The Founder’s Isolation Paradox | Founder’s Office™ Lunch & Learn

Well, welcome back to Lunch and Learn. Joining me today, Candice Powell from the Founder's Office in the Brahan Group, a family office that we've taken that knowledge and bring it out to the founders in the world. And joining us as well is Dr. Katie Powell Hinnitz.

Hi.

We always like the joke that is, hello, Dr. Powell. Hello, Dr. Powell Hinnitz. And it's also when she has her father-in-law in the room, right? So, but I'm glad to have you on the Lunch and Learn as well today. And I understand that you guys are leading the questions.

Well, we're talking about—

nope.

Way to punch.

I don't know what I'm doing here.

Wow, Dad, way to push the Push the buck, just pass the buck off.

Well, it's time to pass the whole thing down to the next generation. I'm giving it to you guys. Here you go.

What a fantastic example of how to extract yourself from your business and push it off to your next generation.

Especially the oldest child, especially the oldest child.

I love it. Well, today we have the gift of maybe what I would say, like going through a layered conversation. So something that was a felt experience by you in many, many ways. For a long, long period of time that you've now since named. And what's been very interesting, and we'll get into this in the conversation, has been how resonant this concept is when you've shared it with other founders. And Candice and I then both have kind of, this is why I use the term layered, we have the privilege of having the opportunity to know the impact of this, not just as founders ourselves and working within the business, working alongside of you, but but also as your children and watching this kind of impact you in a different way, right? And how that impacts the family. And so, I'm really excited for this conversation.

And Katie, spouses of founders too. Like finds like. We married into entrepreneurial families.

You are founders, you are founders, and then you are married to founders.

Crazy.

Can't escape it.

Crazy conversation.

Feel it deeply. Yes, feel it deeply.

So, you know, and the layers really, I think Shrek did get it right in that a lot of founders can be considered ogres, right? We're friendly ogres. We're big green monsters and it's our swamp. And what are all these creatures doing in our swamp? And we've got layers.

You've got layers like an onion, baby.

Layers.

On that note, perhaps let's keep the audience waiting no longer. And what the heck are we talking about? This is the Founder's Isolation Paradox. So, Dad, why don't you take us through what that means, both kind of as a philosophy and how that guides our work at the Founder's Office, but really your experience, and then we can get into some questions we've got for you.

It's probably, you know, I can be way too long-winded on it, but it starts really with the 2:00 AM wake-up call. That's where we named this, right? So, you're— it's 2:00 AM and staring up at the ceiling and trying to solve some problem, and the only person that's really there is the founder's own mind. Yes, the founder's spouse is oftentimes right next to them, or their significant other or whatever is there as well. And by the way, they're usually awake too. They're just differently awake. They're worried about the founder, and they're worried what the founder is doing that's actually going to impact them. So they're caring about the person. The founder is trying to solve some problem. And they are isolated. And in many cases, it's the more complex the business has gotten before it has become an institutionalized, not in a bad way, but an institution-type organization to where it's publicly traded. And now you have all these other structures and systems within there. The founder is still the center and the nucleus of those atoms that are floating around. We all know that from chemistry, and we see that going around, you've got that nucleus, and that's what the founder is. And so it's 2 a.m., can't sleep, trying to solve a problem. Everything from the problem is I need to get a new line of credit so I can take advantage of this new opportunity. If only I had $100 million versus $10 million, I could totally take this next opportunity. To, gosh, I think we're going to have to file bankruptcy tomorrow, or I just got this letter from the government, or my top employee just left, or my, you know, what's going on relative to all these things? The market's going to crash. All All of that goes around, and that is what we named the Founder's Isolation Paradox. And that is what the— wasn't the start of the Founder's Office, but it became really the driving force of, okay, this is actually the problem that we're helping founders solve. And not so much solve, but resolve, because it's really that interconnectivity.

Mm-hmm.

How do we get the lawyers And the accountants and Candace, I actually give your husband the credit for saying that because he knows this, right? So we've got this massive company of lawyers and accountants and professionals within our own organization running a very profitable, very large, very integrated company that also then has the family office associated with that. And we would make a decision with the estate planning attorneys to do a certain thing. It did not make it necessarily easy to run the business, but it was critically important to why we did it over on one side. You didn't publicly put it out there of why we were doing that, because that defeats the purpose. But all of a sudden, the lawyers and the accountants on the other side of simplicity are going down and going like, no, it'd be much faster if we just did this. And all of a sudden, it negated everything.

I think some of What you're talking about too, I think there's a, there's so many, going back to your onion, there's layers to this because in a lot of cases, founders founded their business for, for many reasons, most of which is just, that's just in their core who they are. They're creating, they're building, but also what they sought out was success was supposed to feel like more options, more freedom, more relationships. more, more resources. And there's this, this added layer of feeling of failure during ice when you're in that depth of isolation paradox of all of this is going on. And typically it is married with, you're not free. You're not feeling free. You're feeling on the hook. You are feeling almost imprisoned to what you've built, you know. You're not feeling like you have some, you know, pile of resources to tap into. Those resources are no longer supporting you. They're supporting this big beast you built. And oftentimes it's your resources continuing to support it.

