David Henzel | Love Over Fear: Radical Entrepreneurship & Life Design

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What if the way you lead your business and your life was driven not by fear, but by Love? I'm Dr. Fleet Maul and in this episode I sit down with serial entrepreneur and conscious leadership advocate David Hensel. David is the CEO of Upcoach and the visionary behind Managing Happiness, a project that turns business principles into powerful tools for personal growth. But this isn't your typical entrepreneur story. David's journey took him from a rebellious school dropout to tech mogul building and exiting multiple companies, including Max cdn. His secret? A mindset shift from fear based decisions to leading with love and it changed everything. We dive into how David overcame extreme introversion to become a successful founder and his passion for conscious capitalism. You'll learn how running your life like a business with clear values, mission and self leadership can transform not just your bottom line, but your entire sense of purpose. Whether you're building a startup, leading a team, or simply looking for a more aligned way to live and work, this conversation is A masterclass in heart centered entrepreneurship. Let's dive in.

My name is Dr. Fleet Mall, the founder of Heart Mind Institute and your co host for this session. And I'm really happy and thrilled to be here today with David Hensel. Welcome, David.

Thank you very much for having me. Fleet.

I'm always a little reluctant to ask somebody like yourself to sort of encapsulate their origin story in just a minute or two, but we have a lot of ground to cover today, so I will ask you to do that. Maybe just some highlights of, you know, kind of what inspired you on your entrepreneurial journey, what inspired you to quit school and become an entrepreneur. You know, I think it's always helpful for our audience to understand who is this guy and how did he become an entrepreneur and how does it relate to my journey?

I'll give you the uncut, the raw version. I'll not hold back. I went to 14 different schools and I got kicked out everywhere. I was not, I don't want to say I was a bad student, but if I did not vibe with the teacher, I just didn't go. And my parents raised me very unorthodox without any authority. Actually, my father and a friend brought Shambhala to Europe. So I grew up in an ashram for the first years of my life. So the threat of teacher, like, hey, I'll tell your parents if you don't obey. I was like, yes, go ahead, feel free to tell them. And with 15, I decided to just drop out. And I was kind of lost and didn't know what to do with my life. And at some point, a friend of mine came to me and said, like, hey man, how about we start a business together with computers? And I said, yeah, sure, I have nothing else going on. And then I found entrepreneurship. And this was like, oh. Because nobody tells me what I have to do and I can do my own thing. And that's how I found entrepreneurship. So I never had a job ever. I always was just an entrepreneur. And I had a few businesses first maintaining in house servers when servers were, you know, back in days when they're still in basements of office buildings, not in the cloud, when there was no rift cloud. And then had an e commerce business in Germany in the early 2000s. And then I saw what was going on in the startup scene in the United States and I was really drawn to that. In Germany, especially where I lived, there was like no startup culture whatsoever. So I decided to sell my business, which gave me the money to get my investor visa. And I Moved to Los Angeles in early 2009 where I co founded Max CDN and we had a really good run, sold the business, had a really good, nice exit in 2014 or so. And around that time my mother passed away and my wife was very close with my mom and it was really hard for her to lose her. So she wanted to move back to Europe initially back to Germany where I could not do German weather after eight years, left Los Angeles. So we live in Bodrum, Turkey now. And little after that my wife went through breast cancer. This was a big wake up moment for me. I imagined myself on my deathbed looking back at my life thinking, did I really do what I was supposed to do and I want to have more impact, you know, this was actually also what led me to selling Max CDN because I want to make a bigger dent. Because when I'm decided I wanted to do something different with my life than just like chasing the Benjamins.

Yeah, I want to make sure that we touch on that today and I know we will because you're obviously a very purpose driven entrepreneur and really a wonderful exemplar of conscious entrepreneurship, conscious capitalism.

So.

But I found that very interesting. You know, I think a lot of us are drawn to entrepreneurship for that sense of freedom of not having a boss, right. Being our own boss. Sometimes we end up finding out that we're a terrible boss to work for ourselves or that entrepreneurship ends up being kind of overwhelming. How was it that you found yourself succeeding at that without obviously not a lot of training? I mean, you started off in the tech world and you were good with computers, but you never really had business training per se and you've been able to successfully exit several businesses and now you manage a portfolio of businesses. So I wonder if you could just talk about how you kind of learned business and that startup culture and then, you know, the importance. I think a lot of people start businesses, they don't think about exiting. They, you know, their business is their dream. But if we're not making our business exit ready, we're really lowering its value and we're probably really not operating our business in the best possible way because we're probably doing all the things that entrepreneurs do to keep themselves burned out and overwhelmed. Right. So how did you learn to be a successful entrepreneur and move successfully towards your first exit?

