Optimizing People-First Leadership: From Zero to $24M | Bart Paden

Welcome to the Optimizing Beyond podcast. I'm Josh Negron, and this show's all about sharing lessons, ideas, and strategies that sharpen your thinking, strengthen your habits, and push you to grow beyond comfort zones. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the Optimizing Beyond podcast. I'm Josh Negron, and today I've got a guest who's a longtime friend, local entrepreneur, and the author of the book I recently reviewed in episode 35 called Remaining Human. He's a founder, builder, leadership consultant, but before we get into his 20-plus years of scaling companies, I have to introduce him, I feel like, with his real credentials. According to his LinkedIn profile, he possesses top-tier executive skills, including and not limited to expert-level choco wearing, professional marshmallow burning, advanced staring up and to the left, and a very crucial lifestyle metric, changing clothes without help. Bart Payton, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I spotted those. One of them was even endorsed. And I was like, this is, this is great. I love this.

I'm never that serious.

Nope. That's good. I was looking through as I was prepping for this, and I was thinking about the early days, like in Precious Moments and co-founding Midwestern Interactive and growing it. Have you always had like the grand vision for growing and building, or was that something that you found yourself in just doing on repeat?

That's a fantastic question to start this. I don't want to sit here and say that my journey was predestined or planned. Or completely organized from the beginning to even where I sit today. Like, I'm not that guy. Now, I was very fortunate early on in my college career. I had parents that really supported me, and I was able to focus on my education and not have a required job. So what I did is I went out and got jobs that helped me learn skills that I wanted to possess. So I would spend time at each one of these career stops and learn the things that I wanted to learn. And these were transient type jobs working in retail, or I was a pool guy for a while, tested pool chemicals. and things like that. Great way to learn customer service, by the way. So I just had these opportunities to kind of choose my adventure when it came to becoming what I thought I wanted to become. Now, the plan to start a web and software-based company, that had some purpose in it. I started very early. I had a professor— I think I talk about this in my kind of my memoir and, and the story of my life— I had a college professor who introduced me to this concept of the internet. Now that's dating me quite a bit, but back in those days there weren't books, there wasn't YouTube. You know, I, I was working for Precious Moments at the time that eBay was coming up, so I was in the collectibles industry watching the market crash because now everybody had access to all of those collectibles that had been sitting around shelves. So it's just a very interesting timeline in my life. But I was able to kind of— after I learned about this thing called the internet, I was able to put together a plan. I'm like, this is fun. I really enjoyed doing this kind of stuff and started piecing together this idea that I could start a web or software-based company out of Southwest Missouri where I lived. I was able to kind of put that plan together. I had a grand vision. I didn't know if I could execute it. I've got a neat little story. Early on in my career at Precious Moments, I was sent to a conference in Orlando, Florida, which back in those days, that's where conferences were.

Hmm.

And it was about email marketing. Nobody does conferences on email marketing anymore. And one of the guys that was a keynote speaker there took a real liking to me, and I was— I really appreciated some of the things he was communicating. And we went out to dinner one night, and he kind of laid out what he had done with his career a little bit more in depth than what he had shared with us during his meeting. And I shared with him my vision for what became Midwestern Interactive. Now you got to remember, this is 1998, 1999. So this was way before I really started doing the thing. And I shared with him the vision that became Midwestern Interactive. And he literally looked at me and he said, Bart, the only difference between you and me is I had a vision and I Executed on it, right? You haven't executed yet, and that kind of set something firm for me. Like okay, so this is a guy that I'm talking to that has been there and done that. He in in his case, he built a piece of web-based software early early on and turned around and sold it for seven plus figures, which was really cool. And that wasn't happening in those times. I mean, that that kind of stuff really didn't didn't exist. It was before the the dot com bubble and all that fun stuff. So it was cool to kind of see this guy that had. said, look, I've done this before. You just need to execute on your vision and you're going to get there. So that really kind of put some wheels in motion for me. And I started to be a little bit more focused in my approach to taking on projects. I can do this, I can build something like this.

Hmm.

And that's kind of where it started. It wasn't totally planned or organized, but I had a vision. And as soon as that vision was affirmed, it was all fast forward, move as quickly as I can through the steps that I needed to get through to build it right and begin, you know, that's going to be my career path.

