Episode 10 | Part Two: It's a TRAP!

Gregory Shepard, an entrepreneur who's built and sold 12 businesses, a recipient of 4 private equity awards, TEDx speaker, and Forbes author. This is The Boss Podcast with Gregory Shepard.

Welcome back to the second part of my conversation with leadership guru David M.R. Covey, the co-author of the bestseller Trap Tales: Outsmarting the 7 Hidden Obstacles to Success. David, one of the things you write about that touches my soul personally is the accumulation mentality. Tell me more about that and why you think it's so important.

So, if you look at the deathbed literature, it sounds a little morbid to say that, but what it means is that when people are dying, you know, they know they're going to die. You know, they have cancer and they may know that they only have a certain amount of time to live. What do they care about? What do they talk about? What's important to them? And the answer is always universally what they care about is their family, their friends, their relationships. And they also care about contributions, about service, you know, what kind of service that I did. What they don't care about is accumulation. It's about things, you know, material things. Those things don't matter. They don't matter as much and they're not as important as those other things. My father used to say that there is primary greatness and secondary greatness. Primary greatness is about who you are as a person, your character, your family, your relationships that you have. Do people love you and respect you and revere you? And having those relationships and experiences, you know, having experiences and time. With, you know, with your family and friends. That's primary greatness. Secondary greatness is the financial rewards, it's the accolades, it's, you know, it's, it's the, the praise, or it could be like the degrees or the academic degrees that you get and so forth. Those are important, but they're secondary to the primary things. When you think about it, we have a society where it's You know, the way we sometimes think that we measure success. You know, someone is successful if they have a net worth of $50 million and they have 5 homes and they have really cool cars or whatever it is. And a lot of times we have this mentality that success is defined by financial and material things. And I'm just telling you that people who are in the On the verge of dying will be the best people to kind of understand where they're coming from. And they're saying, you know what, those things don't matter. They're not as important as your relationships, as your family, and as having experiences in life. In my family, I have 7 kids. I wanted to have less, but my father said I couldn't work at the company if I didn't have 7. But, uh, But I have a lot of kids, but we have a philosophy that we say experiences before possessions. In other words, we would rather do like a trip together and spend time together than buying the next little toy or the next little thing. It's just not as important in the scheme of things. But when you look at it, we not only have way too many possessions, we have storage units take in extra possessions that we have that we can't even store at our house. And those things don't buy us long-term happiness. They can buy us some temporary happiness, but the research is also out there that yes, a certain amount of money can buy you happiness to a certain extent, but then it has a diminishing return after a certain amount. And that may differ from country to country, but after a certain amount of money, more money doesn't buy you more happiness. It just doesn't work like that. And the way to really have long-term happiness and joy in our life, you know, is by having great relationships and by serving other people, helping other people. I know, Greg, I talked with you about your mission. I love what your whole mission is about. It's about improving the human condition, giving opportunities to other people. Think about what a great mission that is. And a great purpose that is, and you're financially successful as well. So it doesn't mean you know you can't be or it's bad to be financially successful. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying you put it in a in in the in order of priority, and I'm saying the first priority is to take care of your your family and your relationships, and have great experiences and being with people and serving other people and contributing. And giving back and paying it forward, whatever kind of words that you'd like to use, that's the most important thing. And the secondary things, yeah, are the toys, are the, you know, the finance, you know, your bank account and those other things. Those are not the things that make you primary great.

It's interesting you say that because whenever I invest in a business and then it exits and then the entrepreneur is all of a sudden wealthy, They didn't have anything and all of a sudden they're wealthy. They always have this few months of almost like depression. It's really weird. Like this depression afterwards of like, what now? And now that I have this and I can get what I want, you know, and it's sort of an interesting phenomenon. And the advice I always give them is I say, the first thing you do is take some of that money and give it away. Once you do that, you'll get a feeling that'll pull you out of that depression. And yeah, and I do that all the time. You know, I, uh, every time I sell a business, I give some of the money away because it makes me feel better. It makes me— I almost feel guilty because of how good it makes me feel to do that, you know. And so I, I really, uh, I cherish those words. I wanted to go back into leadership because the more and more I learned about you, the more I was like, this, this guy is the guru of leadership. The man in the leadership arena. So, you have so much to say about it. And I'm really dying to hear who your favorite leader is and why. You know, who's your favorite leader and why are they your favorite leader?

So, I mean, I think that for someone who modeled character, honestly, you know, it's my father. You know, that That I want to be like, you know, that I want to model. My father had a lot of success with the 7 Habits book and then his company, Covey Leadership Center, which then became Franklin Covey. And he had a lot of financial success with his business, but it didn't change him. You know, it didn't change who he was or how he operated. He always cared about his family the most and more so than the business. And he always modeled, you know, correct principles. Which I really, really appreciate seeing somebody to know that his public life and his private life and his inner life were all the same. He was the genuine article. I lived in Australia for two and a half years, you know, and they have a term called "bear dinkum" and "rigid didge," you know, and and it and it just means authentic. You know, my father was really authentic. I would look to him as one of my leadership. Models in terms of character, in terms of different principles. You know, like we're talking about, we talked about like the busyness trap. I love Steve Jobs in terms of his leadership that he showed around focus. Incredibly focused person. Now, I don't think he's necessarily was a necessarily a nice guy or not even a nice a great boss. He wasn't. But man, that guy learned how to focus. So when he came back for His second act after being out of the company for 11 years. And Apple was hemorrhaging cash. They were totally unfocused. And he redirected the whole company and he went up and he drew a 2x2 matrix after spending a couple months in the company and said, we're going to build 4 products, 2 for the consumer and 2 for the professional. And everything else goes. And everybody was freaking out saying, how can you do this? We have all these projects. But he helped Apple become focused. And Apple today is an incredible company, a $2 trillion market cap, the first company to have a $2 trillion market cap. They were actually the first one to have a $1 trillion market cap. And that was just like 2 years ago.