So maybe starting. The biggest hurdle that I had to overcome as an entrepreneur was being an extreme introvert. You know, good computers. I was a geek and I would have never been in a podcast before because this would have Been like, way too stressful for me. I even had a hard time managing a meeting with my own team or being on a conference call with a customer was like, very unpleasant for me. And this changed when I met a friend of mine who was keynote speaking at conferences and he was networking, you know, like a crazy person. And I saw how much fun he had doing this and how good this was for his business. And I was like, oh, I want this too. But doing this as an introverted geek is not the easiest. So I did Toastmasters twice a week, which was very painful. It's like public speaking training. And I went to two networking events per week in Los Angeles, which was also incredibly painful. Introduced. But I really went in hard and introduced myself to everybody, like, okay, next person. Hi, I'm David. And this exposure therapy helped to overcome this shyness a little bit. But the real change happened when my yoga teacher told me that every decision in life you either make out of love or fear. And this was like, absolutely mind blowing to me because I've been always operating out of fear, you know, like in being on stage. I always thought, do they think what I'm saying is stupid? Do they think I have a weird accent? Do they think I look weird? And then when I'm full of fear and I'm just like focused on me, you know, I can't give a presentation. But if I think what I'm sharing here can potentially help somebody in the audience, then it becomes very easy. Or sales. I hated sales for the passion. I only sold out of fear because we're a startup. We have to sell or we die. But once I realized this love and fear concept, if I sell a product out of love because I know this can be beneficial for you, I can even be the pushy sales guy on the planet, I can say, fleet, come on, man, buy. This is going to help you so much and you feel that this is coming from a place of love, that I want to enrich your life. And, you know, not just like, reach my numbers, pay my mortgage or buy myself a new Porsche, you know, once I understood this, everything became much, much easier. And like almost life was from black and white into color tv.

That's a really interesting distinction, love and fear. Because, you know, we hear a lot about from wise business folks and a lot of people are some of the importance of really focusing on adding value, focus on the customer journey, really valuing the customer. And it's really about we're going to do well when we're adding value right to others. And and so love and fear is an interesting way to think about that. Because if we're coming from love, we're really coming from the place of really wanting the best for ourselves and for the world and for our customers. Which means we're going to operate in a completely different way. Right. And along the way, what have you seen that are some of the, some of the worst fear based mistakes that entrepreneurs make? Whether it's in startup phase or whether it's in exiting or trying to get into mergers and acquisition, what are some of the more critical fear based mistakes or approaches that you've seen entrepreneurs take and maybe fail with?

I think there's a million one things where we operate out of fear. For example, when we've been at MaxCity and we initially kind of sold things that we didn't really have and not being 100% transparent with customers, but in the end it always bites you. For example, Maxian, we are a content delivery network making websites load faster and we were pretty weak in Asia in terms of our locations. But if I approach it from a place of love, just like doing the best for the customer, I told them like, hey guys, you know, we can deliver XYZ for you, but if Asia is like a real priority for you, then maybe use a competitor or mix us within a competitor. It's like being that transparent and straightforward. I earned a lot of trust with people. You know, I can tell you another story from I was on a flight and I talked about the love and fear concept and I was sitting next to an insurance salesperson and he said that he used to be average, you know, in terms of sales in his team and he always sold whatever gave him the best commission. And then at some point he decided he'll just sell whatever is best for the customer and he become the best performing salesman in this company. Because you know, it's the gift that keeps on giving because you get referrals, you get people to trust you and buy more from you because you're operating out of love and you just want to provide value. And as you already said, money is a side effect of providing value. If find out how you can provide the most value possible to your customer, then you'll be the richest person around.

So you're really talking about a fundamental mindset here. And you know, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, I'm sure a lot of entrepreneurs in our audience experience as you, you know, even if you have some initial success, as you begin to grow and try to scale and build out your team and things can get really complex. You can really be, you know, profit can be evaporating on you, there can be a lot of competition and you know, you got to make your numbers. I mean in a for profit world you do have a bottom line. And so it's really easy to get pulled into fear to see customers as numbers instead of customers. You know, they're just numbers on a spreadsheet revenue and you know, and even you can start seeing your employees as simply expense. Right. And I mean if things are going great and you got a big fat bottom line, you're really profitable. It's easy to feel really good and positive about everything. But when things get tough, it's so easy to get pulled into this, focus on just the numbers and lose touch with the human side. And of course that can be a vicious cycle going in the wrong direction. But have you seen yourself dealing with that tension or that pull? And how have you seen other entrepreneurs deal with that when kind of when things are tough?

