E37: Interview with Joe De Sena from CNBC's No Retreat

What if the best way to tackle your complex business problems is actually to get down in the mud? Welcome to Invisible Solutions. I'm your host, Steve Shapiro. Each week we tackle your most complex problems using the lenses from my book, Invisible Solutions. If you need the lenses, go to get. And with that, let's get started with today's episode. On today's episode, we're going to take a slightly different approach than normal, and we're going to have a special guest. His name is Joe decenna, and you might know him as the founder of Spartan, which is a really tough physical race that they do now in 45 different countries. Millions and millions of people have gone through that. But today we're going to focus on on his new TV show on CNBC called no Retreat Business Boot Camp. This is a really powerful show where he goes into businesses, identifies some of their biggest challenges that they have, and then he gets them down and dirty in the mud doing tough physical activities as a way of getting them to solve their problems. He brings them up to a 700 acre boot camp up in Vermont called the Farm, and. And he puts them through these difficult physical activities because he's found that this is the way to be able to change the way people think, to get them to have more resilience and to be more powerful. All right, welcome, Joe. So thrilled you could be here on the Invisible Solutions podcast today. Are you in Orlando right now?

I am in Orlando right now. Probably not too far from you.

Yeah. Well, it's pretty amazing that two Bostonians end up coming down to central Florida. It is the place where everybody seems to be coming these days, so that's pretty cool. But we're not here to talk about Florida as great as it is. We're here to talk about your amazing TV show, no Retreat Business Boot Camp. And I had the great pleasure of watching the first couple of episodes. I have to say, it is really spot on awesome. For people who haven't seen it, please check it out. It's a business show and it's a problem solving show. So my whole podcast, everything I do is around problem solving. That's really what you're doing. But you take a totally different perspective on. Can you just give a little bit of, in your words, some background on the show, how it came about, and what your goal is with the show?

Yeah, so I had a tough time for years. You know, when I was very young, growing up in Queens, New York, I would see all these successful business owners or whatever they did for a living that, you know, they Made their money. They had the nice cars, they had a suit. But then they were smoking cigars and drinking and not really taking care of themselves. And I, at a very young age, thought, aren't you supposed to treat yourself like an Olympian if you're in business? Because every day in business, we're going for a gold medal. And so that's something that's just been swirling around in my head for 40 plus years. I got into this business spartan. We grew it to a size that's unmanageable for me. It's 45 countries. It's a crazy town, all day, every day, trying to keep the wheels on the bus. And so I got a firsthand look at how hard it is to run something like this to try to be successful. I got a little taste of what it's like to go for that gold medal every day, to try to be an Olympian. And it requires resilience, it requires grit, it requires complete and utter focus. And I don't think that always exists in business, and it doesn't exist for entrepreneurs. I think a lot of people like the idea of being in business. They're interested in business, but they might not understand the full commitment. And so the show is about getting people that claim they want to be in business, that claim they want to be successful, tuned up and ready to handle what it takes. It does it in a very unorthodox way. I mean, people, first of all, if you're listening and you don't know what the show is, but basically we take folks and run them through what you would run through if you were in the military, you're tackling obstacles, you're tackling tasks. On this farm we have up in Vermont, you're doing things that, at first glance, have no connection to business, but based on what I said earlier, have every connection to business. In other words, if you could figure stuff out on the fly, if you're getting shot at metaphorically, and your whole world is falling apart, but you're able to still somehow keep it together and keep pushing forward and motivating the team, those skills are going to be very valuable when you try to run your own business. And so I don't know if I explained it very well, but that's. That's what we do. That's where it came from.