How did you attract people and get them in your orbit for this? Because I find that some people, they have the vision, but they're not always good at bringing people on board and growing it that way. How did you scale it with people?

I have tried to live my life, and this was very cognitive. I've tried to live my life caring, respect for those around me. So every interaction becomes a positive one, even if it's a hard conversation. And I talk a lot about that and some of the stuff I'm doing now. But I never burned bridges. I never created environments that cause people to stumble. My hope is that I was operating in that way. So I had relationships, and when I had a relationship with somebody, it stuck and it was for the long haul. So for me, the resources there were pretty wide, you know, it was just an ask. And at that point in time, people were just starting to discover what the internet really was, so there was high demand for it.

Hmm.

So people were asking, you know, even when I was figuring it out, I wasn't afraid to try to do the work. So it wasn't like, get perfect at what I'm doing and then execute, right?

Mm-hmm.

I fumbled and stumbled my way through it, but I made sure I was clearly communicating with the people I was working for, right? We're, we're kind of dealing with brand new technology, and that really stuck even through the software company because the stuff that we were building was not— it didn't exist before in a lot of ways. You know, it wasn't rocket science, but it was pretty darn close to it as far as I was concerned. So for me, it was— it's a constant state of figuring it out, a constant state of Learning something new, a constant state of pushing past what I thought I could do and grabbing the next thing and getting access to the people. They were there.

Mm-hmm.

I can't really tell you. I mean, I can tell you the big reason why. I think God put me in the place that he put me in for a reason. And I try to say that as humbly as I can because I have had success, right? But it's nothing I've done has been outside of his will. Nothing I've accomplished has been outside of his directing me as much as I would allow him to. Right? I'm human. But I really feel like I got through what I got through and got to the place that I wanted to get to not on my own doing, right? So I think people were brought into my life. I did a project early on for a lady by the name of Kate Paley. Paley is a name that a lot of people know. William Paley is the guy that founded CBS Radio and Television. I happened to be working for some studios in LA from my upstairs office in my bedroom in Webb City, Missouri, and was introduced to her. She's flying into meetings in a private jet, and I'm flying coach in the backseat between 2 very large men, right? It was just a different world. But those doors just open. And Josh, I can't tell you that I pried them open. I didn't. They were open for me. And I just tried to do my best to walk through them with honor and respect for everybody around me. And I've tried to lead that way throughout my whole career.

So walk me through— honestly, I didn't know that you had started Restore Joplin after the Joplin tornado disaster. How did you I mean, what prompted you to get into that nonprofit space to have that impact?

Those who know me know that I don't exist well in the physical world when it comes to things like mechanics and construction. So for me, it was never a decision about, am I gonna get out there and help people rebuild? I'm gonna use the skills that I have, right? And I have been designing t-shirts and, and brands and logos and all sorts of stuff for years. I was doing it in high school. So for me, it was easy to design that shirt that became the Restore Joplin. I don't know if it's— it's on there somewhere.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Anyway, took about an hour and a half to design it. I did it on Monday morning after the tornado on Sunday. I think by Thursday of that week, I had announced that the shirt was available. It got picked up by a couple of media outlets and they started sharing it. And by the time that project was done, we had raised over $250,000. and giving it all away. And we had orders from people as far as Denmark, Germany, every state in the United States. It was such a cool process.

Holy smokes.

Yeah, a local screen printer, Binky Guy Textiles, it's still open today. They stepped in and gave us— I didn't even ask for it. I'm one of those guys that if I'm in a nonprofit, I want to pay retail. I'm that weirdo. I'm not looking for the handout. And he came to us and said, look, I don't want to charge you retail for this. I'm going to give you the shirts at my cost. So he burdened that throughout the entire process. So we were— he wasn't making any money on the work that we were doing. We weren't making any money on the work that we were doing, but we created awareness for what was going on in Joplin way outside of this market. And then we were helping. This is the coolest part of it for me. Like, we were helping people in our community who were falling through the cracks because insurance didn't show up in a timely way for a lot of these people.

Mm-hmm.

