder, the copywriter. You may be the, um, scheduler for meetings because you're a team of one. But knowing that you're wearing all those hats, we built a whole system where we actually played off the concept of what would a CEO hat look like or an administrative assistant hat. And they're all just fun depictions of it. But we're leveraging cards in a way that you can lay out and have a vernacular. So I'm using this as an example to say this product, to have this produced, our cost is under $5 and it's a beautiful experience. So we're going to be doing that as a free plus ship. It's a no-brainer as a free plus ship. But for other things, and that's the thing, is that if you are putting the Yeti mug or— this is why I don't love swag. When you put that branded swag, that's when things get really expensive. I'm like, I'd rather you leverage those types of trinkets as what we call a jewel, meaning I'll give you what you need, but if you hit a milestone, I may celebrate you by sending you the t-shirt. You don't get the t-shirt for joining my program or buying my product. You earn the t-shirt and we may do a feedback loop. You may share your story and we collect a testimonial. And as a thank you, we'll send you the t-shirt, but you earned it. You went through a transformation. It has different meaning than I just showed up and bought it and you gave me the t-shirt, which I have no connection to. And stuff again goes to Goodwill, it gets thrown out, it gets left in the hotel. And if you're spending your money on it, spend it on the things that they actually need to be set up for success.

All right. So it's not only the box, it's the contents that go into the box that you guys are working on.

We go through and here's the thing, when people don't know how to think about physical, There's, and especially with the online space, people are so wired on digital because it's easy when you start to blend the world. So if you think about what is actually, what is experience? Experience is seen through the senses. So go to Disney World, like what, what you hear, what you touch, taste, and smell. Online, when you have an online-only product, it's only what, and what you hear. You're tapping into two senses. The dynamic nature of now mixing physical, I can introduce not only what you can hear, but also touch, taste, and smell in a really powerful way. Which provides a little bit of a new opportunity. And so when we work with clients, we, it's not just about the exterior of the box. It's about helping them rewire their mindset to think about how do we blend the worlds of physical and digital. And so when clients work with us, not only do we map out the entire strategy, we can build it. And so this is why we have a whole team that is strong on design. We are a distributor. We have partners around the globe. We can get it produced. We have a warehouse here in Austin, Texas. So it's not about just a fun idea. It's only, it's a real, defining the idea and then truly bringing it to life. Wow.

You've been doing this since what, 2018?

Informally, 2018. And then we went all in on it in the beginning of COVID 2020.

2020.

Wow.

So yeah, 3 and a half, 4 years. What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to go to work these days?

Such a great question. I have the world's best team. I think that the one gift I will say is the product is incredibly, like, intrinsically motivating because our clients that we work with all are very impact-driven. They are highly motivated. They want to leave a big impact in this world. And so what's really cool is every single client experience and every single box we're building out is a different story. And it's a different story that when you see it hit market, to see the reaction of customers receiving this, for me, is one of the most exciting things about the world. But team, like, blessings of coming from corporate America before delving into entrepreneurship is it teaches you structure, discipline, respect, client service and client management, team building. And so I think that's been the thing that I came from a world that when people say that they're leaving their 9 to 5, I'm like, that sounds like a pipe dream. You have a 9 to 5, you can end your day at 5. That wasn't the world I came from. It was a 24/7. It was a nonstop. You're always on. If the phone vibrates, you're diving for it. To build a business in which balance is a key important to you. Because I don't want my team working after 5. I don't want my team working on the weekends. I want them to have balance and go spend time with their family, but I want them to be excited. Just, it's just been so much fun to create a business that represents a lot of the heart of what's important to me.

I'm going to pause just for a minute. I'm going to make a note. I got to, my dog is all good.

Take it on.

So what's, what gets you up every day is you have the most amazing team. You are the one that created the team. So how do you go about doing that?

I think part of it, this is one of those things that like growing a business, one of the things they don't tell you is as the business grows, it evolves the culture in such a big way and either people evolve or they don't evolve. Luckily, pretty much, um, it's funny because we're almost up to 30 people now, which is crazy. Most people have been there over 2 years. So since the beginning, we've really not lost people since growing Custom Box Agency. A lot of the people that were there at the early days are still here today. And I think part of it is just you respecting the people, you supporting them, you letting them thrive, you providing the guardrails. Because I don't ever want to see my team fail. My team knows that. And if something goes wrong, which is bound to happen in a growing business, it's not about putting blame. It's about diagnosing how it happened so we can learn from it and make sure it doesn't happen again. Or we can at least put the processes in place to protect team. And to protect client and protect the business. And so the tenets, I think, that we really look at are just around, at the end of the day, I don't care who did it. If something goes wrong, I just want to understand, can we repeat it? Because if I can repeat it, understand how it happened, I can build the process to make sure it doesn't happen again. So that constant state of learning, I think, is an important thing. But I don't know, it's, I'm easy to work with and I want others to win. And so I think that may contribute to the culture, but It's also a culture that now that we're the size, that now that we're the size that we are, how the team is very protective of the team as well. And so when we bring new people on the team, that cultural fit is so important because you want to respect that dynamic. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if that's the best answer, but there's just a lot of respect that I think is important in a workplace.

