BILLIONAIRE REVEALS The #1 Habit For Success NOBODY SHARES! | Ryan Smith & Lewis Howes

You are only striving for that financial goal or hurdle or whatever it is. When you get there, you will be incredibly disappointed. Because...

I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really?

Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes.

You got five kids. You care deeply about your wife. You care deeply about your faith. And you're on a mission to change lives as well. And I love learning about that. How have you stayed humble in the pursuit of success in building a business that has been this massive business and now being majority owner of Utah Jazz, but also been committed to family and faith? Because it seems like we see most people aren't able to do both.

Yeah, I mean, so first of all, like depending on the day, you might ask my wife, she might disagree, who's first and what goes on. Right. Because that's just part of the grind.

Of course.

But I think it's aspirational, right? Yeah. Like, in humble, I don't know if it's something that anyone's ever described me as, but I try my best. I think the idea is maybe like, how do you not change that much, right? So first of all, that's what makes you happy. If you take family and your true North Star out of the equation, you can get lost pretty easy in this world.

Yes.

And I think it limits everything. I think it limits your potential. I think it limits what you can do for other people. And so for me and my family, like having faith that we know where we're going and why, and when times get weird, you always have an anchor or a new North Star to go to is like priority number one, right? And without that, it's hard. And everyone can find that, right? In something. And then who do you want to go with? Like, I want to go with my people. I want to go with my family and my wife and like the people that we're growing with to that destination or wherever it is we're going along the journey. And like, and they remind you. They remind you like, hey Ryan, like, you know, everyone thinks this balance is this idea that we've got like this, completely balanced life. That's not what balance is. This is an airplane. One wing is in the water and all times are down. And you just gotta have people around you that are like, Hey, Ry, dude, you're not bringing it this week. Or like, Hey, man, this is not who I married. You've gotta get that other wing up.

Will your wife call you out on those things?

Oh, yeah, for sure.

All the time.

I haven't seen you in a week. What's going on? Or it's been two weeks. And look, you're gonna have parts of your life like if we've had a child, like everything else shifts to the family or someone's sick or you know, when Qualtrics was going public, like it was off balance this way. The key is that you get it back. You keep getting it back. And it's not, if you take a look at balance within a month or a day or maybe even a quarter, you're gonna have it tilted, but you've gotta look at it and say, hey, over a period of a year or six months or three months, like how do you balance that out? And I think that we can line up to that as humans. We can't control life and what happens because one wing or one thing will always be the major, and then something else is the minor.

And it sounds like, I mean, if you're building your business and launching it, there's gonna be a lot of momentum and energy for months or years building something, you're not gonna have that balance with everything else in your life as well. But it sounds like if you can re-correct it and spend more time with family for a period of time, go back to business, then that's kind of been your approach, right?

Yeah, I mean, look, we started, I mean, Qualtrics was 20 years of just that, just grinding. Grinding. Like, I mean, there's, I feel like there's very few people who went through our journey, right? Being in Provo, Utah, not raising venture capital, doing it ourselves. like nothing was handed to us and so there were times where you kind of needed that correction.

Yes.

And but what people don't understand is that correction actually charges the batteries to make you go further.

Right.

So it's a little counterintuitive that if you burn all the way, like you limited the upside of everyone, everyone around you, that you can try to impact with.

What was the mindset for you 20 years ago on building this? Was it, I'm gonna build this multi-billion dollar company, the exit, and is it all about money focus and driven around that? Or what was the mindset to growing it to where it's been today?

I mean, we didn't have a mindset. I think this achieved everything that we thought it was gonna achieve probably years ago.

You didn't think that was gonna happen.

We didn't let ourselves dream. I mean, there was dreams, but when you're in it and you're in the grind, you can't see more than about 90 days in front of you. How do you survive? Yeah, we'd go through our annual planning and we'd be like, oh, wow. There was no five-year vision. There might have been on our product site, but there wasn't on How does five year... Like, I don't have that now. I don't have this five year plan. Like, okay, for our business, this is what's going to happen in five years. I mean, we went from raising money one year to selling a year later to IPO two years later. No one had that in their plans.

-Crazy.

-And right, and so I think that you... We were just putting our heads down and going and staying focused. and trying to execute and do it as a team and not worry about probably more than anything like who got the credit or who was right, more that we're right or maybe we can do it. And I think that that's lifted everyone and everything. And so there hasn't been this, hey, this is the destination or the endpoint. It's been, let's just be opportunistic. at every possible checkpoint that there is.

Yes.

And let's just assume that we're gonna work till we're 80. I'm gonna work till I'm 80.

Right.

I don't wanna retire. I could have probably done that. Like, I'm gonna work till I'm 80. Whether I mentally have said that's what I'm gonna go do, I just know myself at this point. I keep jumping into things.

Right.

Whether I like it or not. So it's probably easier to say, Hey, Ryan, do you see yourself as an 80 year old? Or an 85 year old hanging it up? The answer is no.

No.

Why is that?

I don't know. Because this isn't how I was as a kid. I believe that when you're building things and you're building platforms, first of all, you can do a lot of good. The scariest thing for me is when it's just me and there's not a platform, there's not a Qualtrics, there's not a jazz, there's not something else, because the power of getting groups of people together to go do big things is addicting. And the impact that you can see that you can have is also addicting. And so, so you're saying, when you.

Mean a platform, you mean it's better to have a community, whether it's employees or a team involved, as opposed to, I've exited, I've got all this cash, and it's just me by myself. Is that what you mean?

For me, 100%. Like no one needs that, Ryan, in the world.

What is that version?

I don't know, but like every time that's come into the cards, like, We've turned away from that very quickly. And so, it's, and I think it, like if you actually think about it, it's businesses, it's organizations, it's nonprofits, it's groups of people that actually change the world.

Yeah. Right?

And, you know, sometimes one individual gets a lot of credit. But if you look at those people who we believe have changed the world, whether it's Elon or Bezos or whoever it is in whatever area, Like, there's a whole group of people that are working together on a mission. It's not one person. And so, that's addicting to me.

Sure, sure.

And, you know, that's something that, I don't know, keeps going. So saying, hey, I'm gonna go tell 80, and like, it actually makes that vision go out.

Yeah.

That we're not sitting here going, hey, we gotta do this in five years.

Right.

Interesting.

I mean, I'm 20 years into Qualtrics.

So what does that do if you don't have the sense of urgency, like this has gotta be done in the next next couple of years, you know what? If it happens at 80, that's fine. What does that shift?

Those are two different things. Okay. Because I don't think I've ever been described as someone, I'm actually the opposite. If you actually look at my co-founders or people that I'm with, they will tell you that I've got too much urgency.

Right?

Interesting.

But.

That can also be destructive if you think it's all going away in 90 days.

Yes.

So You know, part of the things that I found is the older you get in leading people and growing is you have to become really good at managing polar opposite emotions.

Yes.

All right.

Give me an example.

Well, like at Qualtrics, it's like, how do we grow fast but also make money? How do you care about your people so that you're all a family, but the other point, it's like you've got to actually run a business.

Yeah, you gotta let people go and you gotta, yeah.

Or the jazz, it's like we've got to build to win this season, but we also need to make sure that we have, like, tomorrow will come and there's another season too, right? These are polar opposite emotions. You've got to go feel be fulfilled, but you also have to not turn in so you are what you do.

Right?

What I do is different than probably who I am.

Who are you?

I think I'm all, I think we're all trying to figure that out a little bit. But it's, I don't know. I think I'm, right now, I think first and foremost, I'm probably, you know, Ashley's husband and Jet's dad.

Yeah.

Hopefully, like in my head I am. And you know, that's where I want to be, right? And then with that and all the things that come along with that, like I'm a son, you know, I'm a chairman, I'm a governor here, I have all these other roles. But first and foremost, this is the one that probably will be the most permanent.

Right. Right?

And so.

Husband and father.

Husband, father. Yeah, I mean, for sure. I hope. Like always, right?

Like, how long have you been with your wife?

15 years. 15 years.

What's the greatest lesson she's taught you?

Oh my gosh. This week?

In the last 15 years?

Probably number one for Ash is if you are who you are and you're just not trying to be someone else, that the world will come around and accept you for that. You know, I've got a wife who she's just who she is and she just hasn't changed much throughout the process and like and just being steady throughout that actually matters. It's nothing flamboyant. It's nothing that's extravagant that's coming. It's I'm gonna be steady and I'm gonna work hard. And I think that she's kept everything grounded. She grew up in Las Vegas. Both of our parents were divorced growing up. It's not like we came from this thriving and she's just always kind of stayed that person. And that's deep, but it's the core to everything because what comes out of that is hard work matters, education matters. There's no shortcuts. And by the way, we're just trying our hardest. We're completely imperfect.

Figuring it out, yeah.

Life's messy, right? Life's been messy for us the whole time. I think everyone wants to paint a picture that there's perfection, but it's freaking messy, bro.

Especially with five kids, it's right.

Yeah, but everything, my upbringing was messy. Everything, when you found a company, it's messy. And everyone wants this perfection, And we're starting a company. We've got our swag. We've got our website, our MBA model. It's like, that's not how it's gonna work, by the way. It's much more of a roller coaster. And so I think that's kind of how we work together.

It's good. That's cool. I wanna ask you about money mindset, 'cause it seems like you never really were in things for the money. maybe I'm wrong here, but when someone's starting a company and they don't have a lot of money, how should they be thinking about their mindset around money in order to not make that the only obsession, but also to help them grow and build financial abundance?

It's hard. That's a hard question. Because everyone wants to be mission driven. Like there's no one I know that, I mean, there are some people who are just like capital, capital, capital. I'm the world's biggest capitalist, but. like, I think for most people, like, Mission supersedes Financial, but there's a lot of problems that can be solved when you're not living check to check and you actually have food and all of that. Right.

So you have more strategy.

Yeah, maybe not today when you're starting a company, but when we were starting, like, you didn't. like, I I didn't have enough for rent. Like, I didn't have. I mean, this is where we started. I started in college, right?

But you were starting out of your dad's basement or something.

Yeah.

Like, because we didn't have enough money for an office.

Right.

Like, all these for five years. Right. And so you look at these things and ultimately, like, it shapes who you are. I wouldn't trade it for the world, but I never want to go back there.

Right.

You know, a lot of times people. People come and they say, Hey, look, I'm going to go build something. And when you're building it, you're wishing. You're wishing for the future. And you know, for us, it was like, I'm wishing that, wouldn't it be cool to have a marketing department? Wouldn't it be cool that when you went somewhere and you said the name Qualatex, actually people knew what it was. Like just something that simple, right? Wouldn't it be cool that you could hire people? You could have engineers or people to join you. Wouldn't it be cool to have like a real logo?

Right.

Right? Like you're wishing for all of these things. But what happens is, is like, especially in tech, like we get to the point where we're there and then we wish we were smaller. We wish we were back in the basement. We wish we were at a startup again. It's just like this hamster wheel.

Yeah, 'cause more, you know, once you get a thousand employees, it's a lot of different problems.

Yeah, so everyone's like, oh man, I wish it was small again. I was like, well, wait a minute. When you were small, you were wishing you had a thousand employees.

Right.

And so how do you develop a mindset where you can wish that you're going somewhere, and then when you get there, kind of be happy that you're there and, like, go to the next one and the next one and the next one. I think that's, that's how you build. So when, but back to the question, like, really, when it comes down to, to financials, is if you kind of run that same exercise and you say, hey, look, like, I want to get to a point, but it's really more about what you do when you get to that point, because you'll figure out a way to spend whatever point you get to. It's really about, all right, is there a point that financially makes me happy? Is there a point that it doesn't, for me, like once it gets to a point, like it's actually pretty underwhelming.

Really.

In the eyes of other people, like I'll give you an example, like.

When.

We sold our company, you would think that that would be like an exuberant day.

It's a high moment, yeah.

Yeah, and reality is, is...

Especially when you sell for billions.

That wasn't that. And so if you were chasing that...

That wasn't the mission for you.

We didn't really know exactly how that would impact, 'cause we'd never been through it.

Yeah.

But you would think it would be this overwhelming thing. It wasn't.

What was it feeling like?

It was just like, eh.

Another day.

Yeah, like my wife was like, Scary. Like, it's much more around when you saw a younger employee base where folks who worked with us got to pay off a house or a car. That's true.

That must have been cool.

That hits you harder than the overall thing. For me, that taught me a lesson.

-What'S that lesson?

-It taught me a lesson that if you are only striving for that financial goal or hurdle or whatever it is, when you get there, you will be incredibly disappointed. And it kind of ties in, well, if you're going to work till you're 80 and you know how long you're going to work, actually that journey is what you will look back on and say, Hey, that was the mission. And so I think for us, it had much more to do with wait, when that moment happened, when we did sell, who was around? Who was around? Are those the people you want to be around with? Who are you sharing it with? What's the cost that it's been to get there along the way?

The price you paid.

The price you paid, because I know a lot of people who scale like one aspect of their life and they're incredibly successful and they've sacrificed everything for that but everything else is a disaster. And I know a lot of people who don't want to scale anything because they're afraid, you know, maybe they in their mind don't think that they could do it all. And so they're smart enough, they're advantageous enough, they're entrepreneurial enough but maybe they don't want to go because they're worried or maybe they're dealt a hand on this side of the house that doesn't allow for that, whether it's health, whether it's trials of another kind. And that's okay. Like that's perfectly, I mean, some of the smartest people I know and my closest friends, like, would never go for it.

Right. Right?

And other people are wired different. And so I think you've got to really focus on if you know it's gonna be about the journey. And there's times where I didn't know that. But what are you learning in that moment? And then if the advice was to someone starting, just trust me. It's going to be about who you're with and what that can become in your life and not ruin everything for it.

Right.

Because I think you've got to scale every aspect of your life to chase what everyone's trying to chase, which is ultimate happiness. And it seems to be harder and harder with where the world's at, like to find it.

Yeah.

Even though you might be successful or something else, it's like, how do you.

Genuinely become... You may not be fulfilled inside still.

Yeah.

We see it all the time. Like all the time. and it's becoming even more transparent with social media. Like, it's hard.

I'm curious in your opinion, what is harder to scale? Zero to one million, one million to 10, 10 million to 100 million, or 100 million to a billion? Which is the hardest phase?

So, I'm actually glad you brought them up that way. because if I look at a company that's gone from zero to 1 million, and then you look who's gone from 100 to 500, and you look at the company and the team, it's like a band. Oftentimes, the band in the basement or in high school, by the time they hit a big, you're like, wait, there's only one person that's still the same.

Right.

And people don't understand that.

They know the rest of the band is gone.

Yeah, there's like, there's a lot of people I know that are phenomenal at like, you know, as Peter Tiel says, a zero to one phase, right? Like, but maybe those aren't the right people for the one to one billion, 100 to 1 billion phase.

Right.

If you can hold it together, which, like, I feel so incredibly blessed to have been there from the zero phase to the billion phase, which will cross through a billion in revenue this year at Qualtrics. But it took 20 years. And you've got to hold 20 years together. Crazy. And, you know, I probably wanted to quit 20 times, right? Like, and I think I have probably like five. Like, it's just holding that together. And then to be able to also do that with your dad and your brother at some level across that Once again, like who do you want to do it with if you were to get there? -Yeah. -'Cause everyone's like, hey, you don't want to work with family. And I'm like, wait a minute, timeout. If you could make it work and you were able to have like some moments, who would you want to be around you?

Right, your family.

Your family?

Yeah.

That's who you'd want to win with.

Mm-.

But the odds aren't in your favor.

Why is that, you think? Why is it hard to work with family?

So in my world.

So how is it?

Yeah, I mean look, Jared and I, like we would, I mean I recruited my brother back from Google. It was a huge thing and like, we did not get along for the first year. And so we got to the point where I was like, is this the right thing? But then there came a point where I was like, whoa, this guy's the best co-founder in the world. He has to love me. He has to.

Yeah. Right?

And then also, He has to wake up in the morning, come back to work with me. He's not going to quit me.

Right.

Right.

Like, and so we were able to go deeper when it came to innovation than any of the other executives we had around the table.

Really? Why is that?

Because our pain threshold with each other were very different. So for example, when we were in a tough situation, maybe we're on iteration two of a problem, like we can't figure it out the first time, have another meeting, or we go at it. You know, typically people give up. They're like, okay, uncle, I'm just gonna give you your way.

Right, right.

My brother and I could go to iteration 15 or 16.

Oh my gosh.

Right?

Where like the pain threshold was like unbelievable.

It was exhausting.

Exhausting, and stuff was said that you're like, most, you would never say, like, but we'd always come out with a different solution.

Then that was the best solution.

Then we went in with at iteration two, iteration three, iteration four, iteration five. And so I, looking back and learning from that, I believe that the iterations and how deep you can go with people are going to determine or highly, you know, relevant to your success.

Interesting.