You know, I've met a. And you know, thank God, I've never been really in a super tight position. Sometimes we had to do layoffs and stuff like this. But in some of the businesses. But we've never been like in a really life or death situation. But some books that had a massive impact on me. It's called Conscious Capitalism by John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods. And he makes the point that if you really, I guess the concept of the book is that the old way of doing business is you have to increase shareholders value. You have to make the owner of the business rich. This is why business exists. Right? But he makes the point that if a business is taking care of all stakeholders, not just a shareholder, so it takes care of the shareholder, the employees, the suppliers, community, et cetera. So if the business is a force for good in the world and takes care of all the stakeholders, these businesses, he makes the point that they may actually make more money than the ones who are just focusing on increasing shareholders value. Also because like when times become tough, you know that everybody rallies together because you're like a team that plays well together versus if it's us versus them, you know, like the. Because you know, most businesses are driven, you know, I don't know how this will happen with AI in the future. You probably have like businesses that are run by one or two people. But usually businesses are teams of people playing well together and the ones who play well together win. And this only happens if you have trust and align and the right motivation and yeah, so even if times Become tough if you know, pulling together to the same direction. Yeah, I made the experience. It works much better if you're really people focused. Because the end today the success of your business is tied to your people.

Yeah, I really like that. And I think we're hearing that from a lot of our really successful entrepreneurs that are teaching on this summit. You know, it really begins with mindset. And you know, you see examples like John Mackie and many others who embrace that kind of mindset and then it requires a bit of a leap of faith. Right. If you're willing to say, okay, that's the mind, I get it, I've seen others succeed this way. This is who I'd like to be anyway. It sounds a lot better than being in a fear based business. And so I'm going to take a leap of faith and just do that. Right. It's not like if you start from, well, I'll do that. See it works or something. You have to kind of start with the mindset. Mindset comes first. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, for sure. This is like we're doing with love, not fear. I believe that every decision in life is either made of love or fear. Or you can also say it's a scarcity or a prosperity or abundance mindset. Or when you're religious you can also say fear is the devil, God is love. I really think it's a mindset shift. And if you want to change your company and make this more love based decision, maybe start with one department at a time and not make this big overarching shift. There's an amazing book called Reinventing Organizations. And this gentleman took the concept from Spiral Dynamics, a book that talks about the consciousness levels of societies and applied it to businesses. And the lowest form, and he gave it colors, the lowest form is red. And this is like a mafia type structure, you know, or gang situation where like sphere and pressure, et cetera, very fear based. Then one up is yellow, which is military. And the military, if you're my sergeant or whatever is like above me and you tell me to do something, I'll do it even if I know it's the wrong thing. And then one level up in terms of consciousness is orange which is like the analogy is a machine. This is like the American corporate. One above is green, which is like Ben and Jerry's like mission vision driven type company. And then one on top is a teal organization which is a self led company. And I've seen massive successes in this. And I've also like started turning a few of my companies or teams in these companies to be self led companies where people make decisions for themselves, see the impact that they're having, connect with their team members on a deeper level. Becoming a sports team that plays well together, where sports team analogies, players have to make their own decisions or field by just knowing what are our values, what is our mission, what is our vision. And based on this, they can play by themselves and they can only play by themselves if they can make decisions by themselves. And they don't have to wait for the coach to tell them like, hey, now you stand over there and you stand over there.

Well, I love spiral dynamics. It's a beautiful model. Claire Gray's work in a nonprofit part of my life, I've been very involved with that in the integral theory, with Ken Wilber's work and so forth. And it's a beautiful model for really understanding ourselves and understanding humanity and psychology and how we evolve and really being able to meet people where they're at. And when you get into that integral view, as you said, a teal self led organization, it ties into so many other things. I love this idea of self leadership. Let's focus a minute on bringing that, you know, your ideas of taking this love versus fear based approach and then the concept of self leadership into our lives and the idea of running our life like a business. I mean, when people first hear running your life like a business, they may be thinking more like, you know, the amber color, the military. Yeah, running my life like a business sounds like I gotta have a boss all day long, right? I think you're talking about something very different.

Yeah. So the idea came to me when I came home from a long meeting about roles and responsibilities. And I came home sitting on the couch, super tired and our daughter had a full diaper. And I said like, hey, honey, look, Emma has a full diaper. And my wife got really upset because she thought I'm telling her, like, hey, change diaper. Which was absolutely not my intention. I was just making a tired observation. And then I thought like, huh, why do we fight about this now? And then I realized we never had talked about the roles and responsibilities in our household. And the next morning we sat down and we spell it out like, what do I expect of you? And vice versa. And this took away 80% of the friction we had in our relationship. And I thought like, huh, if this works so well, maybe we take other elements from business and apply it to our personal lives. Like having family core values, having a mission, having a vision, having regular meetings, having Shared calendars, you know, kind of all these things that you do in business. And this worked like an absolute charm. And I felt like, oh, maybe others can benefit from this. And so first it was a course for how to apply business principles to your family life. And then we turn it into a self leadership course. You know, where you figure out your mission, vision, values, goals and habits and make 90 day plans. And I found that if you run your life like a business in this way, if you have true self leadership by really defining what you want out of life and you move towards this direction and also a part is getting your habits in order, it's much easier to make decisions out of love versus fear because you just have your ducks in a row. Actually, in terms of habits, I really believe our habits determine pretty much everything in our life. If you're rich or poor or happy or unhappy, or be so in shape, it really boils down to which habits we cultivate in our life.