Well, I love the concept, and one of the episodes that I saw was the cleaning company. I think it was CNS is the name of the company, and it was so fascinating. So this couple buys the company and it seemed like they didn't know anything about the industry. They didn't know what they were doing. And the people that were working with them didn't feel like they had much leadership. So you brought them over to the farm and you put them through some pretty serious physical work. And what I loved is at the end of the show, you always had sort of as the wrap up in the last few minutes of the show, at least the ones that I've seen so far, you would talk to them three months later to see the improvement. And one case revenues were up 167% for one company. For another company is just really amazing. And I'm just one of the things, my work is very intellectual when it comes to business and problem solving and yours is very physical and psychological. And I'm just curious and you touched about a little bit in one of the episodes, but what is it about that physical pushing people to the limit that had them improve the business so much in such a short amount of time?

Well, listen, the brain and the body are connected. The brain lives inside the body, right? And so I know as academics, as business people, we like to separate it. And those exercise people are weird over there and the academic, they're weird. But like, it's the same body, it's the same being. And if you can somehow master being under tremendous physical and mental stress and still push through and still keep it together, you're unbreakable. You're unbreakable and business is punching you in the face all day, every day. I mean, everything that can go wrong does go wrong in business. And my father used to say, you've got to have the stomach for it. So let's bring you to the farm. Let's put you under tremendous pressure. And basically it's a litmus test. Do you break or do you continue? Do you bend? Maybe get close to that breaking point. Find out what you're made of. Find out what you're capable of so that when you get back home, you've got this frame of reference that you can go back to. We call it a resiliency data point in the brain and say, yeah, it sucks I lost my best employee. It sucks that the competitor moved in across the street. It sucks that we didn't hit our budgetary goals this year. But it's not that bad. I'm not living in the Ukraine, you know what I mean? I'm not whatever you fill in the blank. And I think if you have that mindset, you're more likely to be successful. Look, 95% of businesses fail. That's a daunting number. The longer you play the game, the more likely you are to die. And the real reason that happens is people wave the white flag. They give up. It's not intelligence. It's not roadmaps. I mean, there's plenty of podcasts, plenty of books. There's Harvard Business School. You go down the list. Everybody's an expert in business, but yet 95% of the businesses fail. So it comes down to, in my opinion, people quit. I have 10 million people that have done a Spartan race somewhere in the world. I've had more conversations than I care to talk about with individuals, one on one, that are doing something hard and they have all the capability of finishing, but they tap out, and they have the most logical reasons when they tap out. And then 30, 60, 90 days later, I get an email that says, I can't believe I quit. I could have did it. And so really, this whole experiment here, this whole show on the farm, is just showing people what they're capable of, how much further they can go, honing in on the issues in business that people just trip over every day and don't pay attention to. I do it myself, right? We, as human beings, we look for the easy road all day, every day, and we get into the office or into our pajamas in our kitchen in this new world, and we do the work that's easy, and we answer the emails that are easy. And we might not dive in to the hard stuff, right? The complicated problems. And on the farm, we don't allow that. On the farm, we dive right into the tough stuff, the stuff you've been avoiding. The stuff maybe was a blind spot you weren't paying attention to. We ripped the band aid off. Punch you in the nose and resolve those issues.

Well, what I like is that you don't just say, okay, you need to toughen up. So if anybody watches the show, you're going to see that the beginning of the show isn't about even the resiliency. You go in, you point out, okay, wait a second, why are you spending all this money on new furniture? Or you don't have any standard operating procedures or whatever it might be. And so what ends up happening is at least when they're doing the physical work, they're still grounding in the three business issues that you typically identify that if they can tackle those three, they're going to accelerate the business. And I really like the way you make that connection between the business problem and then doing the physical, rather than just sending people off to do tough work and not connecting it back to the business, obviously that was part of the design. How did that all come about? And when you start thinking about the challenges you give people, how do you link it back to those challenges?