And just because I think that.

You.

End up in a different spot.

Yeah.

What would you say would be like three rules of working with family? If you could go back and start it again, working with family, you're like, if you implemented these three ground rules together, it would support the process better.

I think people just need to know their roles, right?

Right?

Like not everyone, like my father was unbelievable. I tell this story about my brother. I remember when we had a co-founder, Stewart, like, I remember sitting in Sequoia Capital's office, and we're sitting in front of everyone, and they said, hey, we're willing to give you money. This is in 2012. We were raising the largest series a round since 2008. We were in 70 million dollars. And, I mean, the world's changed. But this was, I mean, that's 2012. And they looked at us and they said, we'll give you the money, but who's the CEO?

And it's not what it was. Two people, three people.

It was just like, we ran it together. We just, like, we were like two in a box or three in a box.

Like, we all just You're my brother and your dad.

Me and my brother and Stuart and my dad. My dad was kind of, you know, more of like the chairman of the board. He refereed a lot, right?

There's three of you.

It was three of us. And he's like, and it really came down to me and my brother. And I had just recruited my brother back to Google from Google. So he did not come back from Google. He was running Google China. It's pretty big. To work for his younger brother. That was not part of his plan. So it was like, all right, we're gonna do this together. Or it's not going to work.

And they didn't like that.

No, they were like, We need a CEO. And it was just crickets. Like they posed the question, it was just crickets. So here we have this money on the table, and it is quiet.

Wow.

Who's going to be the CEO? And I mean, it seemed like forever. But finally he slaps the table and gets up and he goes, I don't do media. It's him.

Wow.

Your brother says this.

Yes. Wow.

And from that point on, that was my role. Like I was the CEO of Qualtrics since 2012, all because he didn't want to do media interviews.

Wow.

Right?

Yes. But- what do you think would have happened if you stepped up and said, you know what, I'll be the CEO and you're the one who took the role?

I don't know. Well, first of all, and part of it becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like, He then became like, all right, I'm getting ready for CEO. Like, this is what you've got to do. This is how you got to be. And he became my biggest, like, advocate. Wow. And so, huh, like, we, when people would have to give me feedback on, like, where I suck, right?

He was right there, giving me feedback.

They would give it to him and he would digest it in a way that they could receive it. So, like, all my 360 reviews were all through Jared.

Right.

And then he'd be like, hey Ryan, and it's your brother, it's your older brother. So it's like, let me tell you where your blind spots are. This, this, this, this and this, and I'd be like, well what about that? So I take so much of my, like anything that I've accomplished from having that, but also the role and everything that was set up there. And so, I don't know, I think having a role and a strong role is critical with anyone, especially the fountain.

Yeah, so knowing your role.

Yeah, knowing your role.

That's number one.

Number two would be, I don't know that there's three, there's, I'm gonna tell you, there's like three lessons with the fountain.

Yeah, yeah.

I think number two is really understanding that no matter what happens, nothing's bigger than the relationships and no one's gonna get between you. I mean, we always had this rule that no one got between Jared and I.

Right?

And I don't think it ever happened. And people were always trying to get between us and break us up.

Why?

No, I don't think people would try to, but when you're dealing with thousands of people, there are certain folks that would either go to one of us or go to the other, and sometimes it would happen over and over again, right? Or there were topics that were based around people that we didn't agree on, and maybe sometimes it was always the same scenario with the same people. Everyone needed to know that this was thicker than anything else.

Got it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Right.

And I think anyone who's had a co-founder at scale, that's a common thing.

Right.

But with a sibling, like, that could. That could always be there. And then. And I think part of that's the. The third one is like if you do it right, like you have a chance to like Like the upside of this is worth it, you know, and I have a friend who's a professional athlete who who Called me about working with a family member and Asked me this exact same question and I It was a critical role for this person, where it'd be very visible, very part of him. And I said, well, first, imagine when you've got the championship, and it's the two of you together.

I just kind of felt like, and.

It was just like, it was like a tear shed moment for this individual. I was like, but, I could be.

The other way, right?

And so this is really like, how you have to look at it.

Yeah, I feel like honest communication consistently is the only way also. It's like radical honesty.

Yeah, radical transparency is like one of the things that we have.

Really.

But that's just that trust and nothing's gonna be between you and everything.

Yeah, wow.

That's crazy, man.

What.

I'm sure I'm assuming you have a lot of high net worth wealthy friends or acquaintances, peers, what would you say is the best strategy once you've accumulated a certain amount of wealth in order to make sure that you continue to have happiness and joy and not just like, okay, now that I've accumulated this, I'm just going to hoard it and, you know, I'm going to play it safe or like, what's the strategy you find to continue to build wealth and fulfillment at the same time?

I don't, I'm gonna be honest with you, I just don't think about it a lot, right? From people that I see that have done that, the ones that I admire the most are the ones who.

First.

Of all, they've kind of gotten it over time, right? It's really hard. It's really hard when someone has a life-changing moment. You see this in sports a lot where it's like, you go from being in college and then boom, that's hard. Like, I did not come on that journey, right? For us and a lot of the people that I know, it's been this just little by little by little, and then you wake up and you're in a different spot, right?

Right.

And I think that's a little bit probably easier to get acclimated than someone who gets it all at once. But when, you know, when a lot of the big tech booms were happening out in the Bay Area, there was always a bunch of rules. And one of them was, hey, if someone was in that spot and they were working for a Google or a Facebook and the big ship came in for them or the big bag, they would say, don't do anything for a year.

Don't spend it for a year.

Don't do anything for a year. Just don't do anything. And I think that's from what I've seen with a lot of people, that's pretty good advice. If you like something, write it down. If you like it a year later, then go do it.

Yeah, right. Don't do it later. Don't do it later.

But I also think that like, you know, no one, that's not a defining moment of who you are or whatever it is. And then I think there's a quote that I've always tried to live by. It's like, don't use the people to help you get money. Use the money to help the people.

Mm. Right?

And I think the more that that is in the vision that you really don't care about what happens here.

-Right.

-Right?

-We focus on service.

-Focus on people. -And that's like, I like to work. I like to do things. Like, so as long as I'm working, then ideally, I'm working on stuff that will continue to grow.

-Sure.

-Right?

I'm not going to do stupid things that like I waste it on. But there's probably a lot of things I do that don't make sense financially.

Like, this.

Right?

Like, this isn't buying an NBA team.

It's not a smart move.

No, it's not. It's not smart.

It's just like, it's not about the money.

Yeah.

What is it about for you? I think for me and my partners, like, it's about, like, this is an incredible platform. Yeah. I mean, the NBA is probably one of the, the biggest platforms in the world. I mean, especially in the state of Utah. Like, it's the, it's the platform and, like, If you look at the good that can be done from the team, if you look at the good that's happening in the NBA, if you look at everyone's response and how we've let out through COVID, if you look at how we've let out through social justice and equality, these are things that attracted me to the NBA. I think maybe some people would probably say, Hey, I don't, we're the opposite. that's what we love. Like, this is an incredible platform. We're putting on a show every night for people to have an experience and forget about the world for a while.

Right.

Like, in. In when people didn't have the MBA through covid, and then they came back, I. Everywhere I went, someone said, hey, rye. Like, I forgot how much I needed that.

Oh, man.

Like, I forgot how much I needed that.

Those three, four hours.

There's three to four hours. The experience with my kids, it felt normal again, like. I just loved it. I need something to cheer for. And that's pretty special. Like for me, those are the things that drive it. And then, you know, doing something that's never been done. I mean, we want to win a championship in Utah. Like Utah's had such an amazing growth. Like we're the youngest demographic, like the last 10 years, like it is crazy the renaissance that's happened here. The demographics have changed. Like everything's changed. And so, with the tech boom and, you know, I think even COVID with people trying to kind of try to figure out who they are and what they want to be when they grow up. They're like, wait, I don't know that I want to live in a 24 story high rise. Like, maybe I want to come and get a yard and be in the mountains, but be close to everything and like have career opportunities. Like this is where, you know, people are starting to find like wellness, right? In a world that's not very well.

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

That's beautiful, man. So it's been almost a year, right, since you've been here with the jazz, since you acquired jazz, right? Is it last October?

Is that right? Yeah, it's, I mean it closed in December, January. Got you.

Yeah, I mean it's less than a year. It's crazy, man. Yeah, it's nuts. How's it feel though for you? It doesn't feel like too much or you feel like, because this was a dream for a while, like an idea when you were younger of like, used to love coming to the games. Used to, you know?

Yeah, like, Luke, like, like, people get an opportunity, I think, at times to, like, if you're lucky, you could be part of the NBA.

Right.

In some level. But this is, like, my team. This is, like, the team I grew up. Like, that's crazy, bro. Yeah. That doesn't happen often. And so. And then once again, it's, like, who you want to do it with.

Right.

It's, like, myself and Dwyane Wade and Ryan Sweeney and, like, these are my, these are my people, like, like. that makes it so much fun, right? And like, but it's a lot of work. People care about enterprise technology, but they really care about their sports.

I love it, man.

And so you're trying to do things the right way, and I just hope we give people something to be proud of. And that's it. The Miller family who would own this franchise for 35 years. It's such an incredible job is like, like keeping it in Utah and doing all these things, but also, you know, second winningest team in 35 years. Right. So if you look at that, like, there's something to be said about what you can do. I mean, we're not a small market. People view us as we're not a small market.

Right.

We've got, like, in every other aspect, we're not a small market. And so we, we need to bring, you know, the rest of that up. And I think we can help lead out in this region to do some incredible things. So that's exciting.

Where do you think winning a championship starts at?

Oh geez. So first of all, I've never won one. And so, I mean, to be honest with you, I've talked to a lot of people who have.

What have you learned from them?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of them, I mean, last year was kind of interesting, right?

Yeah.

Like, we felt like we were really close and we had the capabilities.

A couple injuries, right?

Two injuries.

Yeah.

It's like, okay, well, like, what do you We do, but I think there's a lesson to be learned. I talked to one guy who's won a couple championships and he's like, the thing about a championship is like, you never know quite what you need.

Until.

You'Re in the moment, right? I mean, you can have a pretty good idea when you're not close, but when you're close, you never know how much you need. You just have to execute, right? You just need a little bit more than everyone else. And I think if you look at how it played out this year with Milwaukee, that's exactly what happened. They had a little bit more at the time. At the right time. Everyone else. And that's what makes them champions. And there are people, there are players, there are coaches, there are teams, there are franchises that seem to be able to bring that every time. And sometimes it doesn't all click at the very beginning. Sometimes like you have to wait and then it clicks and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And so, I hope we get to experience that, man.

Yeah.

Well, if you're gonna be working for 40 more years, I'm sure you will.

I'm sure 40 years, the odds are good.

But.

It'Ll be hard too, right?

Yeah, of course. There's a lot of really-- Do you remember your first game? How old were you?

Yeah, it was just my grandfather and we were actually, you know, in a different place. But yeah, I remember my grandfather used to take me Or he would, you know, and we'd watch, I remember more watching games. On TV or on TV with my grandfather.

How old were you when you oh.

Geez, like five, six, seven.

Wow.

Like I was a sports junkie, like growing up and like, like he loved the jazz. Like he loved the jazz. And like, it's just like, it's kind of trippy to think that this is the spot. that you're in, like, as that little kid, like, parents would drop you off. In my case, my parents would be like, All right, you kids go, go stay with your grandfather. And he was always like, what are we gonna do? We're gonna watch the jazz game, right? We're gonna listen to hot rod.

We're gonna, like, do these things. And, like, that was, that was like a moment. Did you ever think, like, I want.

To play with the jazz or I want to own, be the owner of it? You never think about, like, being in this spot. I think we all thought, like, growing up, like, I was like, I mean, I didn't, I didn't grow up and be like, Hey, I have an idea. I'm gonna start a company with enterprise software.

Right?

That wasn't in any cards. It any-- I mean, look back through what you wanted to be when you grow up. It was like, I wanna be a policeman, a fireman. I wanna play on a PGA Tour, and I wanna be in the NBA or whatever it is. Like, that's what I was. Like, I mean, there was a phase I wanted to be Andre Agassi. There was a phase I wanted to be Michael Jordan. There was a phase like-- Sure.

But it wasn't in the cards, right? I graduated high school like 5'10.

60 pounds, right? Like that wasn't happening.

Was there ever a moment where it'd be fun to be the owner of this one day? Did you ever think that growing up?

To be honest with you, things just kind of happened. It wasn't aspirational. I think in the last couple of years, I was like, look, I'd gotten really close to Adam Silver and people in the league, and I had said, whoa, this is intriguing. I see the value of the platform. I see the value of everything that we're doing.

Were they recruiting you?

No, I don't think the NBA like says, hey look, they got a long list. They don't need to recruit. Really.

Right?

Of people who would love to have a shot. There's only 30 of these, right? And so there's a lot of people who want to be involved. However, you know, I mean, they also want to make sure that people are straight, right? Like they're like, they're gonna be good in that.

For the culture and the, yeah, organizations.

Yeah.

In the role. like, like, are they gonna be a good ambassador? Right?

Right.

And like, because, because truly you are, like, you, you are an ambassador for the league. And they, they go through a pretty thorough process, not only for myself, but any partner I bring in as well. Really?

Yeah. What is that process like? It's, it's, like, a bunch of interviews, a background check.

Yeah, a bunch of interviews. They, like, know who you are.

I mean, it's deep. It's detailed. I mean, it's, it's as thorough as any process.

And don't just let anyone with money buy the team. It's not, not at all. They have to accept you almost. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's like an application. 100. Like, I mean, it's just like, okay. Is this someone that we want that's gonna, I mean, because at the end of the day, you've got 30 groups or 30 ownership groups or governors that are, that's what makes the NBA and like, you're kind of all in it together. And so if you look at the people in the good that other groups have done, whether it's, you know, what's happened in Chicago and like the RhinSdorF family and like, or the Bus family in LA, like, I mean, they've, they've, They've lifted the value. And I think the Millers were one, or Mark Cuban or now Ballmer, like ourselves. It's pretty cool. It's a pretty cool group that I think is, I mean, we compete against each other pretty hard, but there's also some cool. There's also some really unique folks. And like with Barack Obama now coming into NBA Africa that was just announced, right? And being a shareholder in that to expand the game that way. you're what an amazing get, right? For the NBA. And like, that's unbelievable.

Wow. So you think you'll be working for another 40 years doing this? And do you think you'll keep the team yourself and be the main owner?

I don't think so. Like, or I mean, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I don't think I always think of us as kind of our group, but like, yeah, I mean, I'm the one that lives in Utah. But, Yeah, I hope so. As long as it's like, it's right.

It's fun and it's gonna grow on you.

Well, I mean, it's work, right? I don't know. It's like, hey, I'm not sitting here going, hey, this is fun. Like, I mean, it's hard, right? But, but if it's right, if it's supposed to be right and like, you feel it, if it gets to a point where it's not, then, and then look, there's gonna be windows that are miserable. I mean, that's what you sign up for in sports, right?

Right, right.

Losing seasons, like, you know, the losses. We, you know, in business, like you measure by market share. Oh, well you have this amount of market share, you have this. No one's going, hey, the jazz had X amount of market share. That doesn't get you any points. It's like, this is a closed market, there's one winner. And everyone else doesn't feel great.

Right.

Which is very different than a world where it's like, hey, we win six out of ten deals. It's pretty good.

Pretty good.

Yeah, we're all happy. Like everyone's feeling great.

Mm-.

It's just not, it's not the same game.

What do you think will be your biggest challenge that'll hold you back as a leader of the organization?

I don't know. I don't know. I mean, it's all pretty, it's all pretty new. I mean, I think that, I think the biggest challenge that holds anyone back is just people and your ability to bring people together and, like, make it all work. Um, but, I try to be a little more optimistic and think about what's the competitive advantage we have? What have we learned in other businesses with our group that actually is gonna make us actually be able to raise the game?

Right, right.

And.

I feel like some of the things that probably would hold me back, I try to offset with my partners. because maybe their strength is where I'm weak. And that was definitely the case with my brother, I think, because I've been working with Dwayne and Ryan Sweeney and Mike Cannon Brooks. Like, we all kind of come at it differently. And so sometimes you need someone else to come in.

Yeah. Yeah.

And help and, but I think, I think we're, the good news, I mean, all of us are in our young for, we're the youngest ownership group or group that we put together.

Yeah.

And that's cool.

That's very cool.

That's cool. Like, And so I think that's exciting. Yeah, it's fun and it's fun to talk to people who kind of see it your way and, you know, and I inherited a great organization. Are you kidding me? Like Donovan and Rudy and Quinn. It's pretty amazing.

Pretty sweet. I'm curious about your faith. And I've heard that you are extremely committed to your faith and also giving back to your faith financially. Is that accurate?

Yeah.

Tithing and giving back.

Yeah.

You've been very consistent in that process, right?