You brought up something really interesting on that too, Candace, was your memory of youth, of being with a founder. And in doing that, one of your key memories you take away is a trip to Sedona. You were maybe, I don't know, 12, 13 years old at the time, 14.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's funny you say this, because Katie and I have had conversations as well that we are, I hate to say, nearly a decade apart. Who is older? But I have very different memories. I remember your earlier days in some of these organizations versus Katie's memories will be with these businesses being so much bigger and more established. And I don't know that the problems and the isolation paradox was that different other than the size and magnitude on the paper was bigger, but I don't know that the feeling and the navigation was all that different.

It's not because it's kind of like, you know, if I take it to skiing, when you are a brand new skier, that very slight incline feels scary. You can't even possibly imagine looking at the top of a cliff, looking down and going like, what's that going to be like? Right? Type scenario. And so that's not even within your consciousness. Like, you're just worried about getting off of the carpets and And how do you get down that hill? It's the same way in business. I mean, you scale up in life in generally, that's how it goes. So you take on bigger challenges, you take on bigger challenges, you take on bigger solutions. You start understanding where you can be resilient in this case and in that case. And in the next case, we just had a great guest on a couple weeks ago that talked about building a massive hotel business and then had to file bankruptcy.

Right.

And so then, but he's back on top. And, you know, he's had a number of businesses and failures since that time. And that's not an uncommon thing. But the interesting part, I'm going to go back to Sedona just for a minute, because my memory of Sedona and your memory of Sedona are 2 different things. But it also then ties back to something you said about freedom. Here, I think I've got this totally free life because I can travel, go wherever I want, do whatever I want, be at any time. I'm always at my kids' games or at that thing. But you know what? I always had my phone. And I always had the problems that came in because we didn't build the systems and the structure to handle those things. I was still at the center when it came down to ship. It was still my personal guarantees on all this stuff.

Yeah. Can I say something on this? Because oftentimes when we're talking about it from like a client perspective, the very thing that kind of cements the isolation paradox is the exact Right. Reason to be solved for it. And what I mean by that is when it's everything that you have on the line as the founder, it's really, really hard to trust other people to hold that picture together for you on your behalf so you can start disentangling, right? It's really hard to trust that everybody else is integrated, coordinated, and being able to not just look at their function, but the broader picture. And the reason we've identified that is because if I'm an advisor to a founder and I'm looking at it from one specific lens, I'm going to do my job really well.

Yeah.

But if I don't, I can leave, right? I just leave this business. I get to go do something else. But if it, if that's, that's not the same case for the founder. This is their everything, right? This is the thing that they built. They have the personal guarantees, like you just said. It's, there's so much more on the line for the founder. And so part of resolving the isolation paradox is trusting that your fortified team of advisors can see that whole picture, can be working toward that.

I think it's more than that, that we've come across. You're right. And so there's an and, a yes and, and that yes and has really come down into, you know, we worked on the value multiplier and the founder optionality, and these are the things that we've come into of how do we solve solve these problems because it's not— a lot of management books and leadership books say you put the right people in place and then you just let it go. There's no faster fucking way to go bankrupt than to do that because it's not their money. It's not their risk. A management team wants the large line of credit so they can go build the company because if it succeeds, that's how they grow or they go on to the next company. Without regards to that, it destroyed, not on purpose, not with intent, but the founder. The founder in many ways wants that too, but that risk is the founder's. And we, we, I love the joke or the visual that says, you know, in a breakfast, everybody else is the chicken. They're all involved, right? Especially the attorneys. You know, we can go down that whole side. That's actually when this thing came to light really for me, because my attorneys kept talking about we, we, we, we, we. And I'm like, there's no we in this.

It's me.

Right? I'm the person that ends up signing that deal, not you. As a matter of fact, you even keep your law office out of the whole picture. You don't even say, hey, we represented so-and-so. You guys aren't even there anyway, right? So you're at best the chicken laying an egg in a ham and egg breakfast, and I am the pig. I'm committed. You're involved. Big difference. And that's, that's Where the founder has to understand, and most of these management books actually go wrong. They think the founder's the problem, and they are in most cases, but it's not just that they need to hire the right people and get outta the way. It's they actually have to set up the systems and the structure that protect them. And I use the example of Bobby Fischer and playing, playing, uh, you know, um, chess. Sorry, brain fade there for a second, but playing chess. Because Bobby Fischer still goes home whether they win or not, right? But when we watched Harry Potter, when you guys were little and we watched wizard chess, I'm like, that's more like what it's about being a founder. And by the way, the bank, the government, they all want you to be on that piece. Everybody else gets to go home and, and not have to do the pieces. They move the pieces, right? They're part of the pieces, but they're not really on the board. They might lose their economic for a short bit, but they get to go get another job. They don't get destroyed. They don't get their name in the press. They don't get a 10-year battle with the US government. That doesn't happen when a company doesn't get down, shut down properly. They don't get the letter from the IRS because it didn't get wound down properly and they didn't understand it, right? All of these various things that come on.