So you talked about getting your habits in order, and I think many of us struggle with that both in business and our personal life. And for me it really comes down again, this idea of being self led in business or in your personal life. It comes down to the ability to self regulate in some way. Because we all have whatever kind of conditioning we got from our childhood and you know, for better or worse, and then there's a world around us which brings a lot of pressures and anxiety and source of distractions and so forth. And if we don't have some ability to kind of be centered in ourselves and regulate our own autonomic nervous system such that we're not just constantly pulled by external things or we're not jumbled up because of internal psychology or past traumas and so forth, we can just be in this dysregulated state. We're constantly vulnerable to distractions. So to be able to stay balanced and say, this is the direction I want to go in and stay on that course requires some ability to manage one's own mind, one's own psychology, one's own neurophysiology. So were you just naturally good at that or how did you learn to do that?

I think I have an unfair advantage because I have a condition called aphantasia which doesn't allow me to have mental images. And I also cannot reproduce sounds, tastes, smells or emotions. Emotions. I can't just like have them in the moment, but I can reproduce it. So my mind's always very calm. So for example, I meditate from time to time, but I always Have a calm mind. So this is like, you know, I do not have to do this, but something I found that's really important to regulate, to make life much easier for me is to sweat every day if I, you know, either go for a run or I work out. Because if I do this, you know, I think it's, the analogy is like, you know, back in the days when there was something stressful, we had to either fight or flight. We had to fight the saber toothed tiger or run away from the saber tooth tiger. And right now we get stressed by an email that we're getting or by a conversation. And we still have these stress hormones in our body. But if we sweat, or at least I'm talking from my experience, if I sweat, life is much better, I'm in a much better mood, I can handle things way better. So this is my number one habit that I want to keep up. And I also have a canary in the coal mine habit. You know, back in the days people took like canaries into coal mines and when the air was bad, the canary fell over first. And this is for me, my inbox zero habit. So basically at the end of the day I always want to like have no emails in my inbox because I've delegated, archived or dealt with all the emails. So only like open tasks in my inbox. And if I'm not getting to inbox zero for one week, I know I've put too much on my plate and I gotta remove something because otherwise my good habits will fall away. And this has been like time tested, you know, very good indicator for, you know, too much going on that I have to, and that I want to scale back.

Well, exercise certainly seems to be a really trustworthy strategy for our health and well being altogether moving the body and sweating, as you're saying. And you grew up, your parents were meditators and so there was probably some influence there. And you still meditate today. It seems to me that really everything begins with self regulation. If we can't regulate our own physiology, our own emotions, our own behaviors, then it's very difficult to stay on track in our personal lives or our professional lives. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your journey with your company Max cdn, and how you made that company exitable and what your journey towards exit. What made you choose? I don't know whether it was in part because you wanted to move back to Europe, but you did choose to exit at some point and you did a successful exit. So there must have been some successful Journey there in terms of making your company exitable.

There's a great book called Build to Sell. And the concept is that you kind of, you know, if you exit the company. Also an important thing for us was that we're not still tied to the business that we can sell and we don't have like a few years earn out or you're still like in our golden handcuffs, et cetera. And that's what I'm doing with all of my businesses. I always do my best. This also why I have a portfolio of companies and just like two of them I bought. The others I built and I always manage myself out of it. And at the end of the day I only want to be a coach for the business so I'm not really needed in the day to day. So I always want to get like as fast as possible away from the day to day so I can work on the business and not in the business. So I'm not pulled into any fire drills of any customer issues that I always like pass things off as as soon as possible. And I have this concept from a friend of mine, Dan Martell. He wrote a book called Buy Back youk Time. And he says like take your task list every day and kind of write behind every task. Is this a $10 an hour task, $100 an hour task, thousand dollar or $10,000 an hour task. And do your best to delegate away everything that's like you know, below what you think is your hourly rate or kind of based on your business, how much money your business is making right now. And also right next to this task, does this task give you energy or take energy from you? And I do this exercise on a regular basis so I can figure out like what, where can I pull myself out so I can really, I think really the key is like once you get to the point that you work on the business, not in the business, there's like a key indicator that the sellable because like it has an engine aside from your own energy. And yeah, I think that's a very crucial thing.