They needed windows in their cars. They needed tires that had gotten shredded by shrapnel. They you know, windows in their house, simple little things that were just maybe helping them get a little bit of normalcy back in spite of the horrific thing that they had just gone through. So we would sit with these people, and we'd have these conversations, and we'd see the pictures of the devastation and hear how their lives were affected, and then we were able to write a check without a lot of accountability. I was fortunate enough to be connected to a church that was willing to let us use their 501 for this, So we ran it all through them, and they let me run with a lot of autonomy. I was very accountable to them, and, and just because that's who I am. We were writing checks for windshields, we were writing checks for tires, we were helping kids get clothes. I mean, it was, it was crazy some of the things that we got pulled into, and I'm so proud of it. Like, I can look at all the big things that I've done in my career, and that's probably one of my happiest moments because it was unintentional. The goal was never financial, it was always to help people out. And again, $250,000 and we gave it all away. How cool is that?

Man, that is, that is intense. I love that. Wow.

And again, I can't take credit for it. It just happened, right?

Yeah, yeah, the door just opened. So all right. I noticed that you mentioned in your material how important your family time was throughout your career. A young person listening to this, they hear, you know, you just have to gain the confidence to act, you can iterate later, you know, just Just grind, get it done, you know, you'll, you'll get success. And then, you know, I'll sleep and spend time with my family later, right? And so, yeah, yeah, it seemed like that was a priority for you early on, more uniquely than, than some people. How do you— what do you say to someone that, that's ready to just run hard and ignore all the personal stuff until, until they can spend time?

Ooh, good one. You know, for me, the family was the reason that— that why do you have a job, right? It's to provide. So if I'm going to have a job that's going to provide, I got to follow through with the rest to that provision, and that's time spent being present with the family, right? I was fortunate. Not everybody has this. I was fortunate. I, I owned the business. I was not clocking in and clocking out. So for me, it was get the kids up, get them to school, go to work. 3 o'clock, shut it down, get the kids home, right? We'd spend time until it was bedtime. And then for me, 8:30, 9 o'clock at night, I'd get Carrie to bed and I would get back to work. Till 2, 3, 4 in the morning. So for me, the grind still happened. I was still working, in some cases, 60+ hours a week. But it was happening during those windows of time when the kids and even my wife didn't necessarily need me to be physically present.

Hmm.

And I was pretty diligent with that until 2012, when we opened up the doors of Midwestern Interactive. At that point, having staff, having an office, going through those steps, it was Challenging to keep that focus, but Carrie helped me fight for that too. She was present. Both the boys, I was involved in their sports until they got into high school. So I, we definitely still carved out the time. Um, but I just used the hours of the day when I wasn't physically needed by my family to accomplish all those tasks. And the good news is a lot of the work I was doing was production work. It didn't have to be sitting in front of someone talking to them.

Mm-hmm.

So it can be me and a computer sitting in a dark corner of a bedroom. Literally, that's how it all started. And I was working till 2 or 3 in the morning. I was sleeping for a few hours and I was doing it again.

Yeah. So the provision was the anchor and the extension. If they're your why, then they also need you.

Yeah, absolutely. They were always my why. They're still my why. And why I'm doing this again, because I could unplug and go a different direction, right? But the whole reason I'm diving back into the world that I'm digging into is I want to leave something behind. I want to leave a legacy behind. I want to create an environment where my kids can see what their dad did and not just see it through a glass window as if they're observing it, but in a way that they've been able to participate in it. You know, when we talk about Restore Joplin, my wife and kids were the packing and shipping department, so we brought them into that environment. When we were standing at an event in Joplin during that window of time, they were right there beside us participating in it. Eli works for Midwestern Interactive still as a designer. You know, bringing him up through all of the skills necessary to get where he's at. That was participation through me. Noah got my left brain. He's, he's my middle child and he's the guy that's got the math degree and walking with him through his journey, even through college, it's just important. And it always superseded the work. The work never took over it.

Yeah, that's huge. And that kind of dovetails with, you have a quote that you say often. I've heard you say it a lot is your organization cannot be healthier than you are. And on this podcast, I try to emphasize that change starts with you. And so Was that something that you knew innately early on, or is that something you had to learn way later in the process?