So we run it. This is probably one of the main pieces that, that we get pulled into. And a lot of times it's because founders are getting advice from different sections, maybe of their organization or of the advisors, of the professionals they've hired. And those advisors are almost in every case giving the appropriate advice for the information that they have and for the lane that they are in, for the blinders that they have on, and the objective that they think they have, right? We kind of come in and, and we try to piece different parts, like the different pieces of the puzzle together and go, okay, well, over here, this is completely overlooking, you know, yes, you could get funding quickly here. And are you willing to put this, this, this, and this up in exchange to do that?

And every, every founder, especially in the early days, because the way the bankers say it is, well, You are going to guarantee this, right? Because of course, if this fails and they don't understand the consequences of what that actually means. And the difference is that if, let's say, I don't know, Tesla goes out of business, Elon Musk is probably not guaranteed on anything at the end of the day and probably has gone liquid and put the money elsewhere. We've got pretty good statistics Let's say the average founder's wealth, wealth, 80% of their wealth is not in real estate like most everybody else. Their wealth, and it's not in the stock market and it's not in their 401 because they don't usually have one. It's in their business and they're living great lives. They're traveling all over the world. They're flying on airplanes. They may own an airplane, whatever, but 80% is in that business.

Yeah.

That doesn't give them the freedom. Whereas if we can separate that out to where the guarantees— so if 80% of their wealth is in the business, then that's all their guarantees should be on, is the business, not on the family home, not on their child's, you know, college fund, not on any of these things. You've got to be able to structure those things. So the financial planners also generally aren't founders, so they're not giving the finance— the those people the right money.

Well, it's interesting you say this because we, I spoke with one of our, uh, clients just last week. They were at a conference with fellow, um, founders in their industry and they were asking around like, how did you, what did you do for funding for some of these phases of the business? And everyone was going with kind of that traditional SBA. They are personally guaranteed. And so they came back to us and said, this seems to be the standard. And I said, you're correct. For that space, I would say that is the standard. And it's fully an option for you. We have highlighted where the risks are. And they were like, oh no, no, we're telling you, we are so grateful that you told us this risk because yes, it's taking us a little bit longer. And we saw how many of these founders were losing sleep because their entire life is tied up to support this business. And it was actually kind of hard to watch. So, it's interesting because it, in some ways, is not the traditional advice that people are getting. So, that leads me to this question, who does the founder talk to when the decision crosses business, family, wealth, legal, personal boundaries? We're one of the boundaries.

It's why we started this, you know, see, it's the see a need, fill a need type scenario, but you got to be the right person to fill the need. We're the right people to fill the need because we don't just have some penchant of, oh, I've got my insurance license, so I'm going to sell somebody insurance and it's this kind of insurance because this is the only policy I've got, or I'm going to sell this kind of brokerage account because this is what my broker-dealer says I can do, or I'm this type of an attorney or that type of an attorney or this type of an accountant. We've got a—

Or this type of loan. Yeah, we've got, we've got loan A, we got loan B.

Yeah. In many cases, we don't provide any of those services. What we do is we provide being the founder's advocate. And what that means is we look at where the founder is and that stage and where they wanna go. And then generally we meet who, in many cases, at least in the founder's eyes and usually in the other person's eyes, what is the family need? Because in, in many cases, the spouse or the significant other of that founder is most of the time scared to death of what they don't know. They're, they're scared to death that if the founder dies, who takes over this company? Because it's all the revenue coming in and the value. And how do they unwind it? Because they're kind of part of the business. In most cases, they're either in the accounting side or they're in the marketing side or they're in both. And they probably don't even have the skills to do either. But they're trusted, right? Because that's how they started the company. So that's, you know, this is the standard way these businesses grow up.

Or in many ways, they maybe are very qualified to do accounting, but just like the founder, spouses of founders typically wear several hats.

Oh, many hats.

So they're doing—

Rarely do we come across a company that the, that they're fine being the bookkeeper. They're not fine being a CFO, and they're definitely not fine, you know, generally being the controller or the cash manager, because they didn't go through banking and understand what cash management is. It does not mean they're not intelligent. It does not mean they're not capable. It does not mean that they've even built the systems to do it appropriately.

But somehow they're also the person checking copy before it goes out.

Oh yeah.

They're the person writing the bio for the founder.

They're checking to make sure that there's not something in the founder's teeth before they go on studio stage or scenario.

They are doing so many more jobs. It's like kind of that invisible labor and the founder's carrying an immense amount of invisible labor. Um, and, and usually the founder's spouse is also carrying a lot of invisible labor, unrecognized, and they may not recognize that in each other. And the team has no succession plan for it.

So what happens is it's 5, 6 o'clock, 7 o'clock, whatever time the founder's finally coming home and the spouse wants to connect. They're like, so tell me about your day. The last thing the founder wants to do is tell them about their day because they can't even possibly articulate it. Articulate it all, of everything that went into that day. And so now the founder's spouse, who also is on the line for all those guarantees, everything else, also is a great advisor to them, is kind of out on the outer skirts, sometimes even more so than the accountants or the attorneys, because the founder's trying to protect them. They don't want to say, oh yeah, I got, I got served a letter from the IRS. Oh, by the way, your name was on it too, you know, type scenario, you know. That's, that's, no, I'm here to protect. And it's not a male thing or a female thing because we see it across the board, right? Yeah. And they're also afraid of failure and they're afraid in many cases of looking like a failure to their spouse. Anybody else, their kids too.