And along the way, how do you manage to download your vision, your values, your way of making decisions, your sense of purpose, your ethics, the culture, the love not fear culture, how do you download that into the company so that the company continues to operate that way?

So we put a lot of emphasis on this. For example, when we hire somebody, we put a video of the hiring manager into the job ad. And this hiring manager talks about the job description, what this person has to do, but they also talk about the vision, mission and the core values. Then on the last page of our contract that people sign, they have to initial next to each core value and sign that. I'm going to live up these core values. Otherwise I have no place in this company. With all the new hires per month, we make like an orientation type thing where we talk about our vision, mission and values and we give core value stories so people do not just see like a sentence or the core values, but like they can also relate with stories or how people made decisions based on these core values. Then we explain every decision that we make in the business either with our vision, mission and core values. If we hire somebody, if we fire somebody, it always is explained with the core values. Because at some point people in the company will be able to make decisions the same way you would make them. And have a very fun, fun story about that. A friend of mine started Ring.com the Doorbell Company that sold to Amazon. And I talked to his head of engineering about the power of mission and vision. And he told me, ring also has this product that you put on the side of the house and it has like these floodlights and it has like a microphone and a camera. And he said, I have an amazing idea. We're going to build a party mode. So because this thing has a mic, if party mode is on, these lights will flash with the music. And the head of engineering could have said, like, man, that's a dumb idea. Go back to your desk and, you know, continue working. This would discourage this person and, you know, maybe has a good idea at some point and he would not bring it up. So instead of telling him that's dumb, go back to your desk. He said, that's a fun idea, but what does this have to do with our vision, which is to make neighborhood safer? And the engineer was like, ah, you're right. Doesn't make sense. Right. And so if you really can download these, I guess, yeah, these rules of how we play or what game do we play for which company? Customer. I think it's also an important thing that people really know what is our ideal customer? Who are we building this for? This gives a lot of alignment. And I feel very passionate about this because at Max cdn, we had the problem that initially we did not write down our mission, vision and values, you know, and this was no problem when we were a small team because everybody kind of knew everything. But then we grew and we hired more and more people and we did not tell them what our mission and vision is. And so we ended up running into 10 different directions, which really slowed down the growth of the business, really stunted us actually, until we realized that this was the problem. And then we, you know, made a committee and we figured those things out and this allowed us to grow again. I think it's like absolutely crucial that this becomes part of the DNA, that everybody on the team can make decisions the same way you would make them, because, you know, the core values and mission. And mission. And that they can also call you out if you make a decision that's not in line with the core values. You know, for example, my daughter, we have also our family core values. And my daughter is 11 and since she's very little, I always told her one of our core values. Hensels. My last name is Hensel. Hensels do not complain. Hensels find solutions. And every time when Emma complains, you know, I told her, don't complain, we find solutions. But also if I complain about something, she says, dad, we don't complain, we find solutions. You know, so it's a thing goes both ways, you know, not just from top down, also bottom up.

I'm sure an 11 year old is the first one to call you out. Yeah. So. But what I love is you're talking about it really takes not only doing the work to come up with a clear mission, vision and set of values and principles, but then you really have to train it in, you have to reinforce it. You have to. Because I think a lot of companies maybe do some process to come up with a mission and vision because, you know, it's what you're supposed to do. And maybe they have a set of values like honesty and integrity and things.

But then they have a poster on the wall, right?

That's all it is. If you're lucky, it's a poster on the wall. Often it's just on the hard drive somewhere. Right. And so that's not going to really do anything unless you really build in. You're talking about building in through the hiring process, through your evaluation process, both hiring and firing and evaluation, the whole thing. You really have to. It doesn't happen through wishful thinking. If you want a company really lives and breathes that mission and values, you have to really work at it all the time.

We also do shout outs, you know, like we have a shout out Cheers for peers channel, you know, if like I can say, like, hey, Fleet did something amazing, guys. He did xyz. Really living up to our core value. Xyz, you know, so it's like a constant thing, you know, you have to like, really use it at every decision you make. Make kind of go back to that and be like a parrot. Actually, when we sold the business, actually then we were bought by a company and the CEO of this company had like some very large company before sold for multiple billions. And it's an interesting story for, you know, growing and selling businesses. I was the chief marketing officer and we bought a few companies and we putting together the new brand where all these companies will be under. And I was working on the brand and I pulled the CEO into a few meetings and he just sat through the meetings and said, yeah, it's good, and then left no other comment. After the third time of not giving me any feedback, I pulled him aside and said, like, hey, man, don't you care? Or am I messing up? Or like, what's going on? You know, because I was not used to, like, not getting any input and feedback. He said, no, it's great. Me as a CEO only have, like three roles. I have to make sure we have enough money and enough money is coming in. I have to make sure I hire people that are smarter than me in these key positions and leave them alone. And I have to preach the mission and vision of the company like a parrot to the inside world, like to our team and to the outside world, to the market. It was like, you know, because before I was like, always, you know, stirring the pot, being in all the process, like kind of driving all the teams crazy versus, you know, not just like, finding people who are really strong and just like managing, giving them the leeway and not. Yeah, working on the business, not in the business.