Well, I just think about my own business and I think about what would be great for us. And that's how it happened. And look, the CNBC team, they know what they're doing. So when we met them and we laid this out and they saw the farm, and I've been doing this for 20 plus years. I've been bringing companies up to the farm. Never for a TV show, just because that's what we do. You get the CNBC team involved and they end up creating a show that consumers can watch and gain something from. But this is what we've been doing. We've been doing it for a long time. The Googles, the Facebooks, the Goldman Sachs, et cetera, they've been coming up to the farm. Look, this is going to sound silly, but even surprising for me when I check back in with these companies, these teams, the results are incredible. They're incredible. And you can't really, like you've said with the questions you're asking, you can't really connect the dots so easily in your head. I don't understand. It makes perfect sense if they spent a weekend at Harvard, that the results would be amazing. But I think it's really hard to change your course or change yourself or change your team with a podcast. I have a podcast too, so I'm not picking on podcasts. Right. I have books too, but a book's not going to really. You read it, you close it, you put it back on the shelf, you make some mental. You might not do the work, we're forcing you to do the work, we're forcing the change. And that's really the magic.

So what? I know you talk a lot, like on the show, about the tools and the things to use. What is it? So we get the snapshot of maybe three months afterwards, but obviously you've worked with these companies for years after they go through the experience on the farm. What is it that you do to help them reinforce the messages so that it actually sticks? Or does it just stick because they spent those few days together and now it's just part of their DNA?

Well, I like to say, here's an analogy that I think helps it stick when you want to turn iron into steel. And up on the farm, about a half a mile away is an old iron mine. So this is a really Relevant analogy for me, but when you want to turn iron into steel, you got to heat it, you got to pound it, and then you drown it. Right. And. And so that's what we do. We are searing, for lack of a better word, in their brains, individually and collectively, the changes necessary to tackle these problems head on. We're searing it into their brains.

And the searing part, which probably is, Even though it's maybe the least physically challenging, is the one which probably be the one I'd want to do the least, which is where everybody sort of dunks themselves in the water when they talk about what they're committed to and where they're going. I'm assuming that's when you talk about the searing that last. Going into the cold water and just sort of really burning it into your brains and your DNA that that's what you're referring to there.

Yeah. Not. Not just the. The recap at the end, but. But. But all along the way, again, you know, you. You do business, I do business. Like I said, we go through our days doing the same thing over and over and over. And this is a pivot, right? Right. This is a pivot. And it's painful, and it has to be to make the change.

Well. And the thing which I see a lot as each episode progresses is just the change more, not so much in terms of people having the tools to do problem solving, which is what I do a lot around, but using your word, resilience. You see, first of all, a more cohesive team coming together in a way that was certainly not there in the beginning. The leadership. Couple of not very powerful leaders at the beginning who seem to have been transformed through the course of the time at the Farm. So it's just a really spectacular show to be able to see in a relatively short amount of time. I mean, these are just, in a few days, the transformation that takes place in these people. To me, it's quite astonishing.

Again, I've been doing it a long time, so maybe I'm used to it now. What's shocking to me is the results are so effective. It's not like 10,000 companies reach out. You know what I mean? It's an uncomfortable process. So you would think that folks would be, like, just trampling down the farm. Oh, my God. Like, with companies struggling the way they are, especially with COVID and just the reality of business in general. But, you know, it's a couple of dozen companies a year. It's not a thousand. So it is surprising. But I think at the end of the day, Human beings. I don't really want to do the work I don't really want to do. If I did, Central park would be crowded at 5am with runners. But it's not right. We're motivated by the avoidance of discomfort. We don't run towards discomfort.

Yeah, I can definitely see that. And one of the things that you said is like, feeling pain is one of your greatest teachers. And I can get that. And you've had to, I mean, a little bit off the script of the TV show, but obviously with COVID I know that having in person events, like, you know, Spartan events, that was difficult. And it was a difficult time for your business. And so for you, I mean, you must have applied all of these techniques for yourself through that whole process to be able to get through the past couple of years where I'm sure it was quite challenging for you.