Protecting the sanctity of home, right? So home is meant to be the place where you can decompress, but as a founder, it's so entangled You can't, right? And so it becomes reasonable to understand, okay, I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to do this, not even because I want to keep you out of it. It's like, literally, I just need a safe place to not talk about this stuff right now. I need a place where I can just enjoy and have fun, or even just try and get some semblance of relaxation. And Candace, you brought up something that I think would be worthwhile going into just a little bit deeper. So in the example of the client that you were sharing, And we're seeing folks who have gone through maybe the more traditional path for funding are now placed in a position where everything's on the line, and now this really has to work. And something that we've found is like, wow, that's so not a good way to get your best decision-making, your best creative thinking, the things that made you successful in the kind of first seedlings of this. journey because now you're really contracted. You feel painted into a corner. I'd love to hear from you both on, on kind of that experience, what we see in the field and personally as well.

Well, can I, can I tack onto that? Because we just had Constitution Day. And so I want Dad's thoughts on this because, you know, I think oftentimes it's discussed, the country was founded on religious freedom, but it's debtor's freedom. And so in a way, this system has found a way. We no longer have really true debtor's prisons, but in a way we are still imprisoned by being founders. The whole point was to be innovative, to have the freedom and the capacity to create and build and build this economy really truly off of the ingenuity of the minds of the people that are here and have that freedom. Yet the system has found a way to trap and make it so it's almost not very free. So I toss it to Dad to kind of elaborate even further on that.

Well, if you read I mean, I know you guys hear me quote it a lot, but I actually don't know either of you reading it. I'm sure you have, or at least seen the play, but The Merchant of Venice, right? It's not nearly Shakespeare's most popular, but it's one that impacted me from as a young kid because I'm in high school and I'm reading Merchant of Venice and they have Shylock in there and they're going through all these different things. And I'd already had my company.

Right.

I'd had my first company at age 12. So I'm dealing with banks already at that age. So by the time I'm in high school, I'm understanding a lot more about commerce and these type of deals that are going And what banking's like. And I already have an attorney and an accountant, which was crazy if you go back and you start thinking about that. Now, it was also the '70s, so it's a little different time. But you go there and you say, okay, everything in the universe is conspiring around not having the founder be a founder. We were talking about this, Candace, yesterday with, I don't know who we were on the phone with, but it was— Outwitting the devil, right? And it's like the entire universe conspires for you not to be a founder, not to be of free will, not to be driving and creating, because the systems actually aren't there. And what the founders of this country did is they created a model that one pitted ambition against ambition so that it didn't allow for some autocrat to take over Or a faction to take over the country. They might take it over momentarily.

Right.

They might take it over in a segment, but they won't take over the entire big, great model of that. And to that fact, that's also what happens within a founder's life. If you set up a constitution for yourself, and I have a constitution, right? So it goes through there and it gets my articles, just like the 7 Articles of the Constitution. It says, these are the basic founding principles that we're going to talk about. And when you guys were little, We had articles like that within the house. There were basic rules, right, within the house. We didn't have a ton of rules, but we had rules. And those rules were pretty hardly mandated, right? Specifically so. But they were really around growing ideally new founders, right? Give you guys autonomy to make mistakes and just come home and talk to me about the mistakes. You're not going to get in trouble. But if you hide the mistakes, you're going to get in trouble.

So then going back to Katie's original question, which I hijacked, you know, the, we see founders doing what is the traditional pathway and getting, falling into the trap.

Well, it's because it's set up to be a trap in many places. I mean, so let me just use this example of the banks. So you start out, so When, Candace, you've, you've especially been in this, Katie, to a lesser extent. When we've been raising capital for a project, they said if it was that great of a project, the banks would have financed it. That is such a naive, naive, naive thought, right? So because that is not how banks finance. Banks finance it once it's really almost a proven concept scenario.

Yeah.

So but by the time the bank does build a relationship with a new entrepreneur, they're building it and they give that entrepreneur their first loan. And the entrepreneur founder forever feels in that banker's Gratitude. And by the way, what they didn't realize was Shylock, not taking anything against the Jewish, but of that story, they also got their pound of flesh. It just was put in the documents as a guarantee. And they do it by, they say, you know, Katie, of course you think this is going to succeed. So you're willing to put your own everything you've got into it, right? And you're like, of course I am. So now you grow to where the business is actually big enough and where another bank would not make you sign that personal guarantee. Only if you ask, by the way, they'll certainly let you say, yes, I'll put everything in there. But, you know, but founders won't leave their bank because they feel like, but they gave me my first shot. And what they don't realize is they gave you their first shot, but they're still saying forever, you know, Rumpelstiltskin, I want your soul forever. And that's not how it works.