Golden rule: treat others the way you want to be treated. That is something that my parents instilled in me at a young age. So for me, leadership starts there. So when you look at how I operated, I tried to look at, at everything I was doing through the lens of those that I was interacting with. So what was the impact of my words? What was the impact of my actions? What is the impact of what I'm doing? on those around me. So from that perspective, that's, that's kind of the center. It's the center of everything I'm doing now. If you really dive into everything I'm doing with my company, Archetype Original, it all comes from that center place. I'm gonna, I'm gonna create environments where I treat people the way I would want to be treated, whether they're the brand new person on my staff or whether the old grizzled dog that's been there for years and years, right? I treat them the same way. And what I found Especially during the software company timeline, that investment in people is what changed the outcome. That level of care, that level of understanding. And I say this today, yes, you're only as good as the people in your company, right? That's for real. And the way I say it today is the people matter much more than the tasks. If you invest in your people, we proved it with Midwestern Interactive. We started with a $0 valuation in 2012. When I sold my half of that company to my partner, I believe the valuation was close to $24 million. 10 years from zero to that point. Now, the, the 20 years that led up to that 10-year window, that was a lot of grinding by myself. That was a lot of failing and still moving forward. But that, that 2012 to 2022, that window of time was where the things that I didn't even know the names for that I believed were how you were supposed to treat your people and treat your team. That's when those things were put into action. And from the very first hire through when I left, there was 104 people under my care, I believe was the count, right? I wanted them to know that I cared about them as the person, not the employee, not the, the engineer, not the designer, not the project manager, right? I wanted them to know that I cared for them as a person.

Hmm.

And I think that matters. Now, you get a company of 1,000 people, that's very challenging. For a single leader to do. At 104, I was stretched pretty thin, and there were some people that I didn't know as well as I wanted to, but I still worked hard every day to have contact with as many people as I could. And my questions were not always business. They were like, how you doing today? But I meant it, right? Or, hey, I know you were having this issue with a sick child, or I know you were having this issue with your husband being out of work, or whatever it was, right? It mattered to me. Because it had an impact on their performance, but it also had an impact on who they were. And I needed a team. The only way we accomplished what we accomplished was the team, was the people. Like, I don't build a $0 to $24 million company by myself.

That's exactly what leadership should be. And, and one of the things when I was reading the book last month, I noticed the concept of curiosity that I think is something that isn't talked about at leadership enough. Because I think in the same way of what you just talked about, it just being curious, being You know, caring about your people enough to ask and be involved. And then extending beyond in a performance standpoint, you know, when you're looking at data or you're having AI analyze the data like the book discussed, if you don't have any curiosity to go deeper into the why are these metrics low for this person, you know, like maybe I should ask them. Or so tell me a little bit about what the role of curiosity is for you in leadership.

I mean, it started at the beginning. I used to tell this joke and it may not land with your audience, but I'll tell it again. It was me and Al Gore at the very beginning of this. He invented the internet and I was just going along for the ride. We now know that's not true, but it was funny back in the day. But the curiosity is where it started. Nobody knew what the internet was. I didn't know what it was. I had a professor that spoke up and said, you might be good at this. So then I started digging into it. There weren't books that taught me how to code. I downloaded websites that I found on the internet and dissected the code to figure out how it worked. You know, so for me, it's always been Curiosity. It's always been trying to figure it out. We even, you go talk to the people that work for me, that was one of the phrases. We even put it on a t-shirt, you know, we'll figure it out. That's, that's just how it worked in those days. But it carried through to the very end. Like, still to this day, I'm still figuring it out. I, I spent most of 2025, a little bit of 2024 digging into how AI works. It's fascinating. I wouldn't be where I'm at with my understanding of it without a lot of curiosity. It's just, it's got to be part of the journey, I think, for anybody. I don't think it matters what industry you're in. I think if we look at the car business that you're in, right, like there are things that you have to figure out that are not well established. It's not a well-worn path. You've got a new type of person that's working for you and they've got a different set of struggles. Like even in that moment, you've got to figure some way to relate to them out. Well, how do you ask those questions? How do you get to that place? You have to ask. You have to be curious. You have to care. So for me, curiosity is critical for everything that I have done. I say in my book, Accidental CEO, this is not a journey that I really organized and planned. We kind of talked about that at the beginning of the show, but everything that came at me, I took the time to try to understand it, to try to connect with it any way that I could, and then built the things that were necessary to accommodate for it or to plan for it in the future or to detour around it if we had to. Right. But it was all coming from that point of figuring it out, asking questions, being curious.