For sure.

And it seems like every time I meet or connect with someone who's accumulated a lot of wealth, they all tell me the same thing, like to give back as much as possible. And the more they give back, the more the money keeps coming to them. Would you subscribe to that philosophy or do you just feel like this is how you were raised and No, I.

Mean it wasn't something I was raised. I mean like, like, you know, I was led on to it, but it was something I decided, right?

Really?

Like, how old were you when you decided?

I was probably 18 years old.

Really?

You know, I was probably down a much different path in life that wasn't on the path now. And I said, whoa, this something's got to change.

What was that path like?

Well, like, I was, I went to Seoul, Korea to teach English.

At 18?

At 17.

Right.

Did she do a mission for two years?

Yeah, afterwards.

She's taught in Korea first.

I did 17. Yeah, 17 years before college. Yeah, so I went to Seoul, Korea. It didn't go the way I planned. I went over with two friends. They came home. My dad's like, hey, you're kind of up to no good anyway, so you're not gonna, if you're over there by yourself and have to kind of hit rock bottom, it's probably a good thing. It's good for you. Yeah, and a 17-year-old American in Korea, I mean, it was different. I met a couple guys in the subway and like ended up moving in like three months later after kind of sticking it out and kind of really hitting rock bottom with three people who I truly were like, whoa, these are actually the type of people I want to be like.

Mm.

You know, these are people who were having fun and actually, but they were like-- Clean fun. They were clean fun. And they were happy and they were witty and they were like responsible and they were successful and I was like, but they're actually more fun than that group. And I was like, Whoa, what is that? And that's where I said, they all had this commonality and we started working with them. And then I decided, wait, I want to be like them. And that's when I decided, I want to go do a church mission. And that process is kind of daunting because you fill out your application and you pay for it. So I had earned enough money and my brothers would have never believed me that I was going to go do this. So when I told them I had enough money to pay for it myself, then they're like, oh, okay, he must be serious, right? 'Cause that's just how they are. But, you know, we did that and I got called to Mexico City. So I went from Seoul, Korea to Mexico City. So how old were you at this point? I was 19.

So you were a year and a half in Seoul? Yeah, I was a year in Seoul.

And then like- Teaching English. Teaching English was in six months and then went- Straight from Korea, you went to Mexico City. So from 17 to 21, I was only in the US for like, a four month period. Wow. Four to six months, right? And there I land, I don't know Spanish. I land with, you know, and you pair them up in two's and like, like the first guy that I was paired up with was like, he didn't, he came from a little farm town in like northern Mexico who spoke no English, like really? And I spoke very little Spanish. And I'm in the hills of Mexico City. Like, I mean, in altitude, it's free.

Oh yeah. It's hard to read there.

Yeah, and I was just like, whoa, like, and that's where kind of like, like there was just, you know, you do that enough and like I was there for two years and I was all Mexico City. I came back a different human, right? I came back and for the first time ever, I want to go to college. I was a high school dropout before that. I wanted to go to college. But you can't walk in being a high school dropout who might have had a college or high school certificate and say, Hey, I want to go to a top university. They're like, where's your ACT? Where's your SAT? I had none of that. I think I had like a 2.0 GPA or a 1.0 something, 'cause I just, my parents had got divorced in high school. Like it was a mess, like my life was a mess. And so I came back in, and within six months, I was at BYU, top university, got into the top 15 business program, and started Qualtrics, met my wife, and like the world took off.

Wow.

Right?

And so if you look at the before and after for me, it's like, it's night and day. It's not even like that world was not for me. And I became a world where everything started going better. Everything started going right. And one of the things that was part of that is you talk about giving back or doing. I mean, this concept of tithing where you give one out of every $10 you make, when I made no money, I decided, at 21 when I started making a little money, hey, I'm going to do that program.

-Wow.

-And it seemed to work pretty well, right?

-Even when you didn't have a lot.

-Yeah, yeah. It's exactly when you start. And so, I kept asking myself along.

The way.

If I was 21 and I was doing that program, why when I'm 24 and I have a little bit more, am I too good for it now? Why when I'm 30 and the check size is bigger, am I too good for it?

-Right.

-If I change so much that if it's a million dollars that you're giving that that changes your decision when at 21 it's the same ratio.

-Interesting.

-And for me, it's actually become something that I enjoy.

-Really?

-Because I'm scared when the day comes when if the check size makes me change the same person checks when I'm 21.

Now, I hear the other point of the coin where people say, you know what? I'll do that when I start making more, when I can afford to do that. Because right now, I'm not making that much. Why should people be contributing in some way to some, whether it be charity or church or whatever, when they have very little, when they're like, I'm just trying to get by month to month right now. Do you think it's important then still or wait until you have savings and some money in the bank.

Well, so. So I think there's a lot of different philosophies and a lot. And I. I'm never one to tell people how to. How to live.

Right.

Right.

And I think everyone needs to go on their own path. You know, I told you my path.

Right.

But there are some observations and some learnings that. That I've taken on my path. Number one is how do you know you're gonna be at that day?

Right.

You may never get there.

You may never get there.

So, you may never give up.

And I have too many friends who have never gotten there.

And they are never giving back.

Second, I think it makes you better on the path and it's much more habitual. We are creatures of habit.

Yes. It's automatic.

I think at least for me personally, I would struggle personally with my kind of persona of just who I am if I had to go develop the muscle. Later. And at least I wasn't trying to do it throughout.

Yeah, yeah. Interesting.

But I've also seen people who have waited, waited, waited, and then flip and focus 100% of their talents on giving and they impact and change the world.

Right.

You know, I think Bill and Melinda did a really good job on that when people used to criticize them.

Then it was like the other way around.

And then it flipped to where Warren Buffett's handing them all their money. Right.

Right.

And so, so those two, you know, right or wrong, have actually done a pretty good job at giving, I mean, malaria and everything else. It's pretty, it's pretty, if you actually study, it's pretty incredible.

Yeah.

Education, everything else. However, like, I don't anticipate or believe that there wasn't this, like, somewhere in there, line they were developing a muscle to be able to go do that, right? And so, but I don't, there's not, it's gotta be personal or it doesn't matter anyways, right? Everyone's gotta go on their personal journey on what they think is good. The one thing I would say is sacrifice to where it hurts a little. If it doesn't hurt you, then like it's not a sacrifice.

What does that do for you when you're like, E, that's a...

It's a good litmus test. Like it's good. if you're too comfortable all the time, then you're like, for me and my mentality, it doesn't make it so that you actually want to go achieve something. I believe if I'm a little uncomfortable all the time, then it's a good thing.

Really?

Keeps me going.

Yeah, it's smart.

If I'm too comfortable, I'm like, this is great. Like, you'll never hear me like ever be like, oh, things are going great.

Right?

Like, oh, how's Qualcomm? It's going great. Like, how'd you, it's going great. Like, it's never, I've never said that. And I'm often around people who are like, how's it going? Oh, our startup's so amazing. I was like, I'm like, what am I missing? 'Cause like, we're for, you know, it's, I've never said that. Like, there's always for me just a level of uncomfortableness that we continue to put ourselves in that make us like, always feel like it's, and that's growth.

Absolutely.

That's growth.

I wanna ask you two things about the living in Korea. I mean, you didn't speak the language, I'm assuming, right? And so you're teaching English to people that don't speak English and you don't speak the language. What lessons do you learn from that process of like getting people to give you money who don't speak English that.

Wanna learn English to- so with Korea, something clicked in my head. because you're right. You've got, you're trying to survive. You're over there. There's not many folks who are like you because you're a foreigner and especially where I was. And you've got to go figure this problem out. That's crazy. And there's really a good chance that you're not gonna get it right the first time. And so for me, what really like clicked was a process. And a process that Ryan for the first time, you have an idea, it's on you and only you to go execute it. And if it fails, go do it again. -Yeah. -And go to a different idea. And I kind of found myself. I kind of for the first time ever had to put my own brain and ideas to work and be able to get feedback.

Yes.

In the moment of like, hey, that's a bad idea. Whether it was teaching kids and what would work to where they would understand.

And you weren't a trained teacher either.

Yeah.

You weren't like taught how to teach English.

But like even back to how do you even get people to... To want to have to be a teacher.

Right?

And I remember going to this huge apartment complex and like I had this idea because you know, there was just these huge buildings where people lived. And there was like 50 of them in a row, right? Because real estate was so expensive, like no one had a house, right? And so you'd go down to the basement of these places where you'd go in and there was just like 100 mailboxes. And I thought, wow, I bet if I put my number in a note in every mailbox, like someone would call.

That says like if you want to learn English.

Yeah, like I'm in the area. I'm an English teacher like I'm here But like it seems so obvious, but it wasn't like no one was doing it.

No one's doing it. How many calls did you get by doing that?

But like I did that and then like the man's like hey, you can't put the person whoever the person was starting you can't solicit in there and then like so that didn't work well then I went back and I So I changed my model. Like I went and talked to the guy first or the woman first and said, Hey, like let me tell you what I'm trying to do. And every one of them let me do it.

That's interesting. Right? Are you speaking in English to them?

Yeah, try whatever I could, right? It was hand motions, everything else. And then it was crazy because back then I had a pager, right? And that was it. 'Cause when people would call back, I couldn't speak to them anyways.

Yeah.

'Cause I didn't speak Korean. So I had to get a Korean.

Speaker to respond to the page.

Oh my gosh.

Right.

So I didn't think that far through it, right? Well, my pagers started, like, I had 13 messages that day. No way.

The day you started? The first day.

And I was like, Whoa, we're onto something. No one had done that. None of my roommates were doing that. Like, no one was doing that. Well, what happened was, is there was this idea that we would build a schedule of teaching because the less travel time you had, the more you could teach. And so now not only did I have all these families that wanted to bring me in to teach, but we also had very little travel time.

Yeah, smart.

And so, but it was like four or five different iterations of that.

It was in one building.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In that idea process and they were all friends and they all knew each other. It was great.

Wow.

And so that's why and the experience was totally different over there after that. And so, but it was an idea that wasn't intuitive that like and then I thought it was over when I couldn't put those in the boxes and then like we didn't give up and try it and you innovate it and you go and that's kind of how the world goes like Everyone thinks that growth is going to be the straight line up. And if it's not like that, it's not the lottery ticket that you're hoping for, that you want to go that's going to liberate whatever it is you're working on.

Right.

Well, actually it's not how it goes. You normally go and then you hit the wall. Then you got to slide over and go up again. And so actually if you zoomed in on a chart like this and you actually looked at it really closely, It.

Would be like this.

Sure, sure.

Right?

But it would always be going forward. And that's what I've seen. Like, I'll give you a great example of Qualtrics. Like, we started Qualtrics by targeting academics, which is not a great market, right? You've got academic professors who have all day long to use your product and give you feedback. Nowhere to go. And they have no money, which is like the worst business model you would ever come up with.

Right.

But what they're not to know, these people have to go get published and we were selling a software where they get feedback and they get data and then they publish it. We're like, it's perfect. So we go to the top of the university and we're like, hey, we have something that all your professors can use. This is a no-brainer. All the money you're spending, you're gonna say, no one bought it. Like, no one wanted to make that decision. Well then we went to the business school and we talked to the dean of the business school and they're like, No one would have made that decision. So here we are with two ideas that seemed logical but it wasn't working. Then we went to the head of the marketing department. Well that didn't work. So we're like six months in and oh for three, like once again, like are you willing to push to iteration, iteration, iteration, iteration? Well we ended up getting, I remember I get one profession, professor Angela Lee at the Kellogg School of Business. and Angela Lee signed up on Qualtrics. And then she told her department head to buy it.

So you got a professor that then went up, not up down. Yeah.

And so you're starting at like 500 bucks, if that, right? And then you go up and then the department had told the school to buy it, the business school, and then the business school bought it, and then another school bought it, and another school bought it. And then three years later, I'm back at the university level.

Right.

Saying, Hey, we're back. Now do you want to buy it? Because here's everyone who's coming and they're like, Absolutely. And so our thesis and our model was right. But the way to get there was three years off. Because we had to go this way. Then we said, okay, where are the other Angeloles out there? And Angela told someone, at Wharton and then Columbia and then Duke and then Cambridge and like all over and the next thing you know we have 700,000 academics a year that are graduating trained on our platform.

It's amazing.

But it started out with an idea that was directionally right but the execution had to be different. And so it's no different than putting the flyers in the box. That's what happened in Korea. that modeling or process actually became real.

Wow.

That's amazing.

That's incredible.

I'm curious about your mission. You got to Mexico City and the mission's two years, right? And you get to only speak to your family like twice a year or something?

Yeah, now that it's like every week.

But you can FaceTime once a week. But back when you were doing it, it was like twice a year and you didn't get to visit for two years.

Yeah.

What would you say were the three biggest lessons from just being planted into a new country, new city, new language, having to learn the language, How am I going to enroll people in a vision with the language you don't understand and get rejected over and over and over again? What are those two years?

The number one lessons is I would give anything for my kids to go through that.

Oh yeah, the greatest gift probably, right?

The greatest gift because as much as I was able to help and talk about families and like direction and North Star with a lot of people, the real beneficiary of all that was me. I grew up.

Fast. And it's like 20 years and two.

And my, like, what an incredible system, right? Like, I mean, you got a bunch of 19 year olds out there, like, going around, like, trying to speak a language. I mean, that's young and, like, we're doing, it's like, I so impressed. And then the organization of it all and, like, it's, it's, it's one of the coolest things I've ever seen in any organization. I've seen organizations all over the world. It's 50 that is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. And I still to this day pull from the organizational design and the motivations and like how it all worked. And then it's also the only time that I learned that true focus on one thing changes how you work on that thing.

When there's no other option.

Yeah, the reason, you know, and I think all the kids now can call home or FaceTime every week. I actually feel bad. I mean, I understand why, but I feel bad because going four weeks only with one mission of serving and helping other people and doing it in a region, like, I found gears I had no clue I had.

Wow.

Like, no clue I had.

Focus and energy and resilience.

Focus and energy and resilience and, like, creative. Intuitiveness in, like, waking up and the ideas and, like, how you're going to differentiate, like, what you're gonna do and where are you gonna go that day and listening and like going, where am I supposed to be right now? And like, I find out that everything I learned in that actually came out later throughout our 20-year journey. At one point or another, I was like, hey, I've been in this spot before.

You tapped into it.

I tapped into it. And that's, and you have a breakthrough.

Wow.

And so I think that I think that like I don't know, like I would have never known. I mean I was told by someone early on that like, you know, you're gonna be a spot. And someone told me as an 18 year old, you'll be a spot where you'll speak in front of people and you'll do all these things. And like, I was like, no, I won't. Like that's not in the cards. Right. I've never spoken in front of 50 people in my life. And then like, you find like doing that in Spanish.

It's crazy man.

Then to go sit up in English. Like it's like, yeah, I can do this. So I think for me it's kind of been a process the whole way. But it also hasn't been perfect. Like if you follow it in any moment, it's like, okay, once again, back to that wing of the plane. It's down, it's messy. And people might look at it now and be like, well, look, what's happened? It's like, no, it's messy. Like the whole thing's messy. And so I think that operating with that ambiguity has been something you learn because in Mexico, you have to operate successfully without like everything spelled out. And often nothing's gonna go right. Never. And everything you plan is not gonna go right. And so that's, I mean, I can't explain how valuable that's been. And then to have one of the other kids that were there with me become a co-founder of Qualtrics.

No way. That was one of the, oh wow, that's amazing.

And I had a lot of other friends that we were in college that were watching Qualtrics go and none of them wanted to make the jump.

But he did.

But he operated beautifully in ambiguity. He actually thrived in it.

Wow.

He was used to it.

And it worked out well.

Where do you think you'd be right now if you didn't do that two-year mission?

Everything good I have in my life, from my family, my wife, school, business, everything was tied to that.

Wow. That's crazy.

Call it what it is. I mean, for me, I mean some people it's not that clear, but for me, like where I was at 18, at 19, and where I was at 21. Anyone who knows me knows that. Anyone who was there knows that.

Transformed your life.

Yeah, this isn't like, hey, I'm going back and have this revisionist history. Like, no, everyone knows that. My family knows that.

Transformed.

Like they had me, they had already pegged me down a different path. Wow. They had, like, I was the one of the four brothers that they were most worried about, right?

Yeah.

And so to actually have a, you know, a 36, you know, 54 month transformation, it's pretty amazing. It's pretty cool.

What do you think is the greatest investment you've made in yourself besides investing in that? And what do you recommend other people that maybe aren't going to invest in a mission.

Yeah.

What's the greatest personal investment they can do?

I think it's a general one. Like you, like for me, in that CEO moment of my brother, when he decided that he wasn't going to do that, and I was, I kind of was like, damn, I have to be the fastest learner in the building.

Oh, man.