Is the antidote to this then? Well, we'll talk a little bit about it. But to me, and I think it's a theory that I got young, which is look for the incentive, right? The bank is a business, right? There's no favors there. Really starting to question like, okay, this is an option. And I love being treated well. I love being treated with warmth. And I love all of those things should be qualities that you look for in anybody who you're doing business with. But really being earnest and saying, well, they have an incentive to get to my business. What am I going over? Like, how do you disentangle the urgency from the reality of systems that, that are businesses? They also have, have imperatives to grow. They're not doing this out of the goodness of their own heart.

Well, I, I love something I heard the other day. I was reminded, I'm back to listening to my friend Jim Rohn. Right. Somebody asked me a question and so I'm like, oh, that's in Jim Rohn's book. So I pulled it up and I'm like, you know what? I haven't read this in a while. So I'm back. And he said, you can't judge. You have to judge sincerity on sincerity scale and truth on truth scale. Right. Because it is possible to be sincerely wrong. And so, and we see this a lot in debates about things that actually do not have— Katie, I think you said, tell me how you think. not how you feel type scenario, because it is important to know how you feel, but you need to know what the basis of the thoughts are. And of course, I think that sometimes comes into the doctrine of like, where did that data come from? Show me the data. And your guys' wicked stepmother is phenomenal at that, right? As a data scientist, she'll be like, nope, that's not what the research shows. And it's like, ah.

It's very hard to just have a conversation in this family as just the lowly MBA, because I But I think that thinking permeates anybody, right?

Like, I think that it's really starting with— I would caution against cynicism or skepticism even, but even just realism to say, okay, who, what are they incentivized?

I think that's great. What are they getting paid for? Well, Warren Buffett's partner, Charlie Munger, says it beautifully. Now, I don't know that he is the original person that coined it, but he definitely is the person that's kind of most attributed to it, is you show me the compensation plan or the incentives, and I will show you the behavior, right? And the real outcome. And that's so true. Dealing with the SEC.

General good advice.

Yeah.

Dealing with the SEC, you get a promotion because you skewer someone, right? You don't, you're not looking for the facts necessarily. You're looking for a settlement. So the facts start matching that, and that's not to pick on the SEC, but that's in every place that you look at it and you go like, okay, so a district attorney generally is not looking to let somebody off the hook. They're looking to get the proof of the case. So that goes in the court cases, and that goes back to the Constitution because our founders understood that the king's court Only needed to be able to substantiate the facts, not try the facts.

I mean, this is generally good consumer questioning. I, Jackie and I just did a podcast episode on this. And one of our things was like dating apps. Are dating apps really incentivized to find you your lifelong soulmate? Or are they incentivized to give you something interesting, but keep you on the app? A little bit longer and keep you going. And, and credit card companies, they're not incentivized by having you pay your credit card bill off every month. They're going to make it harder and harder.

The whole Sydney Sweeney conversation we were having, it's all about follow the incentives, right? Or the gaming, the board that I sit on.

Everything. Yes.

Always looking at the incentives. And as a founder, that's so critical. Um, because while yes, they are, they probably do wanna see you succeed. And I think the human element, the community, personal element is wanting to see each other succeed. There are elements of our world that are not banking on success.

No. And we hold that, we, I think we, in our optimism as a family and as people in this world, we hold that out that the other side's actually there to help us succeed because that is how we show up, right? We want people to succeed. We help people get succeed. And so, to back to one of the questions is like, who looks out for the founder? And generally, even the attorneys that are lined up for the founder aren't even there for the founder. And this isn't to pick on the attorneys.

Right.

It's that they're there for the company. The founder has to have their own counsel, and the counsel can do both, but they have to have an agreement in there that if things go to crap, they're always there giving the founder the advice, right? And watching out for the founder. And that's again where we go. So we'll sit on a board for a founder because we've got either interest in the business or we're doing this through a consulting agreement. But, and we don't tell the founder that we're there for your voting block because we're not.

That's right.

We, we will vote against what the founder wishes to do because it's in the best interest of the founder. That is what we're there to do is protect the founder. We set up the Covell agreements to do that. The, you know, if we help guide on insurance policies or any type of trust agreements or just their building of their management teams, it's still around how do we make sure that the founder's getting there. You know, the, the, the value multipliers we talk about help build the value of that company so the founders can extract after the, after, you know, get the most value for that company, that asset they're building. But the, the founder optionality method is really about how is the founder less dependent on that company.

Mm-hmm.

And you need to be there because companies, no company lasts forever, even though many of them are created to be. forever entities. They don't. So how do you get that money extracted? How do you get your risk extracted? How do you do that? That's what the Founder's Office is about, and that's how we approach these things. You know, how do we take IP and get it outside of the company? And then you put it back into the company, but through agreement, so the company can have the value, but the founder also gets paid because they generally brought that thought process in.