You have no idea how, like, we were shut down in 45 countries for two years. Even companies like Circus Soleil, who are wildly successful, you know, went bust. It's been really, really tough. And I think the thing that's kept us alive is the fact that we are resilient as a team. We practice this. This is what we do for a living. Otherwise, oh my God, there were so many opportunities to wave the white flag. Just like, are you kidding me? Another headache and other problems like every day. But we're resilient. And the other thing is we're lucky in that we change lives for a living. And we get those emails and that pat on the back saying thank you almost every day. If we didn't get that reinforcement, it would be hard, I would imagine, because.

Even though they're the ones in the mud, I like the one with the cleaning company. I think you said something to the effect of in order to grow your business, you have to get dirty or something to that effect. And I love. You have some really great lines. So whether these are your lines, you got other people writing, really just. There's some great, great sound bites in there. But it's like, yeah, we got to get dirty to do this. And it's not something that we're wired to do. So now with your team. So for the past couple of years, how did you keep them motivated? I mean, I know you couldn't. I mean, I assume you had to furlough some people. I mean, that's every company. I know how to do that to some degree. How did you keep people motivated through all that? Did you bring them up to the farm and put them through another experience or what had people stay strong.

You know, there were half a dozen of us that moved up to the farm during the pandemic, and that really kept us alive. We did a 5am call every single day. We called it the warrior call. And we had folks from all over the world get on and we went around the horn and got information from Japan and information from Argentina and what was going on. So that was good. Where it was like having breakfast every day with the whole world. So that was neat. I did four live workouts a day. That was. I got in the best shape of my life, made my kids climb the mountain every single day, kept some semblance of family together. And I had a lot, like I said, I had a half a dozen of my team members there. So we were just grinding all day, every day. I can't say we had a perfect plan because we didn't know what the hell we were doing. Like, nobody knew what was going on. But we stay alive internally and externally to the world. And it's still. It's just touch and go. It's one day at a time. We've burned through so much capital trying to keep this thing humming. It's the greatest test I've ever been through.

Well, it's quite a testament, though, to your process. I mean, if you can live that in a way that's so extreme, to me, that's just a great, great sign. So most of the people who would. That I work with, listen to the podcast are typically business people. A lot of times larger corporations, they might not be sending people up to Vermont, but what would you tell someone if their business is struggling, if they're trying to. They're struggling with some opportunities or problems that they can't tap into. What would you recommend individuals and teams do that don't require them to. To go off to the farm? But there are things that they might be able to do on a regular basis or maybe one time as a team that will help, you know, accelerate their ability to solve problems.

Well, I mean, I would just emulate what we do on the show. Right? I would. I would bring somebody in. You don't have to pay them. I'm sure there's somebody close to you or the company that will help and give an honest view from 50,000ft with the three biggest problems you have are that are you're going to find 100 problems. Every company has 100 problems. But let's focus on three, and then let's sign up as a team for something hard. Could be a spartan race, selfishly to be nice, a tough mudder, but it could be a 5k, it could be anything. That's extremely challenging. And then let's work on those three problems while we're doing that hard thing. Let's discuss it, let's talk, let's struggle together and let's come up with solutions around them and, and a strong commitment to fixing them while we're doing that hard thing. It could be a walk, could be a 10 mile walk, but it's got to be something physically hard where people are just exhausted, their guards are down, you're having open, honest, real conversations about stuff. All the BS is gone. And then at the end of it, circle up the next day and memorialize it all. And that whole thing could cost you under $1,000. But do something hard together and go through those problems together.

Well, and I love that because on the show, one of the things I think was the episode with the cleaning company where after the first day they were doing all the hard work and they went back and you were watching them have a conversation and they were sharing in a way that they hadn't shared before. They were being like really raw and honest with each other. And I think sometimes that's, you know, put resilience aside. Communication becomes a big barrier in organizations as people feel like they can't say what they need to say or they don't feel like they have a voice or they think somebody else should solve their problem for them and so they just go along with it. So I think that's a really another powerful part of what I saw in the show.