I have to learn faster than everyone. I have to act like I've been there and then figure out how to cram and like make it real so I have to learn. That has been the number one lesson is I would much rather bet on someone who's a fast learner than someone who knows stuff.

Ooh.

Because if the world's going to be ambiguous and messy, it always will.

It's always going to be changing.

You always want the fastest learner.

Interesting.

Right? Because if someone knows one playbook or has been there before, Sooner or later, you're gonna get out over the water and you're gonna have to drop if you don't know it. But if you're actually a fast learner, you do it. So my thought on what the best investment is is first of all, broad, be in learning mode all the time. And I know people, it's funny, my brother, he has this crazy list of folks that he loves to go hang out with. And he wrote them down, all the people that he will drop anything to go, no matter where he's at, no matter what city he is. to go be with.

-Wow. -Because he learns a lot.

-And he's like, There's 70 people that I have in my life that I will like drop in. I was like, Am I on the list?

Right?

-And he's like, They're always in learning mode.

-Interesting.

-And they're trying to like... It doesn't matter how successful they are. They're curious. They're interested. It doesn't matter whether the person's rich or poor or successful or not successful or how old they are. They're trying to learn from oh, you know, I was just talking to your kid and, you know, she's five. And I just learned that, like, they're learning.

Wow.

They're trying to get something out of it. And then, you know, another commonality is they have a great deal or an ability to introspect. Introspection, not only in yourself, but what's going on in the moment.

Yes.

Is really powerful.

Yeah.

So, like, you know, reflecting.

Being aware.

Reflecting but actually learning from it.

And implementing, integrating it.

And so like, okay, what holes did someone else fall in that I don't have to fall in? And by the way, why do I always have to look out at someone else? What did I learn last week about my ride?

Yes.

And what happened?

It was good lessons.

So I think that that's where it becomes very powerful.

Yeah.

Is like when those people can start learning from themselves in the ride.

You've done a lot of good that people are aware of. You know, you do a lot to give back to cancer research, investing back that and back in your church, you know, your community, you're very well known and respected here in Salt Lake and Utah community. What's something that you're proud of that most people don't know about you?

I don't really think that way. Um, and I try not, I don't, I don't care that, I just, I feel like I just want to go work and kind of look back at the end and be like, if I get there. If there is an end and be like, all right, was it good? I think too many people are way too focused on legacy. We can't control our legacy. You know, name the number one business person in 1700s.

Yeah.

I mean, the number one in the world, like, I don't know, 1800. I don't know.

Right.

There might be two in 1900. We're like, okay, great.

Or, like, that's not after 100 years. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, so that's not a legacy. And so many people are like, what's the. What's the Smith? Like, I don't just go be a good person and, like, do good in the moment and try to, like, help, but at the same time, like, go make a difference and, like, try your hardest. I am super, super, super imperfect. And I think that people just, I'm just trying my hardest.

Just like everyone else. That's great, man.

Right? And so I think for me, I don't know, I think we've done a lot recently. I mean, it's been out there, it's public on our LGBTQ+ everything that we're doing around equality. There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that people don't see. You know, at Qualtrics, at Qualtrics, what's so crazy about where Qualtrics has evolved to? We're the experience management company. We have the ticker symbol XM. And if everything that I'm trying to help with philanthropically has to do with getting rid of a bad experience. And so I would have never thought that this business ended up to intersect with that business. We help companies gather feedback to improve an experience whether they fly on a plane. But cancer is a really bad experience. And no one wants the phone call. And you've all had it. Everyone's had it. Or if they don't, they will. And you don't know what to do. And the person who gets it, there's nothing you can do. We gotta do better at that. We've gotta make it so it's like, That sucks. I'm sorry, but we all know you're gonna get better.

Right.

And there are parts of cancer that are at that point now. All right, so what can we do? And it's all about research. We gotta have breakthroughs.

Yeah.

Right?

Systemic racism. Horrible experience. I can't imagine. I can't even imagine. It shouldn't exist still. how do we get rid of it? What are the things we're gonna do? And why? And that's what, I mean, to be honest, I I love about the NBA and their platform.

Yeah.

Like, they're leading out on it and it's working.

Right.

And it's slow.

Right.

And there's so far to go.

Yeah.

But watching change, that's a bad experience. All right? if you're a transgender youth, what a hard experience. It's got to get better.

Yeah. Yeah. Right.

And so to be in a spot where we're helping businesses, but also that's common. So I feel like when it comes to what I want to do, whether people know about it or not, it's be a part of things that are bad experiences and say, hey, Man, we're gonna work on the gnarly stuff.

Yeah.

Because like, those are three gnarly, gnarly... I mean, cancer is not for the faint of heart if you're gonna go work on it.

No, it's not fun.

Especially if you're gonna raise money to that problem or bucket called cancer.

Crazy.

Like, that's hard.

Yeah.

But we're doing it every little step of the way. and if we wouldn't have started 10 years ago, we wouldn't have been where you're at now.

Where we're at now. Yeah, yeah. That's beautiful.

So how can people get involved in.

The Charities and the work you're doing? How can they connect with you personally or.

Yeah.

Websites or. Would like, for me, just.

I'm at Ryan qualtrics on Twitter. That's. That's about all I'm doing. I can handle more than that between email and that, like.

Right.

But just DM me.

Right.

Okay.

And then.

And the cancer, if someone said, yeah.

Fight for the fight.

Fight for the fight.

Fight for the fight.

Fight for the fight.

Yeah.

And so here's what's crazy. Like we started, this is how, this is, this is a crazy story, bro.

Tell me.

Here's a crazy story. So the Utah Jazz contacted me at Qualtrics and said, hey, we actually were bidding out the stadium signage on who would sponsor the stadium.

Yeah.

And I was like, Whoa, that'd be cool if it was Qualtrics Arena.

Nice.

Right?

We didn't get it.

Right?

A month later, they called and said, Hey, the NBA is gonna open up a patch on the Jersey. And I was like, Whoa, Qualtrics would be on the Jersey. That'd be cool, right? So we get down the road. I'm super interested. No one's ever done it before. It's gonna be multiple millions of dollars is how we're gonna go. And at the same time, we had started this foundation called Fight for the Fight. And we had this idea that we're gonna get everyone to give $5 for cancer instead of like, okay, rather than one $20 million, which a lot of people do, it's like you need the big wells to come in and do that. No, no, no.

Five bucks.

No, this is everyone's fight. 10 million people do it, there's $50 million. Listen, we're all, you know. And we're about ready to ink the deal on the Qualtrics side. and Mike who works with me and like we're, he goes, Ryan, like we have this principle at Qualtrics called All In. Like nothing good happens unless you're all in. Right? And this is like the mission, why the mission's so good, it's like you're all in. Korea was so good, I was all in, I couldn't turn back. And if you think about it in your life, like unless you're all in, like nothing good's gonna happen. No relationship's gonna go well. And so that's another conversation. Like, hey, you gotta go all in on whatever what you're doing, right?

Yeah.

He goes, so are we all in on cancer? I was like, well, what do you mean? He's like, we're all in on cancer. We're putting it on the patch.

Wow.

And I was like, whoa.

Like, I want to see Qualtrics.

You're like, that would look cool.

Like, this is the sacrifice.

This is the pain. Ooh, you're like, ah. And we called the league, and the league was like, nah, just put a logo on there. We're not putting a non-profit on there. You're not raising money on this. And the Jazz and the Millers, like, dug in. They were like, no, this is like what we want to do. Like, we want to do this. And so we were the first sponsorship in professional sports to actually have a non US professional sports to have a non-profit on there. That's sick.

Right?

That's sweet.

It wasn't my idea. I'll be honest with you.

You didn't want to do it. You were like, what if I call Dr. Dre? Like, ultimately I made the decision and I went to our board and said, hey, this is the most expensive marketing campaign we've ever done. and there's no mention of our name on it.

Oh, man.

They literally thought that I lost my mind.

Oh, my gosh.

I mean, it was the most expensive campaign by probably 3X.

Oh, and you got zero direct benefit.

Zero direct benefit.

Oh, man.

Well, we've ended up raising close to $30 million.

Wow.

And it's still, I remember the first year, like, Donovan mentioned won the slam dunk contest, and it's like, fight for the fight. And, like, you have this first thought, second thought. And the second thought's always right, but your first thought as a human being is like, whoa, like, but it's become such a powerful thing that there's no first thought anymore.

Wow.

It's always the second thought. It's always like, this is right. And that's beautiful. Adam stood up in front of all the governors and the ownership of the league and said, and talked about this.

That's cool.

And who would have known that that is where I developed a relationship with the Millers to be here?

That was before.

That was before.

That was before.

My first affiliation with Utah Jazz. Didn't have season tickets.

When was this a couple years ago or is this.

Yeah, five years.

Wow. That's crazy.

So, I don't know that we'd be here for that. For one, for that.

For that sacrifice and that commitment to service. Getting to know them and like them.

Going, all right, we're gonna partner and having trust because they could have sold the team to so many different people. Yeah, of course.

And they came and said, no, like.

We all came and said, like, this is for you. And you and Ash and you're like, let's go. That's amazing.

That's an inspiring story. And that's 5fortheFight.org so we can go there and they can donate and learn more about what you guys are doing.

Yeah, 5 bucks and start a fight for the fight campaign.

There you go.

Right? Like we have high schools that have Fight for the Fight on their jerseys. They do something, any project, like any kid they want to do a project, do a Fight for the Fight campaign. $5 for cancer. You take $5 for the Fight, brand it yourself, do it, you know, you could do anything. Like Laguna Beach, Fight for the Fight campaign. That's what it is, it is a crowd sourcing and it all goes to cancer research. We don't take a dime. The patch isn't paid for it. We donated the patch. Wow. And our goal is to raise $50.

Million.

In 10 years. And that's not we'll do more than that.

Yeah.

But we want to do it through five and small at a time because it brings everyone to realize it's our cause. The community.

Yeah.

It's beautiful, man. I love the mission. I love the story. This is a question I ask everyone towards the end of our interviews and it's called the three truths question. so it's a hypothetical scenario. I'd like you to imagine that you've been working for 40 more years and you get another however much longer to live, but for whatever reason it's your last day and you've got to take all of your messages and work, it's got to go with you to some other place. No one has access to this information or anything you've ever shared before. It's all gone. But you get to leave behind three things you know to be true or three lessons from your life with the rest of the world? I call it three truths. What would you say are those three truths for you?

And so would other people read them?

Yes, the world would have access to this, but this is all they would have access to. No other lessons from you or messages or videos or audio or books or anything. It'll all be just this.

I mean, one of them would probably be like, what really mattered? Like, it would probably be like, I've seen enough people that are close to the end, who have kind of gone through something like that. And their truths are like, people matter. And the people around you. And I think that's something that we lose track of.

Yeah.

People matter.

Number two is it's about the journey. The journey is the destination.

Of course.

And I know that that seems really obvious, but like that's 100% true. And then probably number three is like God is real.

Yeah.

Like it has to be right? And so like that's where that is.

So I have one final question before I ask the question, Ryan, I want to acknowledge you for just being a, you seemed like the realest guy. Seem like a realist guy who has put yourself through different scenarios to overcome, transform, grow up in different stages of life and also give back in a big way. And I think that's really inspiring. You're a great model for what's possible. Being a great father, great husband, great man of service as well. So I really acknowledge you for constantly showing up.

I'm not supposed to be here.

Right.

But you made it happen. Well, we showed up.

We got to continue making it happen.

You're consistently doing the work, man.

It's, it's, this, this isn't like, it's amazing. You just put your head down and go and, and like, try to be normal.

It's amazing, man. I appreciate your normalness. It's really cool. Final, final question for you. What's your definition of greatness?

Well, so first of all, I think it's, what is your definition, right? You, you ask the question the right way.

Yeah.

And I think too many people believe that someone else's definition is what your greatness should be. is how to talk about that. Don't let anyone else ever determine what your success is.

Yeah.

Because this is you have your reasons for doing things. And I think that if you focus on that. But for me, it's like if I'm in that last moment or whatever, and first of all, people are at my funeral must do something right, right? Like. you know, we talk about like sacrificing everything to the point where it's like, hey, like great, you were successful, you did all this, but no one wants to go to your funeral.

Right? Right.

Like, I mean, that's a good litmus test, right? And you go to funerals and like back your way into it. Go to someone's funeral, listen to what's said and ask yourself, like, what's gonna be said about you?

Right?

Like, what did you... and often it's, the quiet people who might not be the most confident out there. They just go around this earth that you might not think they, and then you show up and like there's 500 people that had the exact same experience when you thought it was just you and you're like, whoa, that person just was on a mission.

Right.

And they said hi to everyone. They stopped by everyone's house. They did all of these different things. that was who they were. And you're like, oh, my word. Like, they were dialed in. Like, they knew, like, they were on this journey that I only saw one 1, 000th of it, right? But they did it to everyone. I thought I was special and had this special relation, and then everyone had it.

Wow.

That's.

And you're like, whoa, that's scaling. That's like, that's. And you've seen that, like. I mean, like, whether it's like, okay, was Kobe greatness? Like, look at the people that, like, he impacted.

Yeah. Right.

Or look at, like, quiet people.

Right. And.

And I don't know. I just. I think it's just. Just try your hardest every day.

Yeah.

And, like, you know, get a little uncomfortable. And I think that you'll probably be in a good spot.

There you go. Hey, man. Thanks, man. Appreciate it, bro. Appreciate it. Let me know some of your biggest takeaways in the comments below and make sure to share this with someone you think needs to hear it and stick around for more inspiring content coming up right now. What do you think is the right way for people to look at rejection as a positive thing as opposed to something that is the end of their opportunity and of their life and of their moment for going after their dream? How can you, how did you look at your rejections as a good thing?

I love this question because honestly, I feel like people don't share this enough. And I feel like right now we see social media, we see everyone's highlight reel, we always see all the outcomes. It's really why I wrote this book, to be honest, because if you Google my name, you see like, oh, Denny's Waitress to Billion Dollar Entrepreneur. And I get so many DMs, especially from women, Louis. So many DMs from people saying like, oh, did you get lucky? Or was that easy? Or did you have connections? and it's like, oh wow, if we don't share the rejections and the real story and the real journey, then I feel like people feel like they're alone in their own rejection and their own pain and all that. So yeah, my journey has been filled with hundreds of nos, tons of rejection, and I feel like figuring out how to not take it personal has been huge on the business side of things. It's always hurt, to be honest. It's always hurt. But also, I believe, and no matter if someone believes in God or the universe or whatever, when I look back at everything I've gone through, especially this last 10-year window, there's a famous saying, Rejection is God's protection. You could say rejections is the universe's protection, right? Whatever applies to each person listening, but I believe it. And it's, I mean...

So that person shouldn't have said yes to you. It wouldn't have been the right fit for you. It wouldn't have been the right fit.

I mean... Or the right timing or whatever. And what's hard, and here's the hardest thing, is so many people actually never step out of their comfort zone because they're so afraid of rejection. Because it freaking hurts. It sucks when it happens, right? And sometimes it doesn't make sense and it doesn't feel fair. And I remember, you know, gosh, one rejection out of hundreds in my journey because, you know, I thought I was going to be a news anchor and I'll talk to the host my whole career. I love other people's stories. I just want to interview you right now. It's like since the time I was a little girl, it's all I wanted to do. And I was working in my dream job as a news anchor and I started getting this skin condition called rosacea, which is bright red and there's like bumps and all kinds of stuff. And I thought I was going through this this big setback in my career and I would be anchoring the live news and I'd hear from the producer in my ear like, there's something on your face, there's something on your face. And I'd be live and they were like, you need to wipe it off.

You need to wipe it off.

And I knew-- Then it probably get worse. It's like, it's like, expanding out more. You're like, ah. I'm like, ah. And I knew there wasn't anything I could wipe off. And I started going through this season of self-doubt where I started thinking, okay, am I gonna lose my job? Am I gonna lose viewers? Is my boyfriend still gonna think I'm cute? All those thoughts that we tell ourselves. And I started thinking I was in this big setback, but what it was really was a set up for what I was supposed to do. And I think so often our setbacks are set ups. It's just hard to see it at the time. And I started trying every makeup out there from the most expensive to the least to everything. I couldn't find anything that worked. and I made this decision to literally leave my dream job. I think sometimes knowing when to let go of a dream is as important as knowing when to go after one. And I feel like so many people are always like, just don't give up, just don't quit. But I actually think that doesn't always apply. I think that the victory is knowing when to hear yourself and trust yourself. and let go of a dream or step into one. But what I didn't know is stepping into that dream would be faced with three years of constant rejection. So from the moment I quit my job and my husband and I wrote our business plan and our honeymoon flight to South Africa, got back, dove all in, put everything we had into a product, and once we finally had a product that worked for me, I just thought, oh, It's gonna sell. It's just gonna do well, right? And it was literally three years of every single beauty retailer, like all the ones I loved and the ones I thought, oh my gosh, like I put them on a pedestal and I thought, oh, they're gonna love this because it works, you know? And so I would send it to Sephora and Ulta and QVC, all the places and they all said, like every one of them said, no.

