Confronting my CEO coach - Eric Partaker

Alrighty, Eric, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

So you are a CEO coach, and you are my CEO coach. In fact, let's start with what does a CEO coach do? And how did you end up in this rarefied position of being Ali Abdal CEO coach?

So most CEO coaching involves doing podcasts. Nice. Right? So, I mean, I got into this position. John Lennon had this great quote. Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans. So it's like things have just unfolded in a weird and unusual way. I started off as a consultant with McKinsey Company. For those that don't know McKinsey Company, it's basically like one of the top strategy consulting firms in the world and then was part of the early team at Skype. So helping build that. This is back when we actually used to use Skype. Long time ago. Yeah. And then we had an exit to ebay for a few billion dollars, built a chain of restaurants in the UK after that, and moved down to Portugal, even though I'm here with you in London right now. So moved down to Portugal about about two and a half years ago. And these days I work with about close to about 30 founder CEOs, helping them scale their companies. And in terms of like, what do you do? Well, so I take, as you know, a three pillared approach to scale. So I always say if you want to scale the company or the business, you have to look at that as the hardware. And if the hardware is going to operate correctly, you need to code the software correctly. And the software are two other pillars to scale in parallel to the business. And that's the leadership of the person at the helm. And then also them, just as a person, are they providing to their peak potential? And there is an A to B journey in each of those pillars. So in the company pillar, it's to help the CEO get the company from a startup to a scale up. In the leadership pillar, it's to go from founder to CEO. And then in that self pillar, it's to go from like your current to your best self. Nice. And those are the plans that we work against. Right. But the last thing that I'll say is things rarely go to plan for most people. And Mike Tyson, he had that great quote, everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth. I think the real benefit of CEO coaching really, like any kind of coaching, is just the general support and the accountability that it provides. Right. Because there's tons of stuff that you and I talk about that weren't Part of the plan that just come into the picture, a new idea that you might have or something like that isn't going as you would like. And so the relationship is like organically driven in that sense.

How much money did you make when Skype sold to ebay?

Well, yeah, that's. I don't publicly disclose figures like that, but it was a life changing. As a life changing event.

To the point that you didn't have to work again.

Ish. Ish. If you. Yeah, yeah.

Damn.

Yeah.

So why did you decide to keep working?

I think, you know, like once you start, once you get into the habit of like building and creating things, then. Yeah. Like even right now when we move down to Portugal, the idea was like semi retire and not, you know, do not do anything. But like already now it's like I'm into the whole mix of like building, you know, something new again. It's just the act of building and creating, building teams, you know, going for goals. It's just.

Just fun.

Just fun. I mean, you can totally relate. Yeah.

It's something to pass the time.

Playing video games gets boring after a while. Yeah. Because other. Otherwise, what else are you going to do? What are you going to use your time for? Nice.

You start off your book the Three Alarms with an interesting story. If you can tell us that. Interesting story.

The interesting story. Yes. So this is like 2010. I'm on a return flight to the UK and shortly after the plane has reached its cruising altitude. I could sense that something's not right. My left arm goes completely numb. It's ice cold. Feel a ton of pressure in my chest. I start to sweat. A buddy of mine sitting next to me, I asked him, Louis, I was like, lewis, can you feel my arm? He's like, oh, my God. It feels like it's been hanging in a meat locker. Because I thought, like, am I just feeling. Is this actually happening? And flight attendant comes rushing over, sees that I'm really unwell, asks if there's a doctor on board the plane. Luckily for me, there was one doctor rushes over, does the whole vital sign check and just says we need to land the plane immediately. He's having a heart attack. So, yeah, not kind of thing you want to hear, like when you're 35,000ft up in the air, obviously. It felt like an eternity for the plane to land. I was terrified that I thought my. I was. I could feel that. I mean, I could definitely feel like the beat was way. It felt very faint to me. So I could feel like my heart was Struggling and I was so worried that it was just obviously going to stop completely before we landed. Get to emergency, land the plane. There is an ambulance already waiting there on the Runway. You would know this better than me, but I think it's nitrates or something that they administered to increase blood flow to the heart or relax the tissues or. I don't know exactly what it does, but I did feel better from that. And then the paramedic, I remember I looked up into the eyes of the paramedic looking down at me. I said, please don't let me die. I have a five year old son. And he said, just relax. I think we got you in time. And rushed me to a hospital. I recovered in the hospital. The next day I woke up and realized I needed to change my life. Basically because I had. Prior to that point, I'd always been obsessed with peak performance. This whole idea of reaching your full potential. But I just approached it in such an unhealthy way. I was doing 100 hour work weeks at McKinsey and Company during the time helping build Skype when I was building the restaurant chain. I had some times, for example, where I would literally work. It could be two, three days straight with no or virtually no sleep. And that might, that could be like a regular occurrence. And my body was like, yeah, you're not invincible. So that was a wake up call.

So you decided you needed to change your life. What else happened? I've heard a bunch of stories from people who have been sort of had near death experiences and they say that it's sort of like your life begins afresh. What are the changes did you start to see in yourself after that experience?