What you're talking about reminds me of the Athena study at Google. I don't know if you ever came across that study where Google commissioned some of its in-house psychologists to answer the question, why are the top 1/10 of 1% of our teams so incredible compared to everybody else? And the answer was psychological safety. When, when the leaders could create emotional and psychological safety, the team's performance just went off the charts. And as I'm listening to you, I'm hearing a lot of the elements of psychological safety created by you as a CEO and leader and founder are elements that are in there. Growth mindset, wanting to learn, not blaming, making mistakes as part of the process. Let's just make sure— let's see what we can learn from it. That's— that is all part of that idea of making people feel emotionally safe. And when they feel safe They have instant trust, loyalty, compassion, and they're able to collaborate and cooperate rather than fight.

And I'll tell you this, I didn't mean to cut you off. The, the, one of the best things I ever did, which I was nervous about doing and looking back and I can't stress this enough at the early days, I did a, like a team retreat where I flew the core members of the team to Austin, Texas, where I live and we rented an Airbnb and for me, it wasn't like we were still really small. That was such a big expense for me because I'm taking on the cost of flying. I think it was 8 to 10 people to Austin, Texas and putting them in an Airbnb, not knowing what would happen. But one of the things that we did was we were starting to revisit our process at the time and how we were delivering to clients. And my integrator at the time, she's like, Mark, stop talking. We got this. And she's, I want you just to sit down. And just provide guidance and support. And so I was like, okay. And to watch them step up and start to define the business process that I'm a process strategy and ops guy from Deloitte, to see them start to take ownership of it. I don't know what happened after that retreat, but the business was never the same. The team was never the same. And all of a sudden it was almost like just letting them be a part of the co-creation of the business was so transformative that we've done so many retreats since. And it's not me evolving the business, it's the team evolving the business. And I think that is one of the things that if they feel like they are part of the story and a part of the creation, the way that they took responsibility for something that started as a silly idea for me has been absolutely transformative in so many ways to the business.

Wow. Yeah. So what is it, Mark, that you think that's unique about you that you bring to the business that's made it so successful?

I think I'm easy to work with. I think I embark on my own line of curiosity. For me, Part of a lot of where this business has come is I love a good puzzle. And if things are simple and easy to figure out, it's not challenging enough for me. And I think that was like coming from the corporate American world is I like to get challenged and I like to know that I can delve deep and get to the solution. And as I was building out Custom Box Agency, I never thought it would evolve to be what it is today. I thought we'd be something— I didn't know what I thought we would— this would turn out to be. I didn't know that I was creating this new blue ocean for what we were doing the way we did it. But I think that part of it is, I, you've heard the term, you're only as good as your weakest link, right? Which in many different facets is a fascinating concept to me and has been a big growth opportunity, both internally and looking at the business. Because I use that principle in so many different ways. And when I was looking at a lot of the partners that we had to rely on, we want to be world-class. We kept on partnering with people who wanted to be good enough. So if I partner with people who want to be good enough, the best I can be is because they're controlling a part of my business. And so part of the curiosity element would be, if I'm truly serious about growing this business, then this piece needs to come in-house. Like fulfillment was one of those areas that intimidated me. How do you start a fulfillment center? How do you start to set up and manage inventory? How do you start to distribute and get things out to the customer so it can get delivered in a timely manner? But the challenge of it, that is just from a mark of curiosity, is someone figured this out and I bet I can put the pieces together to figure out what needs to be done. To build this new capability. And I think that spirit is something that has helped grow Custom Box Agency in the sense of, if it makes sense and it's something that could allow me to serve my clients at a higher level and allow us to deliver better quality product, let's figure it out. And so that's the piece of the strategy of our business I will happily give away. If you want me to break down exactly how Custom Box Agency operates from ideation to fulfillment, I'll give you the whole blueprint, the whole toolkit. The question is, are you going to want to figure out the puzzle to put all these pieces together in the capacity to be able to play this game? And so that's where I get excited is the more complex, it's like eating candy to me because I don't want it to seem complex to my clients. I don't want it to seem complex to the team, but as long as we assemble it in a beautiful way, it could seem to be seamless even though the backend was to how we got there is a lot more complex. And that's what excites me is simple is boring. And if it's a good puzzle, I get excited.

Interesting. You said something, I wanna turn just for a few minutes to listening. You said something earlier, a few minutes ago about the first retreat you had when one of your people got up and said, hey Mark, we got this. And you had to learn how to listen and evaluate. How did you, instead of being in charge, you had to back off and listen and learn. How do you manage that?