How did curiosity factor in the hard conversations for you, like discipline, correction, and I mean, even, even making the decision whether you needed to part ways with somebody?

Yeah, I needed to understand. I, again, I start from a position of treat people the way you want to be treated. So if I was gonna have to have a hard conversation with a person, I think for me, it started with One, letting them know this is going to be a hard conversation. I never let them walk into a conversation like that blind. That's not fair. And I'm not about power. I'm the opposite of power. That's a, that's a power play if you leave somebody hanging and surprise them. I'm not a fan there. But the reality is you have to ask them questions. You have to have a conversation with them. And more often than not, they know that they're not performing well. They know that a hard conversation is necessary. So why beat them over the head with it?

Hmm.

2 human beings. We care about each other. We have built a relationship because I took the time as a leader and you took the time as one of my team members. To invest in each other and understand who we are, how we operate. And for me, the questions, even in the moment of dealing with the hardship, helped me understand their perspective. I only had a few situations in my 33 years of doing any, any of this where there was malicious intent that was uncovered.

Hmm.

Most of the time it's, I didn't know. Most of the time I had other influences on my life that were affecting it and weren't gonna let me focus the way I wanted to focus. So for me, it was that conversation. It was that relationship. It was that Curiosity in those moments, understanding the full situation. And I'll tell you, I've had more than one situation, probably 4 or 5 specifically, where I was put in a position necessarily— like, it wasn't just I stumbled into this. I was put in a position where I was having to take a look at somebody and their performance and decide whether they were staying a part of our team or not.

Hmm.

And in all but 2 or 3 of those situations that were really extreme, We were able to salvage the person because we gained understanding about what was impacting their performance, and it had nothing to do with work. You're never going to understand that as a leader unless you ask those questions, because it just doesn't come up. If you're talking to, let's say, Susie about project management, you're not going to talk to her about the fact that she just had a baby and, you know, her baby's been in the hospital a little bit over the last few months, right? You don't know that unless you ask, because she's probably not going to share it.

Right.

You ask, how's it going? Right now, you know, now you have context for— she's got a child that's not well. That means her performance could probably going to be affected. So let's connect her some people within the business and help her navigate this. We had other moms in the business. There was a support team that we had built called MWI Serves— or MWI Cares, sorry. And the whole purpose of that was other people on the team that were available to sit in the gap for some of these people who needed help, right? So it always came from care. Even when I was sitting down talking to somebody, having a hard conversation, it came from a position of care.

That's amazing. You correlate a lot leadership with stewardship. You mentioned it earlier on when we started that you're not about the authority or performance, but responsibility is what leadership needs to be. What does viewing leadership through the lens of stewardship mean to you practically?

Leadership for me is not a position of power. Leadership for me is not a position where I am standing above everyone else. In my world, there is no ivory tower. So, for me, that posture of being with my people, like, I even had conversations with employees where I'm introducing them, and I would say, these are the people that I work with. I own the company. I was their boss, but my posture was standing shoulder to shoulder with these people. And I had a team of 104 people without exception that would run through a brick wall with me. And I say with me purposefully. We had that kind of culture. We had that kind of community where we had each other's back. We knew that the effort was trying to move the whole thing forward, not just the thing I wanted as the owner of the business, right? And it was never for me about the profits. The profits were the result of the effort, and I focused all of my attention on the effort. And my effort in that was what burden as a leader— I mean, I think that's leadership more than anything— what burden do I need to carry for my people? It's not what can I get them to do for me? My posture was more a posture of service. My posture was one of taking care of my team. What guardrails needed to be put up to keep them on the road? Not roadblocks, not bumps that they had to slow down and bump over because I needed a data point, but what are the guardrails that we need on the side of the road that keep everything flowing smoothly? That was more my investment of time. And if there was a roadblock, most often it wasn't inside the company, it was from outside. influences. So how do I bulldoze those and get those out of the way so our team can operate efficiently? So that's more the posture that I take. And it is stewardship. It is, you're taking care of your people. My leadership role was not to be the guy sitting on top of the pile. It was the guy that was in the middle of the pile, in the scrum with everybody else figuring it all out.