For three years.

For three years, we got down to under $1,000 in our bank account. account, which was our company and personal combined. Literally it was no after no. And I mean one no that stands out just to share this, because anyone listening part of you know your greatness community like dealing with rejection, dealing with setbacks, dealing with it's hard when you check in with your gut, you feel like you're supposed to be going after this dream or creating something or launching the podcast or creating the product or whatever, it's hard when you feel like it's the right thing, but then there's no proof of success around you.

No one's buying into it.

No one's buying into it, and then your own self-doubt starts taking over, right? And when you have experts telling you they don't believe in what you're doing, that's hard. And I remember one moment in particular when we got interest from a private equity firm, and I was like, I was so excited because we had had so many no's and I thought, okay, if they invest in us, and this was a big private equity firm, they invest in a lot of consumer product companies that we see at the grocery store.

Sure.

Like household names, right? And they invest in a lot of them pre-revenue and then they become big companies. I'm like, oh, you know, if they invest in us, A, I won't go bankrupt. B, maybe they can use their leverage to get us into these stores that are telling us no, they don't want our product. And so we started the meeting process with the investors and went through the diligence phase and presented our product pipeline and showed our budgets. And I'll never forget the final meeting. And my husband, Paulo, who you know, he was there, and then the head investor was like three feet from me. And I thought it was going to be a yes. I was so excited. And he literally was like, Thank you. We want to congratulate you on your product. we think that it's awesome, we want to wish you the best, but it's a no, we're going to pass on investing in It Cosmetics. And I was like, okay, can you tell me why? Right? Because feedback is usually, I mean, feedback is usually a gift, not always. And I was like, can you tell me why? And he looked at me, and he's literally three feet from me, and he says, do you really want me to be honest with you? I said, yes, please. and he says, I just don't think women will buy makeup from someone who looks like you with your body and your weight. Right? And so this was a moment, when he said that, I don't think women will buy makeup from someone who looks like you with your body and your weight, it was this moment where I was looking at him, right? And it was almost like watching his lips move in slow motion. And I remember two big things from this. I remember my whole body flooded with a lifetime of body doubt and self-doubt.

And God doubt, you say?

Yeah, God, everything. But it felt like I was staring my fear straight in the eye. It was almost like it wasn't even about him in this moment. And I knew that two things. I remember that and I remember this moment in my gut that told me, even though I was in pain at the time and it hurt and this was a big rejection, I also felt this really strong moment of feeling like he's wrong. Like a knowing, like a deep knowing. But I also knew that if I was ever going to prove that, I would also have to truly believe it. You know what I mean? And it was tough. I went to my car and cried and didn't know what we were going to do. But one thing that, and I did a lot of things wrong in my journey, and I share those in the book, but one thing that I did right was like, through all the rejections, actually never took them personal. And with him, and with him, I felt no anger toward him. And I had this big moment. So two big things happened. And then I wanted, oh, I'm gonna tell you the full circle. The whole rejections, God's protection and rejections, the universe's protection. I have to tell you what happened. This for anyone listening going through a setback or rejection right now, because I have hundreds of stories like this. Now, after building this company and hiring over a thousand employees and all the stuff that we've done on the way. Okay, so two things. One is, when I was creating this company, right? And you know, you hear about a lot of, you've had people on your show talking about finding your why and finding your mission and all that kind of thing. Everyone knows about that, or a lot of people have read about it. And I think knowing your why is important for any goal or any dream. But two things happened. When I created the brand and I was like, why can't I find any product that works? Like, I don't understand this. This is when I was working as a news anchor. I had this moment where I realized, oh my gosh, my whole life, even dating, even when I was a little girl growing up, all I ever saw was TV ads or magazine ads. I loved them. Like, I loved them and I always saw the models and I always like aspired to look that way. But they all always had flawless I never saw anybody that had rosacea or any type of challenges. And I realized two things. That I always had aspired to look like them, but they also always made me feel not enough. Because you could never look like them. Yeah, what was called beautiful, I didn't see myself in, right? And so I had this whole idea, which is part of why all the retailers were saying no in the early years. I had this idea to not just create products that work, but let me show models, all different people, every age, skin tone, skin challenge, gender identity, skin problems, side, let me just show real people and prove this product works. Let me go on QVC and prove it live. Let me show my own rosation. I just thought if people can see people that look like them, this just makes sense to me, but all the experts said it didn't. So back to me standing there with this investor saying, I don't think people will buy makeup from someone who looks like you with your body and your weight. After I went in my car and cried, like it's rejection always still hurts. I also just remember feeling like, wow, he's passing on investing in my business. He's making a business decision because of exactly why I'm starting this company. just as much, I don't want to call it a victim, but just as much impacted by the definition of beauty that's out there. And he's literally passing on investing in my company because of it. And so it drove my deep why for like why I was building this company. And I took that rejection as fuel for like, oh, this has got to change, right? And for me, it was like, let me build a company where we show all types of beauty, where it wasn't even just about selling product, it wasn't about solving my own problems. And even though I want to help millions of women and all that, the real why was like, can I shift culture and beauty for every little girl out there who's about to start doubting herself and every grown person who still does. And so like that drive fueled it. Not being afraid of rejection is so huge and it's really huge for women because it prevents a lot of people from even trying and it hurts. It always sucks. It never feels fun. But I got rejected so many times on this journey and to finish this thought about how rejection is God's protection. So the day this dude tells me this, right? Fast forward six years and the day that L'Oreal bought our business for $1.2 billion cash, it was all over. They had to announce it because they're a public company. So it was on the Wall Street Journal homepage. It was everywhere. And I got an email from him. He emailed me.

What did he say?

I got an email. He said, Congratulations. I'm so, so happy for you. I was wrong. And... Had you stayed in touch in those six years? Not with him. With everyone else that rejected me though, I did often. So I was always like, it's gonna be a yes, it's gonna be a yes. With him, here's, and this was six years, right, until this moment happened. But what I realized that day is when we talk about rejection is protection, I was so desperate in those moments when I wanted him to invest that we probably would have sold him the majority of the company for like, no money because he didn't believe in us. Two things. We found out we would have been his most successful investment in his firm's history. But then also, like, by the time, because he didn't believe in us, and also we got a lot more rejection on the way. By the time that L'Oreal acquired our company, we were still the largest shareholders. So it was like, okay, so I was so glad he didn't believe in me then. But when rejection happens, it's not easy to see it in that moment. It always does hurt, but I always believe.

I was going to ask you, do you feel like if anyone would have said yes or invested or whatever from him or anyone before that, do you think it would have been successful if people did believe in you?

I mean, there were definitely people along the way that did believe. There were. I just believe in the timing of things and I believe in trusting our gut and going with our knowing, you know, with everything.

And what if he would have said, yeah, I'm gonna give you a million dollars or whatever it is to invest and I'm gonna take this much equity, do you think it would have been as successful of an exit or you think you would have been driven to serve more at a higher level with that support and with that backing or would it have made you more complacent in some ways during that process?

I don't know. I mean, I think the only something that would have gotten in my way is if he owned the majority and wasn't a great partner. Because I wasn't driven by the money. Like, I wasn't. I was driven by, you know, what I know I'm born capable of giving. And also just, I loved our mission. I knew what we were doing. We were shifting culture inside the beauty industry. And, you know, there were a lot of people that believed in us along the way. And, I mean, with L'Oreal, we got a champion inside of L'Oreal three years before we actually did the deal. And she kept wanting them to like, you know, she's like, Look at what this brand's doing. Look at what this brand's doing. We would do meetings and they'd end in no. So it was three years of that as well until they acquired us. But yeah, there were people that got it. And then a lot of us learned this lesson. Once we did get into all the retailers and started doing really well, then they all believe in you.

Of course, yeah.

Once you get results.

Yeah.

When you make people money, they like you.

Of course. They want to be a part of your success. You know what's interesting? There's a meme online of a kid of a little child learning to walk. And it says something like, you know, when a child is learning to walk, they fall over hundreds of times. And they hit their head and they scrape their knee and they, you know, they cry and these things. But at no point do they think maybe this walking thing isn't for me. They don't say, I'm just going to crawl for the next 80 years of my life and just crawl everywhere. They eventually keep getting up and they learn to walk. They balance, they hold on to something, right? You've got kids and so you've seen this firsthand. They never stop trying to walk. Why do you think we as adults stop trying to walk into our dreams or into opportunities when we hit ourselves one time, we fall one time, Why do you think we stop when as kids we never did when we were learning to walk?

I think I've never answered this question before so I'm just going to pour it right out to you my, like, how I really feel about that. I think kids have a knowing inside, an instinct, they want to walk and they just think that they're going to figure it out. They see people around them walking and they just do it. It's like a knowing and nothing's telling them not to trust themselves. And I think that as as we grow up, I think that everything around us starts to tell us not to trust ourselves. Like self-doubt is so huge. And just to use my own example, and some of the stories that I share for the first time ever in the book, it's like when you're in the spot of all the experts telling you they don't believe in you. Or it could be other people's opinions telling you they don't believe in you. It could be literally no proof of your own dream or that it's going to be successful, right? In those first three years of this journey of it cosmetics, there was no proof. It was like no signs, right? Other than women were starting to post around before and afters and spread the word online, which was great.

So you were getting some sales?

Yeah, we were doing like two to three orders a day on our website.

Were you doing like, you know, were you going and sharing, showing it in person at a live events, were you doing QVC at this point?

No, not. So QVC was our big, big, big first yes. And probably the scariest, probably the biggest life and business decision business lesson I've ever learned was.

When did that come? After three years?

Yeah, after three years.

So the first three years were you going to grocery stores and, you know, I tried everything. Going to the fairgrounds, anything.

Yeah.

Anything online. We were to advertise.

Right.

Any different beauty event. I mean, we would, my friends and family They would walk into any Ulta or Sephora and be like, and they knew they'd get some of the best. Can we get some of the best? But they'd be like, Can I talk to the manager? Do you carry big cosmetics? They're like, It what? Oh, it cosmetics is so good.

And they would try to hustle for us. It was very Sarah Blakely-esque where her.

Friends would go and like place orders and make it all sell out. And it was that. It was just trying to hustle. And the other thing is all the no's, like every time Sephora or QVC or Ulta would say no, That was one thing is that I didn't take it personal, right? That was one, I did a lot of things wrong. That was one thing I did right. And the second they would say, no, it hurt, it sucked, obviously. But it's like, okay, I would literally, Louis, I would decide to believe it's gonna be a yes. And I behaved accordingly. I would say, okay, thank you, but one day it will be a yes. And I'm so excited for when that happens. And then what I would do is every time we get a, press placement or we would get, we would be launching a new product or whatever, I would send that buyer who kept saying no and I'd be like great news we just got, you know, in this magazine or whatever and like one day when your customers get to try this in their store they're gonna love it. I think they probably thought it was crazy but I just decided to believe.

You've got to be relentless in following up too.

Yeah.

You can't just hope that they find out about you and you've got to constantly be following up the way that you did, right? Yeah. They weren't, they're not gonna look at the magazine and see it. They're not gonna see your sales numbers unless you tell them over and over again.

Yeah, and I know you're big on LinkedIn and everything. I would literally scour LinkedIn for any person who worked at Sephora or Ulta or KvC.

Friend them and message them.

Everything and then try to send them a sample. I mean it was like everybody. It was, and we couldn't afford to hire anybody so, so it got, we got so lean and so scrappy that in the early years, my middle name is Marie. And so Marie got her own email address. So Marie at cosmetics.com was like head of customer service. And I would pitch all the Good Morning America, I'd be like, Our founder's available for, you know what I mean? It was just like hustling and trying to figure it out. And every time I would check in with my gut though, no matter how many times I got knocked down, Even though there's no proof around me, I still kept feeling like this was what I was supposed to do. And I made the decision to trust it through those years of no proof around me. And that's the hard thing. And I feel like when you talk about why does a little kid keep trying to walk, but why do most of us just give up? I feel like so many people either have never heard their own gut, or haven't heard it in a long time. And then sometimes we hear it and we don't trust ourselves, right? And instead of putting our own intuition on a pedestal, we put things like other people's opinions or what our partner is telling us to do or our own self-doubt or what the experts are saying or the lack of proof of success around us.

How do you think we learn to trust ourselves more?

I think that we have to want to. I think we have to make the decision that we need to want to. And that's hard because you know what? The truth is, it's way easier to stay in our comfort zone. It's way easier to make the circle around us happy and comfy and not fearful. It's way easy. And I think that chips away at our soul when we do that. I think every person knows, like, I think we know deep down inside, if we're, if we're created for more and we're supposed to give more, if we have more inside of us, to give or to serve or to love or to live. I think we all know that deep down inside and I think that if we don't do something about it, I think it chips away at our soul and I think we end up literally talking ourselves out of our own truth and literally never becoming the person we're born to be. I know that sounds dramatic but I think it's true and I think that's the easy route. So I think the first thing is.

You have to want Yeah, absolutely. You gotta take a lot of courage to overcome your fears and go into that stuff too. I'm curious, the first time you went on QVC, what was that experience like for you? You felt like you had a few years of building confidence under your belt or were you extremely nervous right before that first experience?

Literally everything was on the line in that moment and that's what made it hard. So you know how you can know your values and know your why and know all these things and you think you're gonna like stick by them and live them and then all of a sudden they're tested. I think like all of us have had that happen to us. And that, you know, after three years of hearing no, we got one shot. We got a yes and we got one shot on QVC. It's a crazy story. So I go into it in the book on how it happened and how we finally got the yes and all this stuff. But what it meant though was We had one shot in this.

If it didn't sell, you're never coming back.

You're never coming back. And it's live, so there's no script. And QVC is, as you know, but maybe not everyone knows, it's a live television channel to broadcast to 100 million homes. And you have, like, you're measured in dollars per minute. And so their airtime, it's not like a store where you walk in and you can see thousands of products. Only one product can be live on the air at that moment. So you're not just competing with beauty brands, you're competing with Apple iPhone and Dyson vacuum and Vitamix, all the stuff to hit a certain sales. So we got one shot and 10 minutes and it was a consignment deal. So what that meant was we had to manufacture all the product, pay for it, et cetera, get it all shipped in there.

They don't buy any of it.

No, not in beauty at the time and then whatever, and then if it didn't sell, we would take it all back without being paid, go out of business. And at the time we were doing just as two to three orders a day on our website. And what I learned was we'd have to sell over 6,000 units of our product in a 10-minute window to hit their sales goal or not come back. And so, Paulo and I together, and you know Paulo, which is I say his name, applied first 22 SBA loans and got rejected. It was the 23rd one in California actually that gave us an SBA loan just to cover the cost of the inventory for this one shot on QVC. So we, you should never accept a purchase order you can't afford to lose, but at this point three years in it was like- It was like make.

It or break it, right?

Make it or break it.

We're going all in or- yeah. We're dying on the sword.

Exactly. And so we said yes and did everything. We hired third-party consultants and this is where everything I believed in was put on the line. And they're awesome and they help a lot of people, right? So they help people on QVC and retail stores.

They gave you a different strategy that wasn't what you wanted to do probably.

Right, exactly. They are like, this is what you need and you need this perfect model.

And they need to They need to speak in this way, they need to.

Look a certain way. Because that's what had always been done and that's what had always worked. And so they wanted the best for me. They were smart and wanted me to win and they're like, okay, here's what you need to do. Use models with perfect skin, all this. And I would say, okay, but that's not why I created this. And what if, what if I, and this was pre-YouTube exploding. So I'm like, what if I go on air and just take my makeup off on live TV and show my rosacea? And what if I put models that all different ages and sizes, skin challenges, skin tones, everything, and they were mortified.

They're like, no, this isn't gonna work. You're gonna lose it all.

And I would say, okay, but if I'm sitting at home and I'm watching and I don't see someone that looks like me, how do I know the product is gonna work for me? But it's really hard when your gut is telling you one thing, experts are telling you another. It's like, I couldn't try it. Both ways. So I flew out to QVC a week before our airing, our one shot, and this might sound crazy to you, but I got a rental car. I sat all alone in the QVC parking lot for a week, every day, just like watching the front door of the building, knowing the next time I go in, like, I'm either gonna walk out with out of business or with, you know, and I sat there and I prayed. And I cried and it felt really heavy, to be honest, 'cause I didn't--.

It's a big moment.

A big moment because it was like, okay, I'm not nervous for TV, but it was like, it felt like everything was on the line. And I tried to imagine who my customer was, who was watching it, why am I doing what I'm doing, all these things. I remember at one point channeling Oprah. I was like, okay, I remember this time when Oprah was obsessed with the color purple. She told the story on her show. and she wanted it so bad that it consumed her and she ran around a track and just saying I surrender all and ask God to take it from her because she just couldn't carry it herself. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna try that. So I sat in the car, like literally singing I surrender all and crying. I tried, I also was imagining, you might do this, I was imagining like, okay, Olympians, I think that they imagine, like what happens.