There's no doubt about it, communication is the number one killer. And it becomes incredibly hard at exponentially harder on zoom on email on Slack today in Orlando here we've got people in an office, so somebody grabbed me, we sat down, we knocked out something that's been going on for two weeks in circles. All you gotta do is sit down face to face and knock it out. So communication is a killer or a superpower. And so you've got to figure out how to utilize it in a way where it becomes a superpower, not a killer.

That's fantastic. So to wrap things up, each show you identify the three challenges that a specific company has. And I'm putting on the spot here. But can you think of three of the biggest challenges most companies have when it comes to being resilient? What would be the three things that if they could tackle those problems, would really have the biggest impact on their ability to be resilient, grow and Be successful.

Well, I think it's definitely communication, right? And figuring out a process for communication that is, like I said, becomes your superpower. We, we were lucky. We brought in military consultants over the last 15 plus years and they've helped us communicate better. And by the way, it's always a work in process. Like we've got to get better and better and better, especially with this distributed workforce. Number two, pulling. Pulling a page from one of the shows. Process and procedure, right? Standards. Here's how we operate. If you want to scale a business, you've got to figure out a way to have processes that folks can follow. What if you lose a member or two members or an entire team? Other people need to be able to step right in and follow those processes and procedures. And then number three, which you haven't. Well, maybe you did see it on the show is just remember, cash is, is king. It is oxygen. You could never have enough of it. Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, pretty successful guys. Take a look at their balance sheets. Take a look. I know Steve Jobs is gone, but take a look at Apple's balance sheet. He clearly must have whispered in somebody's ear before he took his last breath and said, we need a lot of capital because times change, industries change, businesses go up, they go down. Covid happens, you name it. Cash is king. And you've got, you've got the king. People can't see it, but you're sitting in front of the king of spades there. So king.

Cash is king. That's a good one to close up on. Joe, I just really appreciate you taking the time to be here. Love the show. Can't wait to watch the new episodes that come out. It's Tuesdays, 10pm Eastern Time and Pacific Time. Right on CNBC.

Yes, please. And 1 million of your friends.

I will tell all. One million of my friends. Absolutely. And hopefully we'll have a chance to meet up here in Orlando sometime when you get a free moment. It'd be great to see you in person.

Anytime.

All right, Joe, thanks so much.

Take care. Bye.

Take care. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. It's a little different than the other episodes, but I think there were some really powerful insights here. My takeaways from the conversation with Joe is that we need to deal with adversity. I mean, we can solve our problems intellectually using the lenses, but if we don't have the intestinal fortitude, the power, the drive, the commitment to actually move them forward, then it's not going to make any difference. It also comes Back to communication. Problem solving is a team sport. Yes, you can have a couple of people who might find some great solutions, but ultimately, to implement it, to execute, to get the work done, you need to have the team. You need to have everybody aligned and agreeing and moving forward and committed. And the third thing that I take away from the shows and from the conversation with Joe is that leadership really is important. And if you have a person who is, you know, not committed, not strong, not knowledgeable, and not empowering of the people inside the organization, nothing's going to work. So with the invisible solutions lenses, which we share each week here on the show, they are the intellectual way to find those solutions. And what I really appreciate about what Joe was saying is that's great, but now we need to get the work done. Finding powerful solutions to problems and identifying big opportunities is only the start, it's not the end. We need to move it forward. We need to get that implemented, get the team committed to it, and make sure everybody's on the same page. So I think it's a really powerful one, two combination to be able to think about the challenges, both from an intellectual perspective, but also that visceral perspective that I think Joe brings to the table. So with that, we are at the end of this week's episode. To submit problems you want solved on the regular version of this podcast, go to invisiblesolutions.compodcast.com remember to download the lenses. Go to get the lenses.com I look forward to being with you next week. And until then, happy problem solving.