Yeah.

But they have a $2 trillion market cap and they get it from what? 5 products, 7 products? Very, very small number of products.

7. Let's just say 7. 7.

Why not 7? 7 is the right number. But it's because they're incredibly focused and you had this leader in Steve Jobs and now in Tim Cook that taught us that principle of focus, the power of focus and what it could do. So, I really, really admire him for that. And so, I take different qualities. I love George Washington. I've been studying a lot. On George Washington. I've been reading biographies. I probably have read 20 biographies on George Washington. What I love about him is that he was a statesman. He was not into this partisanship, unfortunately, as Hamilton and Jefferson that kind of started the 2 parties and this partisanship. He didn't want to be the leader. He just wanted to go off and and live his life. And, you know, but he saw it as a duty and as a way to contribute. I just love that. I wish we had more leaders like that, you know, in politics today, you know, really like statesmanlike.

I agree with you. Absolutely. I agree with you.

But, you know, it's funny, I was reading the book, you know, how he would purposely mess with the signage to Mount Vernon so that people couldn't find his place. You know, he wanted to make it really, really hard, you know, and the guy was strapped for cash. He had to borrow money to go to his inauguration, you know, which is incredible, you know, that he was this general that helped us get through the Revolutionary War and succeed 8 years of complete hardship during that timeframe. And, you know, and he just, he was cash poor. He just never had a lot of money, but Man, the guy was just an amazing example of modeling the kind of behavior. You know, when King George found out in England that he was going to step down after 2 terms, he said, if he does that, he will be the greatest person that ever lived.

Yeah.

Because that whole concept was, are you kidding? Why would you step down? You have power. But he led our country in the right way and showed us. for a long time until FDR, we only had 2-term presidents. And that's because he set the standard for that, you know, is that you lead, you contribute, you make a difference, and then you move out. And then one other one that I would say is Robert Iger, who just retired as the CEO of Disney. I love his book, which is called The Ride of a Lifetime. And it talks about his lessons learned from his 15 years as a CEO. He came in after Michael Eisner. And Michael Eisner, for a lot of years, was seen as a genius. And he was. But he didn't do as well in the second half of his CEO. And he went in there and he rebuilt the relationship with Roy Disney, who was the nephew of Walt. You remember at the time, there was a lot of negative press. And then, he built the relationship with Steve Jobs, which enabled the Pixar purchase to happen. And then he bought Marvel and then he also bought Lucasfilms. You know, he worked with George Lucas. So, here's an example of a really, really great leader that learned how to build trust and build relationships with really influential people and took Disney to a whole nother level. Now, they have a whole nother challenge with COVID just like a lot of other companies. But Robert Iger. Man, I wish that people would have convinced him to run for politics.

He'd be great.

Can I give you one more?

Yeah, please.

The last one I want to mention is Oprah Winfrey. And I love Oprah. I mean, she is just— Oprah is just really intuitive and I'd call a really spiritual person. I don't say spiritual in a religious sense for any particular religion. But she's really in tune with her conscience and her instincts. And I just think that she's just a tremendously insightful person and has been a major contributor to greatness and helping people find their greatness. So, I really, really admire her as a leader as well.

That's one I haven't heard, but I totally agree with you. Absolutely. She's been amazing and so likable and still stays down to earth regardless of the amount of wealth she's accumulated.

Absolutely.

I wanted to move into the last— I hate to end the call. I just love talking to you. We've talked a lot in the past about what we're working on with BOSS. Even though I know the answer to this, I really think it's important that everybody understands What David Covey is up to. What are you doing today? Tell me about SM Covey and what you guys have going on.

Yeah, it's SM Covey, or SM Covey is the name of our company. What we do is we have a global licensing business where we take intellectual property like your great content, Greg, and we help it scale. We help it expand. And we do that through licensing, or we do that through, you know, consulting. Or helping companies build their curriculum, build their offering into a blockbuster offering. It's critical because there's a lot of content out there and most of it, unfortunately, is very ordinary and it's not unique and it's not insightful. So we like to think that we work with the best-in-class training on the planet, training offerings and products and so forth, and we help them go global. Which is what I did when I was at Franklin Covey is I helped the 7 Habits go international through licensees and helped the book sell and the program and so forth. And so, that was kind of my learning ground for how to do that. And now, I have my own business where I help a whole bunch of companies do that.

Including mine.

Including BOSS. And, well, I just want to say this BOSS methodology is Absolutely groundbreaking. It's inspiring. It is amazing blueprint, you know, Greg, that you've put together in your history of your your life. You know, like you say, you've had 33 years from 19 to 52, you know, to to perfect this content, and you have, and you perfected it. And the mission of why you want to do this, you know, which is to help small businesses and entrepreneur ventures. You know, become successful and, and to reach his goal and his vision is absolutely illuminating and so inspiring. So we are thrilled to be partnered with you in helping your effort get off the ground and scale and grow and, and get worldwide adoption.

Wow. I have to tell you that it is such an honor to have you on the podcast. And when I first spoke to you, I think you knew that I was a train wreck because I was— my hands were sweating and I couldn't even, you know, I mean, it's, you know, it was quite overwhelming to speak with you. And so it's such an honor and I really deeply, deeply appreciate it. And thank you for all the listeners who are going to be really excited to listen to this one. Thank you so much.

It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Greg. Thanks for checking out The Boss Podcast with Gregory Shepard. Get more on Greg's Business Operating Support System, BOSS, at GregoryShepard.com. This has been a production of Forbes Books Radio.