You visualize.

Yeah, yeah. And so I was visualizing the sold out that sign coming up across the screen. I was, you know, all those things, I was sitting in the car just doing everything that I could. And I also just had this moment where I imagined this woman sitting at home and if I was going to be blessed enough for her to turn her TV on for five seconds, like what did I want to stand for, right? It was like, okay, if she's going to give me her precious time, even if she buys nothing, I'd rather her look at the and see me showing real women and calling them beautiful and meaning it, because you can't fake authenticity, meaning it. And I'd rather have her for a moment feel like she's seen and like she matters and sell nothing, then stand for nothing and sell. And so it was this moment where I just kind of knew. But sometimes we know what the right thing is, but it's also the hard thing and it's scary.

It's like being in the wrong relationship. and your gut's telling you, get out, but everyone's like, oh, but they look great on paper.

And my parents are happier this way.

Yeah, yeah, you're like, oh, but I'm torn.

Yes, yes. I feel like everything comes down to our knowing and trusting it in life. And so many people are like, oh, how'd you sell your business for whatever, a billion dollars? Oh, no, that's not the victory. The victory is if we're trusting ourselves and our knowing and where we're supposed to be on our journey. Do you know what I mean? Like that's a victory and it's like every time I don't do that, that's when I make big mistakes and when I look back and that's when I stayed in wrong relationships. That's when I kept employees on too long. That's when all those things. So I'm walking in the QC building and I go into the studio and there's cameras like we see right now. I know that the second the on-air Light goes on.

Go time.

Live, yeah, go time. Live to 100 million homes and there's this 10 minute clock. And here's what I learned right before, okay? I learned, oh, you're not guaranteed 10 minutes.

Oh, if it's not selling at five.

Yep.

See ya.

See ya. So exactly, so you might be a minute or two in and if you're not in real time doing well, hitting the goal, it jumps. Like your clock might go from eight minutes, boom, you're down at two minutes and you're like, And if you try to sell, nothing sells. You know what I mean?

And it's just like-- you- forcing it, then people can feel it.

You can feel it, and you cannot fake authenticity. That's the thing. So it was like, okay, how do.

You get sales in two minutes if they're not seeing sales when you haven't even told the story of the product?

I know, exactly. You have to be so just, I know, I know. And I had prepared so hard for this.

Consultants taught you how to pitch and how to position and tell a story within a certain time frame and everything.

Yeah, and I literally thought, I walked in there thinking, okay, here's what I'm gonna say off the top, here's how I'm gonna do this. And I didn't listen to consultants in terms of models. I'm like, I'm gonna show real women all those things. But I'm like, here's how I'm gonna do this demonstration on my wrist, all the stuff I had planned out. And then I did my host meeting a few minutes before the show, and.

She thanked me for my ideas and.

Said, okay, but here's what we're gonna do. So literally scrapped everything. So we're not doing that. Nope. And I had, in that moment, I had to trust her, but I also had to just, like, I know, but they're so good.

They're pros.

They know.

They're such pros.

Yeah.

They know.

She had a co-host with you.

Yeah, the QVC host, and then I'm there with the product. Yeah, yeah. Like the entrepreneur, the founder. And she was amazing and all that. But at that moment, I remember the 10-minute clock, and I remember it was like 9:50, 59, 958. And I remember feeling my heart racing. That is it. Yeah, and it's so gross, but I remember sweat. I remember feeling sweat, and you would talk about how much we love Sarah Blakely. I was wearing two pairs of Spanx, and I remember feeling the sweat dripping. I was like, okay, these Spanx are gonna save me, 'cause it's not gonna come through my dress. But then I also remember thinking, I have to not make this about me or I'm done. It's like, okay, this is about how do I wanna shift culture and beauty? Who is that woman watching? If she's gonna bless me with her time, how am I gonna show up for her? And I remember this moment where my bare face came up on national TV. And then I remember walking to the models, and I was shaking like a leaf. So I had planned this demonstration.

Like 100 times in the mirror.

This is the way it's gonna look.

I'm gonna wipe this thing off. I'm gonna put this on, I'm gonna smile.

Yes, and it was so good in my bathroom mirror. I'm trying to do this on national television and this is my hand, literally. And the host grabs it and she's like, Thank you, Sugar. And she took over and we walked to all the models and I remember toward the very end of, there was like a minute left and she's like, the deep shade is sold out or the tan shade's almost gone, something like that. Like what? Yeah, and I was like, and then I remember at the 10-minute mark the sold out sign came up across the screen just like I had envisioned it in the car in the parking lot. We had sold out Sign came up, I started crying. Like imagine. Yeah, and they cut and I see Paulo coming running, my husband coming running through the double doors at the studio. And I'm like sobbing, I'm like, Real Women Have Spoken! And he's like, we're not going bankrupt! And it was just like, and I was just like, ahh! And that one airing turned into five that year, and then 100 and one the next year, and then we did over 100. Yeah, and we did over 250 live shows a year for eight years. That's crazy. Yes, I did over a thousand, live QVC shows myself, but we also built the largest beauty brand in QVC's history. And it is right now, at this moment that you and I are talking, it's right now still the largest beauty brand in QVC's history. And I only share that because it was three years of them saying, no, you're not the right fit, all those things, right? So it's like, at the end of.

The day, nobody can tell you you're not the right fit. Yeah, and you also gotta know the timing of maybe if you've done it three years earlier, you wouldn't have been ready. Maybe if you're pitching it, you would have bombed and you would have never had another chance. You never would have another chance and you would have been done. So sometimes the delayed of people saying no is good for you to figure out, okay, how can I become better? How can I be prepared? How can I sell more? How can I do these other things? So that's what I think we got to think about as well is, you know, how are we going to set ourselves up for something when someone says no?

Yeah, and to not be afraid of it. I mean, to not be afraid of rejection, to not be afraid of doing it imperfectly, any of that stuff is so important. Oh my gosh, if I ever got afraid of, it never was easy, but if I ever got afraid of rejection, I would have been done. Like, done. Would have never, hopefully had, you know, I hope I had an impact on the beauty industry, that would have never happened. I would have never built a billion dollar business, you know what I mean? I think it's huge. And I think it comes down to this is like just really trusting your knowing. You know what I mean? Every time somebody hurt me or said no or whatever, I would go back and be like, okay, another expert said no. Like, is this, am I wrong? Is my gut wrong?

Right?

We start to, but every time I would get still and just know. And you know, for me, it's how I've never heard God talk to me, but like I feel For me, faith is part of that. I hear it through my intuition. For other people, it's the universe. It's everything. And I just think, you know, you mentioned relationships. I think that we all know if we're in the right relationship. In our gut, we know. And I mean, I don't think I have a single girlfriend in my life, including myself, who hasn't gone through a relationship where you know He's like sketchy, you know, and you know, and you're like, oh, maybe his phone did break for three days. Maybe, you know it didn't break, you know. We all know. And I just think that we start to turn up the volume on all this noise in our life, how busy we are, other people's opinions, what our inner circle says, all the things, and we have the mute button on our own gut, and it goes on for so long, that we start to not learn how to hear it. And so, you know, for me, and it's not, and I believe everyone has a knowing, and I believe it's always right. And I think that like learning how to listen to it, how to trust it is a journey. It's a process.

I'm curious about... Do you do that.

In life though, like with people, with friendships? Do you feel a knowing?

No, I feel it, yeah.

You feel it right?

It's pretty quick for me, you know, it's an intuition. But I'm also, I also research people pretty extensively and I look at everything. I look at things that they don't even think I might be looking at.

And.

I learn a lot about people by doing research. So before I even speak to them, I'll kind of get a gut instinct and then they really need to show me whether convince me that I'm right or convincing them that I'm wrong within connecting with and sometimes I've been wrong, very few, maybe two or three times out of thousands of people where I was like, oh, the things I saw about them, you know, I prejudged them in a way that wasn't accurate. And I took responsibility for that. But most of the time you can get a sense from people whether you watch a couple videos or just see what they're sharing or how they communicate.

So it's funny, I just get a feeling.

Yeah, me too.

I've met so many people that are amazing on video. And then I just get a feeling and I'm like, okay, you know, and.

--Do I want them in my life that much?

Yeah. --Well, and I just think that, you know, listen, I think every single one of us, you know, has miscalculations and misjudgments and makes mistakes and all that. And I just, I don't believe where our mistakes, I believe where our intentions, you know?

--Absolutely.

--We can shift our intentions in any moment.

--Yeah, yeah, for sure. --I'm curious about A personal question. Have you felt more self-doubt before QVC or right now?

Before QVC, but I still feel it now.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's still a journey. You know, I think that there's so many areas in my life I figured out how to like, you know, overcome it, how to turn down the volume on it, how to believe in myself, and I try to apply those all the time. It's a lifelong journey. For me, believing where I come from doesn't determine where I'm going. Of turning down the volume on past mistakes or on miscalculations or that kind of thing, and believing that You know, I think at the end of the day, I think all of us, no matter where we're at in life, are on a journey of it. Do you know what I mean?

Of course.

You know, one thing that happened to me that I share in the book for the first time with Oprah's Blessing, she read it cover to cover. She blessed what I shared in the book. But having said that, I talk about, you know, the first time I ever met her, and then I talk about having lunch with her for the first time at her house. just one-on-one, me and her.

So I was there the day you met her, right?

You were there.

First time. We were at an event. And you met her, I didn't meet her. What was that like for you?

I mean, from the time I was a little girl sitting in my living room, right? I would sit in my living room watching Oprah every day, Monday through Friday, and her sharing her vulnerability, her sharing her, you know, all the parts of her, not just not just the perfect part, right? All the parts. She was my mentor who I'd never met. You know what I mean? She helped me believe, oh, maybe my dreams are possible. Like my whole life. So I don't get starstruck and with them at Cosmetics, you know, and growing, and then especially the L'Oreal acquisition, you know, you have a lot of celebrities that want deals. They want makeup deals. So just because of that, you meet so many. So I never, I think everyone's human. I think we all have the same doubts, same fears, same insecurities.

Are they gonna like me? Do they see me? Do they think I'm interesting?

We're all the same. So I knew all that, right? And so the day that I met Oprah was at that event in LA and it was a surprise. I didn't know it was happening. It was a long story. So I go into how it happened in the book, too. But I ended up going into her green room. It was just me and her, and I had never met her, and she's like, Miss Kern! And I'm like, Wow! Freaking out. I was so out of my body in that thing. I literally just prayed for the right words, and all I could say was like, Can you let me know if I can ever be of service to you? I didn't know what-- like, I didn't-- it was a whole thing. And after I met her, I went and spent like three days writing an email to her. Like how do I even? And so I talk about this whole process and talk about the whole thing. And I ended up getting invited to lunch at her house. And so we --One-on-one or with a small group? --One-on-one. Yeah, I didn't know until I showed up, but I spent days like looking at all the things I --What I brought her is so crazy. It's so crazy. And it'll make everyone who reads it feel --And you get a car! --No, I know. I was like, what do you And anyhow, after the day we had lunch, we spent a few hours together. And again, only sharing this because she has blessed it. She read the book cover to cover and gave me her blessing to share this story. But I left her house and as I was leaving, she gave me her cell phone number. And she said, you know, here's my number. Call me anytime.

She's like, you put the number in the book?

Oh my gosh.

No, but she said, It's on page 100.

And this is recent, right? So she says, well within the past couple years, she says, you can call me anytime. Like, call me anytime. And I was like, Thank you, and we did a video and all these things. To this day, Louis, you've never called her.

You've never called her.

I text her. I email her.

I would never call either.

Really? Okay, help me figure this out.

I would have already texted and just be like, Hey, what can I do for you? How can I serve, you know?

Yeah.

Well, and I realized so, you know, if I have like a show, so I did a show with her friend Gail and all the, and I'll ask her for feedback or this or that. And she's like, do you want the truth? And I'm like, yeah, please. And I'll text her, I'll call, but every time I, or I text her and I email her, but every time I want to share something with her, even just anything, I don't call. I haven't called to this day. I know. And I was trying to figure out why haven't I? I'm the person that literally in my heart and soul managed to go from Denny's waitress to building an entrepreneur because I learned to believe in myself and believe I belong in the room and overcome rejection, overcome fear, but I am still a work in progress, right? And I'm like, I'm not calling Oprah because at a deep, deep, deep, deep, deep level, I still don't think my vibration is high enough to like, Be with hers. And I know that's a lie. I know it's a lie.

You've never called her.

Never called her. I know.

You should call her right now.

Oh my gosh. I know, but- you- should call her right now.

You should.

I think it'd be powerful to see if she picks up. Just say, hey, I appreciate you. That's it. Don't ask for anything. Just call her and see if you want to.

See, if I do it, it needs to feel like it's the exact- Do.

It when you feel ready. Yeah, yeah. But I'm throwing it out there, throwing it out there. Just to tell her what you appreciate.

Do you have these moments? Because I think maybe people, and by the way, I know literally, I know any time we feel like we're not worthy of being in the room with someone else, of being at their level, it's a lie we're telling ourselves. I know that, right? And even for me, it's still a work in progress for everything. And I was ashamed and embarrassed when I realized why I hadn't called her. Do you know what I mean? And like, I'm the best freaking friend and I have everyone, right? Like, I wouldn't have written a word unless she had blessed it in the book. Like, I'm so loyal to people. So it's like, you know what I mean? She told you to call. I know. A couple years ago.

I know.

Yes.

On your drive home, you call.

Yes.

And just say, hey, I was just thinking about you and I appreciate you. You know, don't ask for anything. Just say, hey, just wanted to see how you're doing.

I appreciate you. Is there anything you're afraid of where you haven't done like that?

You haven't done it yet?

Would you call her?

You know, I'm the type of guy that I'm similar to you, but not because I wouldn't call her. It would just be, I have friends who I know are so busy, who are extremely successful, and I just see how busy they are that I don't want to bother calling them, that I'll just text them or send them a voice message or a video message. So, hey, I'm here for you. If you need anything, let me know.

Know. Yeah.

And it's just, I know they're easier to respond over texts and maybe they would pick up or not, but it's just a.

What are areas you have doubt that you struggle with dad and stuff? Have you, like, mastered it all?

No, I haven't mastered anything, I don't think. That's why I'm always learning. But things I doubt before I answer that, I want to make sure I close the loop on Oprah, and then I'll answer that question. What is the greatest advice she has taught you from the first time you met her till now?

So her advice was Maya Angelou's advice, which she shared over and over. She said she's learned this lesson a few times, which is, you know, when people show you who they are, believe them the first time, which is Maya's words. And it's actually something so hard to do. You know, I go into the book, in my book about a lot of stuff from being like the rug being pulled out from underneath me learning I was adopted in my late 20s by surprise. There's so many things I go into this book on about how to handle and they happen in our personal lives and in relationships and all that. You didn't know you were adopted until you were in your 20s? Yeah, until my late 20s. I found out by accident. Yeah, and then I went on a five-year search of trying to find my birth mom.

And so it was like five years.

Of thousands of women calling thousands of women by this name. Yeah, and I go in and I feel like, you know- Did you ever meet your mom? I have, and then that's a whole thing. I know you're, I think you're halfway through the book, right? Yeah, yeah, there's some stuff in there and I share it, I've never, 95% of this book is stuff I've never shared before. Personal lessons, professional lessons.

What was the first thing you said to your mom? Your birth mom.

It's a story, Louis. You have to, like, the first thing that happens after five years of searching for her- oh my gosh. Yeah, after five years of searching for her and watching the adoption shows where people go running to each other, like in the wheat fields, embracing, and I dreamed it didn't happen. I, when I finally found her and reached out to her via email, with getting her info finally, it's a long story, so I share how it happened in the book.

You email her.

I email her and the day I did, everything disappeared. Her social media, everything was gone.

Shut up. So you were you followed her you could see her stuff online Facebook or whatever.

24 hours of finding her. I found out everything gone.

Like LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever Twitter.

Yeah, and I didn't know why. When was that?

How old were you?

In my 30s.

30S, wow.

Yeah, yeah.

Like a couple years ago, right?

Yeah, yeah. And so I am and so at the time it felt like she gave me up again.

Oh man.

Yeah, and I talk about that process of... And it's a beautiful story though that's still unfolding right now. And I talk about how we mend relationships in our lives and how we handle things when we feel... Because you know, my parents who raised me didn't ever want me to know.

Did you feel abandoned by them by never telling you?

A little bit. I also felt like it was like the rug just got pulled out from underneath me and I went on the street this journey of like, who am I? We're like living a lie. Yeah.