And I think what all of these methods that you're sharing, one, probably deserve their own episode, but through each of these tendrils, right, that is how the isolation paradox becomes resolved, right? So we know that by disentangling the founder from the company, right, creating the institution of the founder's brain and what they built, but giving the founder freedom that they are not so entangled and wrapped up in the business actually increases the value. So, not only does it increase quality of life for the founder, their family, and often their team, but it also increases the value of the business. And so, when we think about the founder's isolation paradox, is it fair to say that the antidote is the founder's advocate, learning from other people's experiences? What would you say kind of as a distillation of what someone can do today who's experiencing this?

Well, as you know, because you were probably one of the greatest OPE people, especially when you were little. So your older siblings would do something and you didn't because you're like, nope, that, that gets you in trouble. Or at least didn't do it.

Or she did it just sneakier.

Yeah, exactly. Or she did it to a point that I didn't find out.

We will never know.

Exactly. You know, it's funny when you're 30 and you still don't want to tell your dad what you did, you know, type scenario. But, you know, So that is part of it. But I think one of the problems, and, you know, not to speak for Candace per se, but Candace and I have to sometimes just put our hands on the stove, you know? Oh, it's hot.

A couple of times.

You'd be like, you'd see us pull our hands away and you're like, I'm not touching that. Candace and I are like, wow, was it really that hot? Was that really that hot? Maybe I should try this. Maybe I'll try both hands, you know, type scenarios. Like, oh my God, why the hell did you do that? I told you not to do it. It's like, well, I needed to test it for myself. Right. And I've got grandchildren that are, that one's not and one is, and, you know, it's kind of like, I'm not going to do it.

They are.

Yeah. It's me and Katie. Just, I mean, like polar opposites as far as so many similarities, because we do have a lot of similarities, but then in their approach to questions and challenges, they do. And I think that's a really, that's actually a gift in the business.

So OPE works. For some people, reading the books and understanding the challenges, you know, and as they said, you know, the thing about the Bible that is wonderful is it gives how to do something. It also gives a lot of stories of how not to do something. And most of the books, most of the management books, most of the things out there, most of the podcasts or other things you listen to are how I succeeded, how I'm so magical and perfect and beautiful. And this is all, and this is how I overcame it. And I lost this limb and all of a sudden I was able to do this. And, and it grew back and that, that's great.

But, uh, that's one of the— The hero of every story.

But, you know, we try and also show you the ugly. Candace, you have the best interview questions. You really don't give a crap about the people's success. That's expected, right?

People are excited to share that.

It's on their LinkedIn profile. You wanna know, yeah, you wanna know how they got bloody, right? You wanna know how they overcame getting bloody.

How you survived being bloodied.

Yeah. Yeah. Not just that you got bloody, but that, that you actually overcame it. So OPE, Opportunity is an important one, but I have not found somebody who really lives a successful life. And I'm not talking just about financial success because that can happen by luck, right? That can happen. In many cases, it is luck. It's timing. It's, you know, it's opportunities. It's whatever. There's a discipline to it, but it's, it's, you know, there's a lot of things that go into that. But a successful, wealthy life is not luck. It takes a lot and it takes a lot of learning from that. But in many cases, what I find that it takes is it takes surrounding yourself with the right people who will give you and listen to you. And by the way, they can be your kids, because I learn an awful lot from my kids, and I make fun of their wicked stepmother, my wonderful wife, who does beat me upside the head a lot. But it's ways that I sit there and go, wow, okay, yeah, I'm being a dumbass. And my team members—

And you see how she's incentivized to beat you.

Yeah, what's her incentive? Why the hell is she even in here?

It's on a need-to-know basis. It's above your pay grade.

You couldn't even pick it apart.

I know. I just way, way smarter, way better in all the ways. So I surround myself with better, smarter, more capable people than me in every single area of my life. And I do my very best to be a very good student. So yes, I do have a doctorate. I have too many degrees for most people on this planet type scenario, but that's not how I started out. Right? I started out as literally a poor kid in a breezeway, barely graduated high school, barely went to high school, right? And came to university later in life. That's not why I became successful. I became educated and in academia because I was curious.

I also wanna highlight, it's not why you know so much and you don't exclusively surround yourself with— that has been a journey for you and, and, and, And us as well. But that is not a marker of intelligence for you.

For academia? No, you don't have to have a degree at all. I don't care. I mean, I have the, like, I always use our bricklayer as the example because it's so tangible. One of the most brilliant artists I saw was, you know, building stuff and seeing things and being able to do it and could do math in his head so fast. And he didn't get past the 8th grade. I didn't, I don't care. I mean, he'd be a person I bring on any project, didn't matter where it is. It was phenomenal.

In so many ways, so many like truly valued members of our, of our family, our team, our ecosystem are some of the most brilliant problem solver, get it done humans that you would trust every single thing with. And degrees can't teach you that. The things your brilliance is not Not because of your degrees.

No, no. How many, how many of the billionaires that we know, and not to make that as a market, it's just something you can put the tangible in it, don't have degrees. And actually, because so many of them feel bad about that type, and then they make fun of it or other things type scenario. And it's like, look, you know, that, that is not the scorecard. I love my father-in-law, you know, who just passed away. In that most people did not know him as a PhD and tenured at 3 universities and multiple patents. They knew he was pretty smart for some reason, but he was a ski instructor.