Oh, I, I welcomed it cuz it was one of those things that it caught me so off guard. Because when you start a business and especially the world that I came from in corporate consulting, there's such a high bar. We have a term that is it client ready? And the lens that I have is, is it client ready? Meaning client ready means the final deliverable is so polished. It's almost perfection that it just needs to be put in a museum. It's so perfect. It's not sloppy. It's well thought through. It's sound. It's a perfect recommendation based on the insights that you have. And so the standard that I'm used to is so extremely high. And, and so for me, it was like one of those things of wanting control. And so when this happened, it was a time of why don't I, why do I feel the need to have the amount of control that I'm having over this situation? So when the integrator came forward and said that, it was one of those almost welcome of, okay, let's just see how this goes. And then to see the team truly step up and to your point, just to, to listen and observe. Like they were 10 times, 100 times more qualified to help guide that conversation than I ever would have known had I just kept my mouth shut.

So obviously listening has been an important part of your career, both in corporate consulting and also as an entrepreneur. How do you go about developing your listening skills?

Good question. I would think about, so the ways that I, you know, when working with teams or different departments in our organization, I love to when they present a challenge, I love to put it back on them and just see, how would you address this? And just listen to how they would start to break down. I think one of the most powerful things when I was in corporate consulting was sometimes I just need you to demonstrate thinking and just show me how you're thinking through a problem, not here's the result. And if you can show me how you're thinking, for me, that gives me a lot of confidence in terms of saying the way you're thinking about the challenge is correct. Because when people don't demonstrate thinking, for me, it's just a missed opportunity for growth on both sides. And so I think that's one of the things that I get excited about is I don't want the team to be dependent on me for solutions, all solutions. And the reality is when I put it back on them, they have the right solution or they have better solutions than what I was thinking of. But part of it is just having them demonstrate thinking and the power of just demonstrating thinking. And that for me, from a listening perspective, is now there's just certain people on the team that they may for a second guess how they're approaching a problem. But then part of it is just as they break down how they're thinking about it, the validation that I could offer just makes them stronger. And it also builds more confidence in me and their ability to step into their role or step into their leadership.

Validating others, another really important leadership concept that most people miss. One more question. I'll let you go. What's one thing about yourself, Mark, that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

One thing about myself that you would never know unless I revealed it. I, when I was born, my feet toed in pretty badly. And when you're from Alabama and everyone wants to play for the Alabama football team, I tried to play sports and would trip over my feet. I wore braces on my legs as a kid, and I had a belief at a young age that I was never meant to be an athlete. And it took me until I was in my 30s that I set a simple goal, just cuz I didn't self-identify as being an athlete, that I wanted to do a 5K a month for 12 months straight. And I wanted the medal and the t-shirt to showcase that I did it each month, which after 4 months led me to getting exposed to something called a Spartan race. I don't know if you've heard of Spartan.

No.

It's an obstacle course race in mud. So you're running in mud doing these obstacles. I've heard of it. And never thought in a million years that was someone I didn't like. I signed up for it cuz it was a group fun. I'm like, it's a 5K. And then started to get closer to the date and researched it and was like, this is not me. These are athletes. I don't look like them. I'm not them. And so the thing I tell you that a lot of people don't know is I embrace something that I never thought was my identity. I had such a great time that they have this thing called the trifecta. So you do the 5K and then you have to do the 10K and then you have to do the half marathon, which I didn't identify as an athlete or a runner. And the rule was you had to do all 3 in the same calendar year to get your trifecta. And in 2015, after doing 2 of the races, I was like, I have gotta get the 3rd one. And so the thing that people may not know about me is, um, a lot of people see that I do a lot of obstacle course racing. I've, um, I'm doing another half marathon Beast in Hawaii in August. Um, and that's gonna be, I think, my 20th Spartan race and my 5th trifecta. But to like the second that I did my first half marathon, it was this like overwhelming emotional time of realizing that I'm capable of more than I ever thought. And I am an athlete and I'm seeing these pictures of myself and this new identity.. And now having done it as many times, so people may not realize initially the struggle I went through and the transformation by embracing something that I thought I was never capable of, that you realize that we're capable of a lot more than we ever thought.

So absolutely. You wouldn't know that I was born crippled, two club feet, blind. You? Yep. Bad teeth, partially deaf, and left-handed. And today I'm a level 3 certified ski instructor, aircraft and helicopter pilot, whitewater rafter. Used to do a lot of rock climbing and mountaineering. Don't do that anymore. I'm 73 years old.

Are you still left-handed? Are you left-handed?

Yeah. I'm ambidextrous now. I play jazz violin. Uh, yeah, exactly the point that you made. You, you, we have no idea what our capacity is until we go out and overcome that which, that which is put in our way. That's fun.

That's crazy. That's amazing.

Yeah, I get it. Mark, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time today. It's been really a joy getting to know you.

You too, as well. Thank you, Doug.

Absolutely.

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 #ListeningWithDoug. Leaders. 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 and my team.

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