Well, and that philosophy also, I feel like, is really enabling, like John Maxwell talks about 360-degree leadership, you know, that someone doesn't have to have a position or a title to lead. There are people in every organization that are leaders but don't necessarily have the title because they adopt that kind of steward, stewardship mindset. And so I can only imagine being a leader at the top of an organization operating that way, how empowering it would be to others watching that and going, well, I can do that. I can lead too in my little influence.

And isn't that what you want as a leader? Like, I use the phrase cloning a lot. Like, if I believe that I'm doing good work, There's some idea that I want to take what I have and I want to plant that in someone else and help develop them and their skill set as a leader in that way. So my investment in leadership is not protecting my authority, protecting my role. My job is to kind of work myself out of a job.

Mm-hmm.

I want to elevate everybody around me so much that I'm unnecessary, and then I shift my perspective. Like, now I'm leading in a different way. Now I'm taking on other challenges. Now I'm focused on growing the business or whatever it was. But for me, it was always about elevating people. And I wanted teams that elevated each other. In Scrum, in project management, we talk about self-organizing teams, right? That's one of the phrases that they use in that methodology. It's a, it's a project management agile-based framework that we used. And self-organizing teams is what you want as a business. It means you don't have to be on top of them all the time and telling them exactly what you need to do. You develop them, you build them up, you give them the skill sets, you give them the authority, you give them the responsibility, and you let them run. So for me, that's much more where I like to sit in those situations. I hire great people. They're not only good character people, they're high performers, or they're at a minimum very capable of becoming a high performer once we got them trained up the way we wanted them trained. So why do I need to be on them all the time?

Hmm.

So for me, I would rather stand beside them. Let's figure out this problem together. Let's go through this together. Let's figure this out as a team more than I'm the boss, do what I say because this is what I want.

It's also— it takes you out of potentially being the bottleneck. So many businesses out there, even if, even if we're not— let's, let's assume we're not dealing with a power-hungry leader or, or one that wants to keep their people down. They want to run fast, they want to do great things, they invest in their people. But if they're the one that's most capable or understands the most, they want to like audit all the output, right? They want to, they want to be the decision maker, they want to analyze everything. And at some point with scale, you can't do that. And so, you know, what do they say? Delegate. If someone can do something at like close to 80% of what you can, ship it. Like, don't be a perfectionist. Like, how do you do that? So yeah, I mean, by doing that, I think that's one of the reasons why you were able to scale because you enabled your people to run. Bart, you said earlier that obviously you're a man of faith. You're not shy about that. It's kind of everywhere. How, you know, especially now in being a coach and consultant and getting into that world, how do you navigate using your faith and the principles of your faith While also potentially sitting across the table from someone who doesn't subscribe to it.

My faith is everywhere, you know, and you know how I relate to you. You know how I communicate with you. You know, based on the actions that I take, or at least I hope, right? Nobody's perfect, but I try. If you look at me without knowing me, without saying a word to me, you should see somebody that has respect for the humanity around him. He has a good understanding of right and wrong, right? These are things that I want people to know me for. My legacy should be things just like that. He built me up, he didn't tear me down. Or if I did tear you down, I built you back up after because you needed to be torn down. So for me, faith becomes part of every action because I want people to get better, I want them to grow, I want them to progress. And if they happen to progress towards Jesus, great. It's not my job to convert them, it's not my job to force them down any path, but I can present it. And it may just come across as, man, this guy is supposed to be my boss and I just see someone Who cares about me as a human? It's amazing what that will do to people, and I try to live my life in that way where the impact is not just because I said the words, but I did the thing that they're like, "Oh, he's really living it out." And I hope when I when they put me in the ground, I hope that's something that is right there that said, "Yeah, he lived it out. He he did the things that he said he was going to do. He took care of the people that were in his care." You said something earlier about John Maxwell, and there's a there's a quote that's similar that. that Simon Sinek said about leadership, and I love it. Basically, leadership is not a title. It's, it's taking care of the people to your left and to your right.

Hmm.

And it doesn't matter to me where you are in the hierarchy. If you take that posture, you will create a winning team. And I've got people that I have been connected to since stepping away from the software company that are in environments where it's very difficult for them to find leadership above them. It just doesn't exist. So the only thing that they have is looking to their left and their right. They're looking to their left for help. They're reaching out to their right to help someone. Like, that's just naturally how a lot of companies have to work these days. And my hope is that I can inspire people that even in those small roles, those lower-level roles, you can still be a leader because you can look to your left and to your right and you can see the people that need care, and they're the same people that are willing to help you. So build that culture in your business and you will thrive.