That's brilliant. That's a beautiful description of the true role of a CEO and so hard to get to, I think. But yeah, the key is hiring people smarter than you and letting them do. Getting out of the way and letting them do their jobs. So I know you manage a whole portfolio of companies, and I don't know to what level they're integrated or they're all doing different things, but I would assume there's a kind of uber culture that you're maintaining throughout your business empire, if you will, with these various companies. And you said your primary role is coaching. So do all your companies sort of have a CEO and then you're kind of coaching them all and you find a way to have a kind of shared culture across all these companies.

They have somewhat similar core values, but each one is their own entity and their own personality. But overall, it's always about in the team creating atm, alignment, trust and Motivation is something we really always hone into, making sure that it's just like a basketball team that plays well together and, of course, kind of do good by people, be people, centric, no asshole policy, et cetera. So it's like this overlap, but just, I guess, generally building a great culture. But, you know, they're very different businesses, from software service businesses to business process outsourcing to, like, it's, you know, a variety. But I'm mainly acting as a sounding board for people, actually. I see myself as a janitor. I want to unblock you. I want to remove, you know, I want to make sure you have everything you need to perform on the court, you know, and if there's a roadblock, I'm here to help you to remove this roadblock block. I guess that's how I see myself, you know, janitor with a mop in my hand.

So are you actively looking to add to your portfolio of businesses? Do you see acquisition as your kind of. Yeah, you see yourself as an investor growing your business through acquisition at this point, and then, if so, what's that process like of looking for those opportunities?

It's very serendipitous. Or I like to scratch my own itch. This is usually how I'm operating, you know, and it has to really. I made this conscious decision a year and a half ago that everything has to. To fall, like, really aligned with the love not fear concept and spreading this more and more, which was also an interesting epiphany, actually. You know, we talk about, like, you know, acquisition, et cetera. Kind of like, I think it's really important that you do something that you're really excited about, because when things get hard, you know, it's much easier to pull through and come out on the other side if you're. If it's not just for the money. I did this. I started leaning into managing happiness and love and fear, like, five, six times over the last eight to 10 years. And I always then, like, shiny object syndrome. Like, oh, no, now I have to build this business first or that business. And two years ago, I did this exercise with the author of Immunity to Change. And this exercise was if you really want to hit the gas on something, but subconsciously you're pumping the brakes. He opened my eyes that love, not fear and managing happiness is my real passion project. But he gave me the analogy that it's, you know, it's like a girl you love for 20 years, but you rather hook up with her friend, because if it doesn't work out with A friend, it's not that big of a deal. Because I really think this is my mission and vision in life. If I fail at this, I fail at life. You know, so kind of being acting out of fear because it's too important. And now the open my eyes towards this. I started leaning into love not fear. And like, majority of my time, like 80% of my time goes into Love not Fear and connected products. For example, we're launching a recruiting service now under lovenothere, where because we've been like, really good at recruiting with the business process outsourcing with hundreds, like 5, 600 employees. So we hire a lot of people. And now we thought, okay, how can we fit this to Love not Veer? So we. The mission of the new recruiting company we're building is like finding people who are actually excited about doing the job that you have to offer. You know, so people do their job out of love and not fear. And also as a side or as an upsell is that we can help people to create a better culture inside of their companies.

You know, one thing I'm really picking up listening to David in this conversation is your focus on learning. And you've referenced a number of models and great entrepreneurs and business leaders and theorists who you've learned from. You mentioned spiral dynamics, the work of Claire Graves that was popularized by Ken Beck. You just mentioned Immunity Change and Keegan's work there. You talked about Dan Martell, Buy Back youk Time. And I think you've referenced a number of others. So I wonder if you could talk about the importance for you of being a lifelong learner, being a reader, making these connections of how you've expanded your possibilities and horizons as an entrepreneur through what you've learned and who you've learned from.