Mm-hmm.

For the last 35 years, that's what he did of his life, right? He didn't talk— nobody ever called him Dr. Rogers. That was just— was never anywhere, right? So that, you know, that's kind of a cool thing about him, of what he did and what his life was like and how he impacted so many people.

So, it sounds like if I'm sitting in the chair of a founder who's feeling isolated, we've defined the isolation paradox, and I'm like, oh yeah, I feel lonely and noisy, and no one could understand my perspective. It sounds like, okay, well, the first step isn't just to go to the person with the degree, with the knowledge, because that's not always enough, right?

Not to pick on it, but the, you know, 26-year-old MBA from a top college, Uh, that is working for McKinsey or Ernst& Young or something like that. Not again, to take it away. Definitely a place for that, but yeah, they probably don't have a lot of perspective.

So, it's probably then we're looking toward experience, right? And so, that's the founder's advocate component is saying, okay, we've created this team of people who have a myriad of lived experience seeing around corners that maybe you haven't, but also just somebody who you can come talk to. about it. Tell me, like, who, what the antidote is to that. Is it that myriad of lived experience overcoming these experiences in some way or another, maybe with some pain points or not, and being willing to share that with a new founder? How does somebody kind of pull themselves out of this?

Well, I think we provide some tools, Katie, and you're the one who's kind of been the more tool implementer of our team, you and Angela and our others, not kind of, you are. Candice and I come up and we brainstorm this stuff and then it's like, and—

We break everything.

There you go.

I love it so.

Got a new idea.

Well, because, you know, it's so fun. It's fun for us to be able to get these wins, but I'm a little disinterested in doing all of this and not helping others, right?

Absolutely, yes.

And I know we all are.

No.

And so, there is, we have places, obviously we do this in our consulting practice of helping people, but I think a good place to start is the Founder's Risk Assessment, just because sometimes we don't even know what we don't know.

How do you get there? How do you get to that? I don't even know how to get to that.

It'll be in the show notes. It's also on our website itself. So, the Founder's Risk Assessment.

I think we're loading up a QR code right now for it, actually.

Oh, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

There it is.

So, that's one way, but I think that, you know, an assessment isn't that lived, felt experience, right? Like, how many times have clients come to us, and Dad, you have the most rich background in where you literally see someone's nervous system calm down to be like, oh my God, you've, you've named what I've been feeling for years. You're naming what's keeping me up at night every single night.

Like no one— It's usually not them first. It's usually their spouse. And it's usually after we've had dinner with them and with their family. And it is, you know, and they're just like, they're like, okay, now I see what you saw. And then it allows the founder to let their guard down.

Mm-hmm.

It's, I mean, it's, it's so close to consistent. The only thing that's a variable in there is when they don't have a significant other, because then they're carrying all of that and they don't even have someone else that's sharing that load with them in some, some level where we had, you know, one founder come in and just just tremendous challenges going on and so prim and proper and strong and everything else. And then broke down just crying as we got down to it because it's like, you know, and I don't have the psychology degree, but it is, you know, it's that scenario of they had a safe place.

Mm-hmm.

And that is, I think I shared with everybody, you know, a few episodes ago about Theo of Golden. And I just, you know, I loved that. I don't know if I can find my note on it to get it actually right here. It was, his work was a dispenser of advice, a keeper of secrets, an agent of calm, and an incubator of ideas. Sometimes consulting is a matter of a single meeting. Other times it involves a long, complicated transaction. They all tend to be very specific and very case by case. And when I read that, and if you haven't read Theo of Golden, it's a great book, right? So it's a wonderful, wonderful story. Really good twisted at the end. story in a very happy way, mostly happy way. So it's a life way. So, but it, you know, it's a great— that's a, that's what we do. And sometimes we get paid an unbelievable amount of money for that because we bring so much value. If we can make someone into being, you know, worth $100, $200, $500 million, of course we should get paid well, right? Type scenario. But it's not about that. It never has been. When we help people get into homes, it didn't matter if it was a $70,000 home or a $70 million home. home type scenario, or all the various businesses, it's about actually making that difference in their lives and where it comes back to. And that's, that's what we do. And that's what the tools have been built about is how do we do that?

Yeah, I think it wraps up kind of the whole Founder's Office ecosystem to what I would call in the biz, right? Like our purpose. So we tackle it from the IP angle, we tackle it from the risk angle, we tackle it from value enhancement angles, but all of it is actually to solve and alleviate the founder's isolation paradox, because we're just not doing ourselves a good job in our eyes if we're not meeting that moment, that founder, the versions of us that we see, right? Of being like, God, I've been there and I want you, I want to help you there.

Every, Katie, that, I mean, that's a wonderful way to say it, is that at the center of our organization, whether founders know or care that that's what we're working on, that is what we're working on. To build it so that the founder is not the business and the business is not the founder. And then the founder can have a life and enjoy it. And by the way, talk about a founder who loves being in the game and loves playing the game and has tried retirement a couple different times. It doesn't work for me. I am a founder for life. I love starting businesses. I love being in this game. And it's just important that I'm not that centerpiece. And it's really hard, even with all this experience, all these years later. So, you know, that's what we do though. And I love that because it is around that formation of, are we putting them back on the board? Are we getting them off the board? How do we structure it? Where's your risk? And at least if you're going to take risks, know what the risks are and make sure you're getting paid for it.