100%. So you recently launched Archetype Original. You talked about it earlier. Out of all the things that you're working on with that, that whole whole hub and spoke situation. What's— what are the things that you're most excited about right now that you're working on?

I'm a writer. I never thought I would be on any podcast saying I'm a writer, and I am having so much fun writing. That wasn't part of my journey. Like, I could write. I had to write proposals. I had to write emails. But the idea of writing for the sake of exploring an idea or writing the book that I wrote— I mean, I took 33 years, 32 years of my life and distilled them down to 178 pages, which is weird. 32 years, 178 pages. I thought there was going to be more there. There just wasn't. And that was a really fun book to write. And it was very cathartic in it. And some of these journeys that I'm on in research and understanding topics, it is cathartic. I've experienced these things. So why did I experience them? And that, that is a fun exploration for me. So writing is a big one. The next piece that is, I'm finding I'm more and more excited about is I've built some applications that I think are going to allow me to test leadership. It's not live yet, but I've built this system that I call ALI, and it's the Archetype Leadership Index. And the whole point of this particular platform, and it's mentioned on my website, there's 7 conditions of leadership that I believe I can test for. The first being clarity, the second being communication, third consistency, trust, alignment, stability, and drift. Those are the 7 conditions of leadership that I have come up with that I believe give a great baseline for how leadership is being perceived in a company. This little platform, living in the software world that I lived in for so long, I'm really proud of what I've come up with. So one, the idea of building it for myself, like I'm building software, this whole new era of vibe coding and working with AI to, to build applications It's changing the landscape of software development. It's making it more reachable for so many more people. But the fact that I have 30 years living in that space, I'm having a lot of fun building these applications, and I think they can have a real purpose in what I'm doing going forward. So I'm really excited about the writing. I'm really excited about the software that I built. But then the last one that, that is— it's my heartbeat. I want to help business leaders do better.

Mm-hmm.

I want to help business owners do better. My heart is with small business, so 5 to 250 people, those businesses where with a small team of people you can really have an impact not only on the business, but you can have an impact on a community. Like, those are the things that I think are the 3 things that I'm most excited about this journey. And I look forward to those days when I get to sit down across the table from somebody and help them navigate growth or help them navigate an issue that they're experiencing in their business. Or, um, you know, I've got 3 or 4 mentorship clients that I talk to on a very regular basis, and it's just being a sounding board for these people. I've been there. I've sat in those seats. I've, I've walked in those shoes. So why not use what I've learned over 33 years of being in business to help others? Those are the 3 things I'm most passionate about and excited about what I'm doing.

You're like curating everything to give back. Like, yeah, what a life-giving thing.

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, it comes down to legacy, Josh. It does. It comes down to what am I leaving behind? Am I leaving something behind that has an impact? Or am I just taking as much as I can and it's all going to disappear with me? I'm the other guy. What I, what I'm doing right now, there's, there's, I want to leave more than just he was here.

Hmm.

I want people to look at the work that I've done and said he had an impact. He changed my life as an individual, or he helped us fix our culture and our business. And now we're thriving, whatever that is. But that's the play right now. It's about legacy. It's about what I can leave behind for future generations and not just my family, but the broader community that's around me.

What an aspirational, worthwhile goal, my friend.

I'm crazy.

Good crazy. Good crazy.

I hope so.

Awesome, Bart. Well, thanks for joining us today. Guys, if you're a business owner, executive, or aspiring leader who wants to build your culture where your people can actually actually breathe and operate, you need to check out Bart's work. And he said it, he's an author, so check out his book. Uh, I just read Remaining Human, which is a great leadership book on the emerging AI world that's upon us. So if you want to grab a copy, I'll have it linked in the description. He's got an incredible array of leadership services, diagnostics, and tools on his website as well. And also, because Bart's a friend of the show, he is giving our Optimizing Beyond family a discount. So use the code Josh10 at checkout and you'll get $10 off your book. I have linked it below. So as always, thanks for listening to the Optimizing Beyond podcast. Remember, growth happens when you take action. So subscribe, share this with a friend, but most importantly, put what you learned into practice because as we know, daily anything changes everything.