I consume a lot of books, I run, and so I listen to audiobooks on two axis speed, and I consume a lot of books. As I mentioned, I have like no formal education. I have no degree, and I dropped out of school very early. It doesn't mean that I didn't like learning. I just didn't like to learn things that other people want me to learn. But wherever I see, you know, I've probably read not every, but like pretty much every personal development book under the sun and lots of organization development books. And so, yeah, I think it's just absolutely. Leaders are readers, I guess. Right. I think it's so crucial, you know, we have behind you all the books. I stopped reading physical books. I just do audiobooks. But otherwise there'd also be Hundreds, if not over a thousand books behind me.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks today too. I mean, I do both. I love reading. I love having a book in my hands and I've always got a stack of them up by my bed and by my desk. But I do listen. Anytime I'm out running or walking or driving in the car, I'm always listening to books on tape. It's an incredibly valuable way to consume information. And I like listening to the book. I really do like listening. Most of those books you see behind me are books that I've read, all those books, and most of those I read 20 years ago. So we're kind of moving towards the end of our time together. I want to keep the folks a bit on exiting here. So I want to talk about pre exit and post exit. So when you were preparing to exit Max cdn, I mean, it sounds like in some ways you were preparing all along. And you've shared a lot of wisdom here about how to build your company in such a way that it's exitable from early on. Right. And if you're doing that, you're probably doing the right job as a CEO. And then if you even hire a CEO and move, they're really just being a coach or a board member, investor and so on. But you're talking about continually replacing yourself. You gave the example, Danmartel's work of buy back your time and all those kind of things. You know, if there are business owners in our audience who maybe didn't do that from the very beginning, but they are at a point now where they do want to exit their business. And so they kind of got to get it ready, they got to make it exitable. What are some of the most important things for them to focus on in the process of exiting or even really in a negotiation of selling their company to optimize the value and make sure that they preserve the legacy of that company, that selling their company doesn't end up being, you know, something that's going to leave a bad taste in their mouth or a bad result for their employees. So I'd like to talk about that first and then we're going to talk a little about life after exit. But if you could talk about that, getting your company ready for exit, how you do that in a way that creates a positive legacy.

Yeah, this is like definitely a thing when you sell. This was like one of the suckiest things of selling Maxi. And because we had this like amazing culture, we had like this tribe of people are like, so Hide. And it was so amazing to be around them. Actually. We never lost an employee that we didn't want to lose at maxcn. Only one who was offered to build a CDN for Apple. Like, dude, this is like always my dream to work for Alpha. I was like, yeah, can't compete with that. Good luck. But otherwise, we never lost people. And kind of like then with this merger and it was not the best culture at the company we went into. So it was really painful to see this amazing tribe fall apart and people just like, leave the company. This was definitely sucky. I'm not a fan of selling companies. This is also why I have this portfolio now. I like to keep them and run them and have these synergistic effects because once you sell, all your support system that you've built falls away and maybe you can just manage yourself out of the company and that the company still is running and paying you nice cash flow if it makes enough to have a good operator or promote somebody from within, you know, an alternative that you should probably look into. In his book Buyback you Time, he talks about this. How can you build a business that you do not necessarily have to run it? It also becomes more exitable because you can move yourself from the processes of sales and operations, et cetera. I think it's very interesting. Another key thing that I'd recommend to people selling their businesses is the number that you get up front that you're happy with this number, even if you get nothing else. Because, you know, private equity, et cetera. Kind of everybody always like, finds a way to reduce, you know, what they pay you from, like, you know, messing with the working capital or messing with, you know, just like not paying you afterwards, you know, this can all happen. So only what you have in the bag, you know, everything else is just like icing on the cake. But you have to be happy with the initial thing that you're getting, you know, and I've seen this like so many times that things have, you know, didn't pan out as they were promised or planned. So. So, yeah, I think that's definitely a key thing.

I think that's sage advice and. But I also like what you. It sounds like you're more of a proponent of building great companies and then keeping them as the investor coach. Right? Replacing yourself and, you know, so if the company doesn't require you to be there running it day to day, if you can really be in the background simply as a coach and it's producing a good cash flow and as a good Investment, it's like an investment you're holding, then why not? Right, right.

So makes a lot of sense post exit problems. What do you do with all this money? You know, sounds stupid, but like, you know, then it's like this responsibility. What do I do with this? Like, where do I invest it, where do I put it? You know, because at the end of the day, like money is kind of like vegetables that you have in the fridge that they, you know, inflation, it kind of rots, you know, so you have to like do something with it, which is an interesting problem. But it's definitely a problem. You know, it can also be a quite stressful problem. I really enjoy having cash flow businesses also. Another thing was very interesting. Even though I had like lots of money in the bank, bank not having cash flow coming in every month drove me insane. It was like, it was really wild, you know, kind of like. Another thing was also interesting post exit. I thought like, okay, we move here to Bodrum. You know, if this nice place here, I'll just like watch my daughter grow up and like do nothing. And after three months, this got really, really old and I was like running up the walls, like, I gotta do something. I felt absolutely useless. And so, yeah, this, you know, it was definitely interesting experience, kind of how lost I felt to some degree, also losing my identity because it was like really identifying with the business and like, you know, you're all of a sudden, it's like, poof, you're not the maxi end guy anymore. You know, it's kind of a irritating experience actually.