They weren't being. Exactly. I understand they're trying to protect you.

Or whatever, but it's like eventually you'd find out, right? I mean, I don't know. I mean, now with 23 and me, it's like. But yeah, I mean, yeah, they never. It was a total accident. So I talk about that process, too, of like, how do you handle that when somebody, like, I love my mom who raised me more than anyone on the planet. And that's who I thought was the closest person to me in my life. I mean, she still is, but. What do you do when you feel like someone betrays you? And so it's been a journey. There's so much in this book, that's why I was laughing in the beginning. I'm like, oh, you're halfway through. Okay, get ready.

Have you felt like you've, I guess, healed that part of your past from your mother that raised you?

Yeah.

And yeah, I mean...

I think that any time we face abandonment of any type, I think that it's a life journey of figuring out how it's showing up, right? And so it's interesting, like on my journey, if I were to say my biggest weakness, and I built it Cosmetics over a thousand employees, my biggest weakness was not firing people soon enough.

So hard.

Because I didn't want to abandon them. Even when they mistreated me in some cases. I know. It's hard, right? And I kept toxic people around in relationships or in friendships or in my company because I didn't want to abandon them. So it's like I'm aware of it. Our stuff always shows up, right? And then we work through it. It's hard. It's hard.

Yeah.

Yeah, this is a book.

Do you feel like you're still recovering from all that or do you feel like it's...

I do.

Really?

Yeah. I think it's a life long journey.

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm working hard on boundaries on, you know, it's, yeah.

So you've been in touch with your mom, your biological mom many times.

Yeah.

You just have a relationship?

We do now. We do now. It's like a, yeah.

Once a month you talk. It's every once in a while.

She's on FaceTime this morning with my daughter.

Really? Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we're building it. And here's the thing is like, We never know what someone else is walking through, right? We just never, right? And it's like even with our own friends and family sometimes, even when we think we really know them. And so this has been a journey of like getting to know each other from scratch, of me understanding all of her decisions.

Do you understand them or is it?

More, more now. I do, I do, yeah. And you know, It's, maybe you want to make those choices, but-- I said something, was it, Louis, you said something that's so powerful about forgiveness, right? It's like when we don't forgive, it's like we're just hurting ourselves, right? What are the words you use?

They're so good. It was recent I heard you say that. I mean, I don't know if it's my quote, but I've heard so many different things about forgiveness. I mean, it's like holding onto resentment and not forgiving is like drinking poison and someone else expecting to feel the pain. Or to be hurt or to die. You know, it's like when you're resenting someone or angry at someone and you haven't forgiven, it's like you're drinking the poison. Yes. Hoping they feel that pain. But you're the one who's suffering.

Yeah.

They're off and doing whatever they want to do in their life.

Yeah.

Your biological mom, you know, was off.

Doing whatever and was hoping that you.

Had the best life, I'm assuming. But, yeah. And believes she made the right decision. Of course. And her, yeah. And her mind, she was right. You know, with her story and her life situation, she was probably right in her mind. So, for sure. You have to get into that frame. It may not seem right, but you have to get in that person's perspective and you may not agree with it, but that's okay.

And forgiving is the only way to be free. It's the only way. It's hard.

Do you feel like you've fully forgiven everyone in your past? Biological parents for not telling you the truth? Truth.

I think so.

I mean, parents will raise you, not telling the truth, biological mom abandoning you or whatever it may be.

Yeah, there's, you know, my mom who gave me up for adoption, she was with my dad one time ever, one night, and they were in college actually. And it's interesting because I grew up with a family where no one had gone to college. So I always thought my whole life I was the first person in my family and all that. My birth mom did go to college and it was her and my birth father and they were together one time ever and he doesn't know and she can't remember his name.

No way.

Yeah, and so- so- you- don't know.

Your birth dad either?

I don't know him yet.

Shut up.

And so I talk about, yeah, one of the things I talk about in this book is what happens when you don't know where you come from.

Oh my gosh, there's no certainty.

There's no certainty. And I had a really big spiritual moment. And, you know, I talk a lot also in the book about my whole journey of being raised with faith and then going through a season, a lot, multi-year season of God doubt. And, and how, what do you, you.

Talk about self-doubt body doubt, God doubt.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I kind of go there and, you know, it's, it's been a journey, so. But, you know, I, I, I, I believe I trust. I trust in our journey. You know what I mean?

I think we're all... See, Berkman doesn't remember who he is.

Right.

She doesn't remember his name. And have you been out of trace back DNA?

Yeah, it's, I'm in the process.

I've done 23andMe ancestry. I'm sure it's a matter of time before it happens. Oh my God. This is crazy. But so far, no, I haven't found him. And, but I have this big epiphany. I mean, this like crew knowing one night when, because Louis, like, I go through, you're probably this way too, just looking at the business you've built and everything that you're doing with School Greatness and everything is like, when I'm into something, I'm like all in.

Obsessive. I gotta find the answer.

So, like, my husband would get worried about me because I'd be up all night, all night, all night. I'm like a dog with a bone, like that.

Yeah.

And this has gone on for years.

No way.

Every time I see someone on I think they look like me. I'll Google him and see, did he go to this school or did he, all those things.

And.

It'S gone on for years. Oh my gosh. And I had this big moment, this deep knowing that is not going to make sense to a lot of people, but it will to some, where I realized, oh, I actually know who my dad is. How do I say this the right way? I know God is my Father, so I know my Father.

Sure.

Do you know what I mean?

Of course.

And so at this point, it's just like, okay, who's my dad on Earth? And I bet you all find him too. And yeah, so...

This is crazy.

The book is crazy. It's a lot. It's stuff I've never shared. And I think sometimes, you know, what I realize is for 10 years, I've done all this stuff with IT Cosmetics and been the first woman to hold a CEO title in L'Oreal's 100+ year history, all these things. But sometimes when we're doing this role, I don't wanna say we hide behind it. What I realize is like, if I don't share all of these things, then someone else going through them who doesn't know how to get through them may feel alone. Struggle more. Struggle more or any of that. So it's, yeah.

I have so many questions. Did you connect with your mom, your biological mother, When you were before at Cosmetics or in the process of it or?

Yeah, we had launched it, but we're having no success.

Wow.

Yeah, yes, I met her before that big moment on QVC.

Did you ever think maybe one time, like, this is gonna be so successful that my dad's gonna find out about me and approach me and reach out to me?

I have those thoughts. I had those thoughts, like, you know, going on QVC, I did over a thousand live shows, and, you know, even now, If I do like a big keynote at an event where there's like 100,000 people and that, you know what I mean? I think that, I think what if he actually knows of me but has no idea I'm his daughter?

That's crazy, isn't it? Oh my gosh, that'd be nuts.

Yeah, yeah. And so I'm just trying to trust. I mean, I still obsessively search. I still all of those things and have done the 23andMe.

There's no link yet to someone else in 23andMe.

That's the craziest thing. fourth cousin, like, I don't know if you've done it before, the 23 and me. Okay, so you know how you get the DNA relatives and there's like 70,000 people that are your third or fourth cousin where it's so difficult, but on the highest one where you're really like really connected, I have all these people on my mom's side, but on my birth dad's side, it's all the third or fourth cousins, thousands of them still.

Oh my God. So I'm waiting.

Waiting for him to do the test. Yeah, or somebody related to him in Like a, 'cause it could be a sibling or, you know. Yeah. Another child or whatever.

This is crazy. Gosh, that'd be so nuts.

Yeah.

I want to hear how this story ends. Okay, I keep you updated.

But that's good.

Your mom, your biological mom, was in your life. Now, is your, the mother that raised you and your biological mom, did they connect?

Yeah. Really?

Yeah.

So, did they know each other when?

No, so they've never met. They've never met.

Yeah.

And it's a journey. I learned...

So she had you and it's like two days later someone comes. That is crazy.

My parents got me.

And they never met each other.

They never met each other and it was private and my birth mom had used a different name on all the paperwork which is why it took me so many years to eventually find her. But eventually they met and the three of us met and my birth mom brought three bracelets, kind of like Wonder Woman style gold bracelets. One for me, one for her, one from my mom, and they had belonged to her mom who had passed away. It was beautiful. My mom who raised me, I was worried would she be okay that I found my birth mom, all those things. And my mom who raised me thanked my birth mom, Rosemary, when she met her and just said, Thank you for giving me the best gift that's ever happened to me. Yeah, and we were just sobbing. And so it was beautiful, you know? And I'm glad I didn't give up because it was, you know, five years it was, and listen, like when you get a phone call and someone's like, hi, do you, right? It's like you think it's a telemarketer and you hang up. And so it was like five years of me calling, you know, tens of thousands of women with like either a similar first name to the paperwork or similar last name and just getting hung up on for five years. What would you ask them? Hi, is your name Rosemary? Like, is this Rosemary? Oh, I have a relative, it could be all different things, but like I'm looking for a relative A relative of mine actually named Rosemary and it was like click, click, click. I tried all different stuff and the part that I never knew was, was one of those women who hung up on me, her. It was her. But I didn't know. But every moment for five years it was like, is this person who's about to answer gonna be my mom?

How did you finally, did she pick up or did you found her on social media or something?

There's a search agent, so there's a television show, right? Yeah, it was a television show.

An FBI agent who could find someone.

Yes, and so Paulo is like, can I submit your, I don't even know he, because we have, my husband and I, total opposite television. Like nothing in common, right? You would like, you and him are like, he's like, watching sports. He's like, this, da, da, da, da. And I'm like, oh, it's on the Bachelor. And like, you know what I mean? Anyways, so I didn't even realize he knew I was watching these adoption shows, like I DVR all of them and whatever. And so there was one where it was called the Locator, I believe. And anyways, he wrote into the show. He said, Can I write your story into the show? And I go, yeah, of course. And he wrote in and they didn't pick me for the show. But then a search agency called and said, For a fee, we can search for it. And I thought, oh, what a scam. But it ended up not being.

How long did you take them? Not long.

A week.

Couple weeks. And I'd been searching five years.

Oh man, she just be like, I would have paid this right away.

And like as a journalist, I know how to find everything, but because her name wasn't the right name, they were able to trace all kinds of stuff back and actually. Wow.

Yeah.

This is fascinating.

I feel like, Louis, I feel like every person though has situations in life where we feel like somebody we trust pulls the rug out from underneath us and it could even just be a relationship, someone we're dating or a friend, someone we're friends with 20 years and they betray us and we all have these situations and so I felt like sharing what happened and like how I got through it and just all the things. You know, I think that we all share this journey together, you know what I mean? Absolutely. And we're all connected.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

What do you want people to know about exiting your dream? Making it successful, having a big exit, over a billion dollars, being on the Forbes list, and having this kind of, you know, mark of success. What do you want people to know about what life is like when you create that for yourself? Is it everything's easy and perfect? What are the other challenges that come with the success and the financial abundance and the credibility? Is there different challenges you face now? What is that like? For people that are wanting to create that for themselves, they see your story, they know your journey, and they want to create that for their dream. What do they need to know that's on the other side?

I think that I believe it's possible for people to accomplish their dreams. I think if they make that decision that it is, I think that Ed Mylett, I believe, said this famous saying that when you eventually arrive at a destination, you still bring you with you. Right? And it's easy to always hear people say things like that, like, oh, money can't buy happiness. This, that, you're like, Yeah, it would for me. You think those things, right? You're like, whatever, right? You hear all those things, but it's all true. It's like wherever, whatever big goal you accomplish, you still bring you with you.

Your crap.

Right? Your crap. Your insecurities. Your insecurities, your same family, your same, I mean, people can change their family, but you're still you, right? It's like you bring you with you. And so, yeah, some of it's so fun and, you know, and you have this same journey too where you are in situations or experiences that are different than where you were raised. Absolutely. Right? Like some of the things I've had the blessing of being part of are nothing like how I was raised. And those are fun and amazing and yet I still bring me with me, right? And so like to me that's the journey for all of us. It's not oh can I sell my company? for a billion dollars? Oh, can I get 50 billion zillion downloads? All the things, right? It's like on this journey, who am I? And am I stepping into all of who I am? And am I learning to trust myself? And am I learning to become the person I'm born to be? That's the victory. It's never because the accomplishments don't change anything. You know what I mean? You still, to use those words, you still bring you with you. So, what's it been like for you then?

What's been the biggest challenge to, I guess, overcome since exiting and being where you're at?

Yeah.

That you didn't overcome during that 10-year journey.

Yeah.

I mean, most of my friends are still the same.

That's good.

Yeah, still the same. I didn't know that the exit would be public. We knew, like, two days before that they would announce the purchase price and when that happened everything changed. So meaning, you know, you hear from a lot of people you haven't heard from in years saying, you know, you pay my mortgage, oh yeah, medical bills, all that. And so you go through this journey where you want to say, you know, you go through figuring out, you know, like I've learned the lesson that if you do give, never give alone, just give a gift. Just give a gift, right? Because you don't-- Never get it back. Never, yeah, yeah.

That person?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you don't want any of that. And even if you do give it back, it's still like, yeah, no, no, no. It's like all those things. But one of the biggest things I learned is just, I remember when Forbes called for the first time and called the office and said, you,'re going to be on this list. And I told the head of PR, I'm not, no way. I do not want to be on that list. just tell them no, no thank you, I appreciate it. And then they called back, emailed back and said, We publish a list of, the list is called America's Richest Self-Made Women. And they're like, you,'re gonna, we have enough data from bankers and lawyers.

I'm like, how are you gonna post it whether you want it or not?

Yeah, yeah, whether I want it or not. And I was so mortified and so like, right? And so for three years in a row, the last three years I've been on this list. And here's the story that happened to me is every year I would either hide it or if I was gonna go to an event and they were gonna, and it was on the bio they were reading, I made them delete the word richest and put in most successful. Right. So, so, so it was the Forbes most successful self-made women's list in all the bios in the bio, like everything online, everything. And I had this huge epiphany. Why?

Yeah.

I- By discounting what you've created.

Yep.

Well, and here's the thing. And see, okay, how do I say this? So many women, we are taught, right? We are taught to dim our light. I had this huge moment, Louis, where I'm like, okay, I've gotta figure this shit out because I have a responsibility now for other women, for other girls, for other people out there. And I realized I was dimming my own light and calling it being humble and calling it being gracious and calling it all those things, right? And-- what an Olympian who wins a.

Gold medal say, I didn't win a gold medal.

I know.

I'm just an Olympian. I'm not a gold medalist.

Yeah, well, and here's the thing is I had this big epiphany, like, wait a minute. Like, okay, all growing up, because Oprah showed her vulnerability, all the things that she showed, because she shared that her background wasn't perfect because all those things. Like it helped me believe where I come from doesn't have to determine where I'm going, right? Because I saw an example of what's possible. And I sat there and I thought, wait a minute, every time I scroll social media, even when I see successful business women, right? Think about so many of our friends, your friends, people in LA, people that are in an entertainment, for example, you might see you see the woman way more successful than the guy she's dating or married to, whatever. And he's like in a business suit in front of a plane, and she's like lower than him physically. And like, you know, it's, but she's also a businesswoman doing her thing, but you almost never see it out there. And I kind of had this moment where I'm like me hiding the stuff about Forbes, me wanting to avoid it, Calling it humble. All I'm doing is dimming my own light and I am, you know, potentially robbing other girls or women of seeing another example of what's possible for them. You know what I mean? And so it's been a journey even of things like that, of coming to terms with things like that. And I now believe the Forbes richest self-made women's list, it is still even weird to say that, but like I believe in the power of that because it's showing, you know, not just other women, every person. Oh, here's these women that are self-made that are totally kicking ass right now. And they're, you know, every person on that list is an example of what's possible because they're all self-made too.

What do you think is the mindset that is different between those that have accumulated wealth from nothing versus those that stay poor or who haven't accumulated that much wealth. From what you've learned from where you were to where you are now and all the wealthy people you're surrounded with, what do you think is the mindset that is different?

I think that I think wealth isn't about money. And I know that's gonna sound cliche. I think I think people who are successful, the amount of money they have is irrelevant. But the mindset is what they have in common, right? And I think it's that they show up in service. I think it's that they believe what they're doing is making the world a better place, is serving someone else as bigger than themselves, is answering their own calling. I mean, how, you know, you probably know so many people that have accomplished business success and they're miserable. You know what I mean? And there's people that haven't who are miserable.

What have you learned from other wealthy people in terms of expanding wealth? What do they do differently than you think, based on just seeing them or having conversations with them? Or is that not something you're in conversation with with the friends in this space. What do you see them do differently? And what do you do differently now that helped you earn this as opposed to, you know, working at Denny's?

Working at Denny's is hard.

Hard.