Yeah, absolutely. Worry about your own incentive. Everybody else is making sure they're incentivized to support you. Make sure you are incentivized.

I'm going to give another shout out to Jim Rogers today. So my father-in-law, We're skiing and he's phenomenal skier. And at 81, he passed away at 85, but at 81 we're skiing in Jackson Hole, which is, if you're not a skier, is one of the toughest mountain, you know, in, in-house mountains in the United States, inbound mountains. And we're standing at the top of Corbett's and Corbett's Coulee, and they, they run this King and Queens of Corbett's. So if you wanna see some crazy stuff, you go look that up. So we're standing at the top of it and he skis up to me, whispers in my ear, there's There's old skiers and there's bold skiers, but there's no old bold skiers. Right? And I'm like, what do I do with this, Jim? If I go down it now, I'm an asshole. If I don't go down it now, I'm a chicken, right? Type scenario. But he was absolutely right. What he was really talking about, we had this conversation, was, is the risk worth the return? So you go down there and you do it and it's awesome and you get the crowd, it's just wonderful. But what it doesn't, you know, you're moving towards 60. Is that really where you want to end your career on that one? Or do you want to live like me till 85 skiing all over the world? I'm like, yeah, you're right. And, but that doesn't mean that he was a chicken off, you know, doing, he was doing amazing stuff. Business is the same way. You do not have to take the unnecessary risks, especially the risks that take you out and maim you for life. In those scenarios.

Yeah. Solid advice, Todd. Thank you for that. Way to close us out because we are at the—

we are way past our time.

Way past our time. Thank you for hanging with us today. Um, we've got our—

It's such a pleasure. It's such a pleasure. I get to talk to you guys. It's so cool. It's like the coolest job on the planet.

It's like we never talk.

He acts like he does not talk to his children every single day and see Constantly when he is in the country. And yes, yes. So do not listen to him about his— about this.

I'm like Donkey. I'm out on the porch all alone. He is.

We're worried about it. We're working on it. In the meantime, for folks who, who are feeling the founder's isolation paradox, really encourage you to take the founder's risk assessment. It's just a really great way. It's free, even for advisors, if you're advising a founder who you feel like, that feels like a glimmer of what I see them experiencing, take it. It's a great way to kind of like look at what are some risks, what are some options that are being taken account for now that may be limiting that freedom, that optionality, and really that growth in general in the future.

You know, I think you brought up one last point on there, Katie, and we haven't had a show about this. But not only are we the founder's advocate, we're really the advisor's founder's advocate, meaning as well too. So we work with a tremendous amount of advisors.

That's true.

That bring us their clients, not to hand off, to enhance. Because we'll do that, and they know that their clients are safe with us, and we never take, ever take a consultant's client, no matter where they are in that. We're not going to steer them away from that scenario. We will be the advocate to that founder, but it is, you know, how do you do that? So you can bring your people in, stuff that should be able to go through, learn it, be a part of it, be a bigger part. We have a number of different people of the SEPA world that do business with us because it's like, here's how we can bring you in because we don't have that spectrum, right?

Exactly. I was on a call today with one of our clients' advisors, and it's such a privilege because we can't get them out of that isolation paradox without understanding the full power.

Yeah. I had 2 already today of our clients' advisors on the phone with. Yeah.

That's oftentimes who we're chatting with a lot because they're in the thick of trying to solve it. And when they open up and want to get past maybe just their lane, and not saying that everybody is stuck in their lane, there are a lot of fantastic advisors who are broad, very broad thinking, but recognizing that having additional resources and the ability to kind of maybe see in a different in a different way. It's fantastic. Please click on— we've got the QR codes up here for you to connect with us. Feel free to connect with us and check out our website. And then I'm going to hand it over to Dance Mom Dad for your WTF plug. You know, I'm not going to do it myself.

Well, first of all, thanks for joining us. As Candace and Katie said, thank you for you both being on the show today. It's super cool. What a cool life I live, which is phenomenal. And with that, I got to be the guest of WTF recently, twice, I think was the whole deal, which is Women Talk Finance. And it is truly one of the just— it's a cool thing to have these empowered women that are in my life that just do a phenomenal job. And it's always like, oh, comparing them to men or not? No, compare them to themselves. They just are phenomenal people. But they do approach things differently in different ways because there's different skill sets that happen within there. And even on how the communication— and I'm always learning. Because it's like, no, I approach it from how I am. I'm an older white guy, right? Uh, who has some money, and that's not always who we're helping or where we're serving or what the world's like. And so, to get perspective. So nonetheless, Women Talk Finance, Jackie Kuiper as well, our general counsel, who's just amazing. And, uh, it's an awful lot of fun, and you get there at anywhere you get a podcast. So thanks for joining us, everyone. Have a great week. Take care.

Thanks, Jeff.