Yeah, I think a lot of people struggle post exit and interesting what you said, you know, in terms of wealth. It's well known that a lot of people with a lot of wealth experience a lot of fear and anxiety, especially if that wealth is, you know, anybody who has a lot of wealth is probably invested in different ways, right? But that's kind of under the, the market forces and you know, you manage it as best you can, but you don't have a business where you're adding to it, where you add that cash flow that you know, you're creating, right. Like when you're in business. So I would think that, you know, even if you have a lot of wealth, you're more prone to experience that fear and anxiety if you're seeing it expand and shrink with the marketplace that you don't have a whole lot of control over versus if you're still have a portfolio of businesses where you know that you're influencing a kind of economic machine that's continuing to produce cash flow and put you in a different mindset. It you're still growing rather than trying to hang on to it.

Yes, I've noticed from a bunch of friends actually who had similar experiences selling and then you have a bunch of cash in the market and pays dividends but still it's a weird feeling if you don't have like continuously every month, like you know, nice cash flow coming in. Uh huh.

Yeah. This has really been illuminating. David, what's next for you? What do you see in the future for you? I mean you're still, you've been very successful, you're a young man and where do you see this going for you?

You for me it's like all impact, spreading love not fear. I want that, you know, billion people understand the concept that every decision in life is either out of love or fear. And I just so good friend of mine who is also a private equity guy is like a portfolio of companies and we kind of threw together the best organizational development things that we have worked in our companies and you know, now we have the self leadership course that's already, you know, running for many years. We also have it in a few universities that are teaching it as well. And now we are focusing on organization development. So that's the next thing. And we turned lovelandview into a franchise system. So we have like franchisees in Turkey and Greece and Slovenia and a bunch of other countries and also in a few states in America. So really leaning into this and growing this and as I mentioned the new recruiting service because I think it goes really well with creating these great cultures and finding people who are actually a culture fit for your company. And you know, for me it's like all about people and people dynamics and how to grow business like that. Actually a friend of mine, he's this P guy and he buys businesses and then just like applies these people dynamics things so like to create, make the team play better together and then just like businesses just take off. You know, it's quite magical when you apply the right operating system to a business.

So is there a Love Not Fear.

Book in the works? You know my goal was to be done with it by the end of the year but so many other things happen so I'm a little behind but I'm pushing for it.

Yes, I know that feeling. I just finally got my next book to my publisher this past weekend and so many things keep getting in the way. I finally just had to cancel my schedule for a week and say I'm finishing this thing.

The last 5% are always the hardest, right? In any project.

So.

Yeah.

Well, I really love your message and I hope that our Entrepreneurial Mastery Summit can be one vehicle to get your Love Not Fear message out into the world. I think it's a really important message, and I really wish you all the best with that. And how can people find out more about your work?

People can find us under lovenotfear.com and as we mentioned, we can do a giveaway. We have, like, these GPTs that help you to define your core values or your mission and vision. And I think this would be something amazing for the audience. Kind of like seeing your core values and then applying them to your life to help you to make decisions and to, you know, be the person that you actually really want to be was very beneficial for me and, you know, happy to give those away.

That's wonderful. Well, we have the link right down below, so I encourage the audience to take action on that right now. It's a wonderful gift from David Hensel, his Love Not Fear work. And tell us a little bit about how the GPT works.

So GPT, for example, for the core values, it asks you a set of questions, and then it really crystallizes out your personal core values. And even though, you know, before was, like, quite a heavy work to really figure out your core values. But even people who had core values for many years and very refined core values, when they use our GPT, they're really surprised, like, how accurate and how close it is. And same with the other one, to define your personal vision and mission and your family mission and vision and mission and mission. As a professional, I think it's very useful to have this North Star in your company just for your personal life to make the right decisions or to make it easier to make the right decisions, because maybe it's an entrepreneurial thing or maybe it's just a me thing, but like a shiny object syndrome and FOMO is a real thing. But once you have, like, this clear idea of, like, where you want to go, it's very easy to say no to things. You know, for example, people always come to me like, hey, let's do this business together, and it sounds, like, economically cool and it sounds fun. And it's also often, like, the people. But then it will distract me from what I actually want to do, which is push love and fear.

Really important. And I look forward to doing that myself. I've done a lot of work around both my professional and my personal mission values, but I always love to refine it. So I'm going to jump in and see what your gb, he will do for me. So thank you very much for that. So the link was right down there below. Please take advantage of that. David hensel love not beer.com thank you so much for being part of our summit.

Thank you for having me. Fleet Appreciate you.

Thank you for joining me on the Radical Responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded, stay present and stay true to you. Take care.