Yeah, so it wasn't like a change immediately, but I knew I had to change. I mean, the thing that I focused on like first and foremost was just trying to get my health in order. I wasn't sleeping as much as I should be as much as I should have been. My eating was like all over the place. I wasn't doing the basic stuff like going to the gym as much as I should have been. So I focused there and I thought I was kind of getting that all dialed in correctly. And then, you know, it wasn't long after when my wife said she was going to leave me and I was like, oh crap. So I still haven't gotten this fixed. Yeah. And you know, her thing was, she's like, you're here, but you're not really here. You know, you're just kind of like in your own world and you know there's no way with everything that she like, I wasn't going to let that happen. I wasn't going to let. So then I started to really focus, dial in like being a lot more present at home basically. And then this, you talked about the book. The three alarms, like this model for me emerged where I knew work was important. Obviously it was so important that I was over tracking on it and I got into that whole situation. Health is obviously important because it was almost lights out and when I thought it was going to be lights out, the first words out of my mouth related to relationships. And then I said, please don't let me die, I have a five year old son. So I really dwelled and thought about that and realized that if we take an 8020 approach to life improvement, 20% of the areas that we could focus on for 80% of the improvement that we're seeking, there's this three legged stool. And if we really focus on showing up at our best on the health front, on the work front and on the home relationships front, I think that leads to a, a life well lived or a better life, basically.

Work, health and home.

Yeah, nice.

And so like why is it called the three alarms?

It's just a hook to. So the three alarms relates to. So at one point I literally, so I thought of my day as segments, right? So you have the morning when I tend to work out. So that's mostly about health for me. Then you got the work day and then you got home. And I thought, what if I came up with an identity that represents me at my best, the superhero version of me at each of those times a day. So healthfront came up with this phrase, world fitness champion. Not that I am one, but that's kind of the version of me that I want to show up at the gym. World's best CEO for when the workday starts. And then world's best husband and father. And I took those as labels and created three alarms on my phone. So one to go off in the morning to remind me who is it? What version of me is going to the gym. One to remind me how to show up during my workday. And then that last one, world's best husband and father goes off at the end of the day to prompt the question, how would the world's best husband and father walk through that door right now? And so the idea with the alarms is they're to help you live a more intentional life. Because I think, you know, a lot of the times we go through things without intentionality and we end up being a little bit more reactionary than we should be.

Nice. So with the CEOs that you work with, what do you see as the like, I guess people listening to this and certainly this was my impression of CEOs and still is to an extent. You would think of a CEO as like someone who's got their shit together. Like these guys are kind of dialed in with their health and their work and everything and. But, but the other thing that comes to mind is someone who's just like really neglecting their family relationships. What have you seen have been the patterns of, I guess, disease amongst the CEOs and me that you coach.

The patterns of disease. So leprosy. So the typical person that I coach is a workaholic or over tracks on the work front. And that will typically come at the price of or sacrifice in health and key relationships. That's the typical profile. And the point I always try to drive home is like, look, I get that you want to optimize performance on the field of play and the field of play is say, business. But if you're going to do that and if you're going to think of yourself as an athlete, then if we're going to optimize performance on the field of play, we have to optimize performance off the field of play as well. And again, if this is athletics, I'm not going to say, okay, Ali, here's the game schedule. I'll see you on game day. And that's it. As a coach, I need to make sure that you're showing up for all the in between stuff as well and that you're doing your best to show up at your best when it comes. So yeah, I would say the disease, if we were to use that word, is that tendency to neglect the off the field of play stuff and over track on the field of play.

So then when people come to you and you to be like, hey, you know, you're the CEO coach, like, and you're telling them, hey, let's think about your health and relationships. How does that land with people?

Yeah, so first off, like, that's not how. Yeah, let's talk about your love life. It doesn't land with people because that's not what I say. So it's very similar to like how we started and how we started the whole conversation. We have to look at the three pillars. And so it's like the scaling of the company is typically the tip of the spear for anyone that I work with. But for that to happen correctly, they need to be leading as well as they could. And then that last pillar is where we take that more holistic approach. So the self pillar is where I say, okay, look, let's make sure that the health is right, your key relationships are right. But also there is a work component within that self pillar too, but it's rather fundamental and timeless, whereas the other stuff is more specific, say to their situation. So the work component within that self pillar is basic things that I know that you love as well, such as productivity, time management, how you go about structuring your week. Some of the things that, you know, were ended up being some of the very first things that we talked about when we started working together. Right? Yeah.

So in, in the, in the leadership section of your kind of three pronged method, you said the A to B transformation is from founder to CEO. What, what does that mean?

What does that mean? Yeah, yeah. So, okay, but let's just keep like the athletics analogy, you know, our metaphor going because it makes things easy to explain. So as a, that you might still be running onto the pitch or the field of play and you might play a certain position, you're keeping goal or you're striker midfield or something like that. That doesn't happen though, in the Premier League, we never see the coach running onto the field. And at that level, when you're trying to scale the company to bigger and greater things, you need to be able to stay on the sideline, have that team of all stars on the field, direct traffic, get them to play super well together so that they can win as many games as possible. And so as you transition from founder to CEO, you're doing less of the stuff directly yourself, which you probably, maybe some things you can do to a very high degree, but you're probably jack of all, trading it in many senses and not even doing a lot of the things at a very high degree. And that's driven for multiple reasons, necessity, lack of financial firepower at that point in time. So you're transitioning from that to let's find the people who are truly world class in each of those areas. And if they're truly world class in each of the key areas that are going to make your business successful, they should easily outperform you in the same sense that the coach of a Premier League team or an NBA team. I couldn't even fathom the idea of going out onto the court or the pitch and actually playing the position better than any of the players. It would be a ludicrous thought. And that personally, I think is where you want to get to. It's like to have that true team of all stars.

To continue the football analogy, some people often say that the players that got you to Division 1 and 2 or League 1 and 2 are not the same players that will get you to the championship and not necessarily the same players that will get you to the Premiership. Now, I find this idea quite distasteful because I have been operating with basically the same people for like, six, four years now. Yeah. What's your take on this? It's like how.

Yeah.

This kind of analogy around kind of replacing team members as you go.

Look at Satya Nadella, right. With Microsoft. He's.