It's hard. But working at Denny's set me up for this, right? Like, I mean, this is what I'm saying. I think everything sets us up for where we're going. I really believe that. I believe every When I worked at Denny's, it was hard. The kitchen was a mess. They had operational issues and they couldn't get pancakes out fast enough and people would get mad, they wouldn't tip, they would leave. And I was like, okay, as working as a Denny's waitress, I became aware of operational issues and how important they are. Right, because of the fact that they couldn't get pancakes out, like sometimes in under an hour. So no one wants to wait an hour for pancakes. So, watching that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, watching that.

Interesting.

So, I mean, I don't know, Louis.

Did you ever believe you would become as wealthy as you are financially? When you were making whatever, $7 an hour in tips or whatever you were making back then as a waitress, did you ever believe that like one day I'm going to exit a billion dollar company?

One day I'll sell a billion dollar company.

Yeah.

Like what switched in your mind to be able to say, okay, even though this isn't what I have right now, it's going to happen.

Yeah. I believe that, I believe that when we have dreams on our heart and if we work hard enough, I believe they're possible, right? And I think if we fill our minds with the right things, like, I don't know if it was Steve Jobs, it was someone that talked about how every single thing out there that's ever been built or been created has been created by someone just like you and me. And when we think about things that way, like we start to carve grooves in our brain that things are possible, you know what I mean? And I think that again, when we tune into our knowing and you know, for me, I wanted to shift culture and beauty. I probably could have made a lot more money going public with the company, but I also, you know, was working 100 hours a week and totally exhausted, totally addicted to work and I made the decision to trust myself also that I didn't trust myself to actually not keep working 100-hour weeks unless I did sell it.

Yeah.

Yes, ma'am. But yeah, I mean, there's big journeys. And listen, I again think we all know, we all know deep down inside what we're born capable of and we know if we are, if we know, like there's so many stories I share in this book about how I handled things from competition to competitors knocking us off to mean girls not liking when we were six. There's so many stories. And my biggest thing that I learned when it comes to that is like, I believe we're not born to compete with anyone else. I believe we're born to compete with like who God made us capable of becoming, right? And right, but we all know that I know right now sitting here, I am not yet the person I was born capable of becoming. I'm not even close to that person. I know that. And I feel like we all have that knowing if we really get still inside. Do you know what I mean?

Of course.

And so for me, I think, yeah.

Is there a mantra you have now when you feel doubt? Or if you feel overwhelmed, I know you're, A new mom, you've got new challenges that are in your life. What do you say to yourself?

Yeah, I mean, almost every day, God use me, love use me.

God use me, love use me.

Because I know it's not about me. And I know I don't have to carry it all myself.

That's good. That takes a lot of pressure off you probably. Because I think a lot of us hold the pressure. It's all about us taking on everything.

I prayed that before this interview.

Oh, that's good.

Yeah, it's like, you know, help me say something someone else out there needs to hear. Like, have it not be about me. Because if I start to think it's about me for a second, I'm gonna be like, oh, does Louis think that I'm cool enough to be on a show? Oh, all the stuff that our inner critic starts to tell ourselves about ourselves. When we make things about ourselves, it's like, yeah.

My friend Rory Vaden, who you know, I said a great line, it's hard to be nervous when your heart's on service.

Oh, that's so good.

When you're just focused out, you're just focused out. You know what? I'm gonna mess up. I'm gonna forget something I'm supposed to say. I'm gonna stutter over my words, but as long as I make sure that I'm thinking about the people that I'm, you know, in this experience to help them in some way, it doesn't matter.

If I mess up.

Yeah.

And the other thing is like, if you mess up right now or I mess up right now, it's like Someone out there who loves your show and loves you is gonna feel like they're not alone in their own mess that just happened to them that day. It's still a service. It's like that servant's heart.

You can't expect to be perfect. Yeah, no one's perfect. You can't put out that image of perfection. It's not real. I'm curious. You mentioned there are many things you would have done differently. One, not working 100 hours a week. I also know in the book you talk about there's no such thing as balance, and I don't think there is such thing is balanced when you're launching something and when you're needing to build momentum, you've got to go all in. That means sacrificing certain things for a period of time until you can create more balance. I know one of them might be not working 100 hours a week every week. Another one you mentioned, which is letting go of people that were maybe toxic and holding on to people for too long who are employees. What would be three things that you would have done differently? that would have given you more peace and been just as successful in your business. Whether it's those two things and one other or three other things.

More peace. You said three things that would give you more peace.

Three things that you would have done differently in your business or in your personal life to create a better flow for you without as much stress. Where you'd still be able to get as much success Without this stress and overwhelmed that maybe it came to you.

Yeah.

I would have believed my success was possible sooner. After hearing three years of no's and rejection, by the time we finally started getting traction, I was like, oh my gosh, I felt like, is it all gonna come crashing down at any moment?

Really?

I felt like, you know, I have to strike while the iron's hot. I have to drive, you know. So in the first, like especially the early years, but then I really kept that. It's so hard because I felt like, you know what I mean? It's like part of why I did 100 Hour Weeks. I almost, in the beginning, couldn't believe this was happening, right? So it's another version of imposter syndrome. It's like, wow. And learning to believe it, learning to believe in the mission, believe something bigger than myself, is probably how I didn't mess the whole thing up. Because sometimes we start to get success and then we can't believe it for ourselves, right? And then we mess it all up. Okay, so that's one. Another one I would have done differently in anybody out there who is starting a dream or a goal or a business with a partner.

Or- yeah, if you were married and you guys started together.

Yeah, or a loved one or a family member.

Yeah, talk about that.

I had had so many people say, Whatever you do, don't ever start a company with your partner. Or, you know, people say, Don't do it with a family member or a good friend.

And because it'll ruin your friendship. How long were you guys married for before this?

We wrote the business plan on our honeymoon flight to South Africa.

That's crazy. So you got married, started life together, and then started a business together at the same time.

Yeah, and we did it five years before, but yeah.

Man, you really get to know each other in a whole different way probably.

You do, and you know, here's the thing is like I get why everyone does it, right? And I just, we always think, oh, it'll be different for me. There's gonna be someone out there listening right now watching this who feels what I'm saying, right?

Our partner, we're amazing. We can do anything together. We love each other. It won't get in the way.

And whoever you launch a dream with, you want to trust that person. You want to spend time with all the things. It makes so much sense why people go into business with family or friends or their partner. So we did it. It is a miracle that right now I can tell I love my husband. That is a miracle. We're still married. It's a miracle because it got really hard. And what I would do differently, because Louis, there is a point, and I taught, you know, I've never shared these stories before. And in the book, I talk about this because a lot of people need to hear this. It's like, there's things, there's so much I did right, but there's a lot of things I did wrong. And it got to the point where, like, my phone would ring, It could be any hour of the day or night.

3 am.

Yeah.

And if I saw it was my husband, I literally equated it to a work call. Everything was work. Oh, you see what I mean?

Yeah.

And we couldn't date you.

Yeah.

We couldn't date you.

Neither of us.

You guys gonna date each other? Because it was just like, what do we need to get done?

Yeah.

What needs to happen? We need to make money here.

Yeah.

What's the product look like?

Well, and, and, and, and, you know, we were really all in together. We both cared so much together. The blessing is that we both worked so hard. If one of us was all in and the other wasn't, it wouldn't have worked probably. You know, every, I mean, I did over a thousand live shows at QVC, so I was staying the night in this hotel room for many years, like 150-200 nights a year. I'm trying to run the business out of the green room, going on air all hours of the day and night, and honestly, was the biggest gift for our business, but personally, and you're so tired, but he did every one of those shows as well. And he'd be in the green room watching the numbers live, giving feedback, and I would actually get off air. And by the way, I'm so good with, I love feedback and criticism. I mean it sucks, I don't ever want to hear, but it's like, I.

Know it's- Especially from your husband.

So that's the one thing. It got to the point where you're like, I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear it. And so I was like, oh, okay, I need to hear it for the business. I need to hear it. But I would walk off air from a show at three in the morning, like maybe we had this huge, I don't know, million dollar sales goal or something, and I'd walk off air knowing we may have just missed that show goal. And I'd see his face at the end of the hallway, and I would struggle internally like, okay, how do I show up in love? Because right now I don't want to see him. I don't want to hear what I did wrong. I don't want to hear the things that didn't work in the show. It's tough, right? And then we, I think, really failed at ever setting boundaries. So when we would say like, okay, starting at eight o'clock tonight, no more work talk or nine o'clock tonight, no more work.

You never did that or you tried?

We did it. We tried. We tried.

We were just like, oh, but this is important.

Let's get this done. It was always important. And it was always like, oh, like the person that would say, okay, nothing after 9:00 p.m. or the other person, it could be either one, would be like, Oh, okay, but really fast. Did you hear what happened today? Yeah, yeah. Like this just got caught up in customs and whatever was going on with the business and we built to over a thousand employees. So there's always stuff going on.

You're just solving problems all day. Yes.

Yes.

When you have a business, you're always solving problems. You can't really shut down if it's your business.

Yes, exactly.

So how did you resolve it?

I mean, faith. Literally faith.

Trusting the process.

Yeah, I mean, to my knowledge, neither of us has ever lied or stolen or cheated or anything like that. So we had that foundation of trust. But we were both burnt out for a lot of years. And when you're tired and exhausted, it's very hard to show up.

Of course.

Right? And so if I look back, I think that I did not need to work 100-hour weeks. to build a billion dollar company.

You could have stopped at eight or seven and had three hours to yourself, gotten up early and done it all over again for 80 hours or 60 hour weeks.

Yeah, I would have believed it sooner that it was all really happening.

Yeah.

Okay, so, and the final thing you.

Would have done differently?

There were so many things I would have done differently.

Tell me about marriage and business then, and boundaries around that. If someone's in a relationship right now and they're in total love and they're dating for years, oh, they're oh, go ahead.

Oh yeah, I did that. Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. I mean, listen, I think that along the lines of Oprah's advice, just when people show you who they are, believe them the first time. I think that I would have followed that advice more closely.

I still do. With the vendors, employees, with teams.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that's hard. It's hard when you don't want to hurt other people. And again, I've had other entrepreneurs, you know, after doing a thousand live shows, I've met tens of thousands of brand founders in the green room of QVC and entrepreneurs. And they've all said the same thing, that if you keep a toxic employee in your business, even if you love them or they're doing a great job in some areas, that what happens is they, it's almost like a cancer in the sense of it will spread. and it will affect everyone else.

You cannot allow negativity or gossip or drama in your culture. Exactly. Otherwise you need to cut that out.

It's contagious.

It is the worst thing.

Yeah.

And I think everyone needs to create a boundary as a business owner to ensure and communicate responsibly what's acceptable and what's not acceptable. And if you don't communicate it effectively, that's on you.

Yeah.

And if people are dramatic and this and that, that's on you. So you got to make sure you're constantly in that communication.

Yeah, and I think that the challenge a lot of people face too is when people grow with you, right? They can you almost in a way when you're growing so fast because we were growing way faster than our infrastructure could keep up with. So then you have people wearing a lot of hats and then as a business owner, a lot of people will relate to this, right? And maybe you've gone through this too, that sometimes you'll have an employee and you actually really feel like you are dependent depending on them. You know what I mean? And like you can't lose them.

So you deal with the toxicity here and there.

And you never should, but it's hard in the moment. It's hard in the moment to lose someone that you feel like you really need.

Of course, or someone you've built a.

Relationship with over years, it's challenging. Or you don't even know how are you gonna absorb their role at that moment. But every time you- you- always figure it out.

You always figure it out. And someone better always comes along. And then you're like, always. Wait a minute, who was this person a month ago? It's like you always figure it out in some way.

Why didn't they do that sooner?

Exactly.

Always. What was the longest you went keeping someone on? That you knew your gut was telling you, I gotta let them go.

Yeah. Four years.

No.

Oh my gosh. We've all done it in relationship, intimate relationships, where we knew, but it's like we waited six months. Two years. Six years. Until we finally broke free.

And you think it's gonna get better, they're gonna change. It goes back to that Maya Angelou quote that Oprah talks about also being her greatest lesson. And a lot of us learn it over, we need to learn it over and over and over and over. When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.

When someone's in a relationship and they have this amazing business idea together, or one person's got this idea and they say, I would love for you to join me in this company. or this project or this, you know, art, whatever it is.

Yeah.

And you're like, this is exciting. Let's do this together. We're gonna launch this and see if it works. What is your advice for people who are married or going to be married or in a relationship about working together? Do you think they should? If they do, what should they create contracts early on, even though there's this like, you know, trust and respect, what would you do differently? currently or what advice would you give someone to ensure that they could still maintain a healthy relationship and make a successful business?

I think you have to have such rock solid emotional intelligence and communication.

That's hard.

I think it's the only way.

You can't get offended.

You can't be... You have to be able to communicate your emotions when they happen in a healthy way. I know. And you know, I know a lot of people now who are even I have two friends that are running businesses together and they go to therapy. They go to- Just like the way couples would go to therapy. Yeah, a lot of like friends that are co-founders go to therapy. I think it's really important. It's healthy. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, yeah, it's hard. But I get why people want to do it.

You know, you trust that person. Yeah, and you want to do it with someone that you, you know, love or appreciate with so you can build it together. But when things get hard, that's when it's challenging.

Yeah.

And the odds are not in anyone's favor when they're gonna start this. You know what I mean? It's, and there are people that end it and they are able to stay friends or whatever, but it's very hard.

Very challenging.

Yeah.

And you just have to really ask yourself, is your relationship worth putting at risk? Is your friendship worth putting at risk? But here's the thing, Louis, is like our humanness, our human nature wants to believe It won't happen to us. It's just, it's what everyone else goes through. But for me, like my friendships rock solid, or my marriage, or my, you know what I mean? And so it's hard. Sometimes it's just a thing that we go through and then have to decide, is this something that, you know what I mean? That we want to do again.

You've accomplished so much, Jamie. You've, you know, done so much. This book's amazing. I want people to get it, believe it. how to go from underestimated to unstoppable. I'm curious, what do you think will be the greatest thing you have to overcome after you've accomplished so much this stage of your life? Like, what's the thing you're still going to need to overcome to make you feel like you've made it or a sense of peace inside or a sense of, I don't know, next level understanding about life? What do you think is still your challenge you get to overcome?

It's a journey. I think stepping into all of who I know I'm capable of becoming while somehow still feeling enough while doing it.

What is that? Who is that? Who is that like knowing of who you can become? You've already become so much.

Yeah, I mean, I think we all have, right? I think we all know what that means for us, I just have a deep knowing that I have a lot more to give and a lot more to serve. And I'm in this space right now. I mean, you know, Louis, like a lot of people would never have left the situation I was in. And what I mean by that is I, you know, as you know, struggled for so many years, finally got success at this company when we sold it to L'Oreal a few days before I met you at Summit of Greatness a few days before that.

We saw it a few days before, yeah.

Well, I was sitting in this corner office in the 60,000 square foot office and a corner office overlooking the skyline in Manhattan and the office, my office, the bathroom, all these things was bigger than like any place I'd ever lived most of my life. You know what I mean? And beautiful and all these things like stuff you'd see in a movie. And I remember sitting in this office knowing, feeling my gut knowing it was time to let go of one dream and start another. And I remember knowing in that moment most people wouldn't do this because I was sitting there looking around in this office space at what the world tells me significance looks like.

Yeah, the CEO of this big company, thousand employees.

I have goosebumps saying this. Like saying this out loud But I remember looking at the Manhattan skyline, sobbing my eyes out all alone sitting in this office, seeing this beautiful artwork on the wall, looking around going, oh my gosh, I finally got this. This reminds me of a movie. I'm sitting here and yet I know in my gut I'm supposed to leave this dream.

And.

Yet it would be way easier to stay there and have this really cool title and this really amazing office and literally the things the world says are significant. You know what I mean? And I think our life is defined by those moments when we listen to our knowing and we follow it anyways. You know what I mean? And when I look back at this journey, all those times, even when it didn't make sense, even when the experts said, Don't do this, you know, all the things, it's like when I listened to my knowing, even when it didn't make sense and I trusted it, that's like the moments that change our life. you know? So, yeah, then a few days later I met you.

And now we're here. I love it. Well, I want people to get this book. I've got a couple final questions for you, but make sure you guys get the book. Believe it. Very powerful stories endorsed by so many people. Incredible wisdom, lessons, humor, sadness, all those things. Make sure you guys check this out. Powerful, powerful story. It will be a movie one day. I can say that for sure. This is a question I ask everyone at the end called the 3 Truths. So, imagine you've accomplished everything you want to accomplish for the rest of your life. You do it all. Whatever that is. With the family, more business ventures, mentoring, helping women, whatever it is you want to create, you create it. And it's your last day. For whatever reason, you've got to take all your content with you. So, this book is no longer with you. You take all the copies. Whatever happens, you take all of your content with you.

You.

No one has access to this interview anymore, but you get a piece of paper and a pen and you get to write down three lessons from your entire life that you would share with the world. This is all we have to remember you by, these three lessons. I call them three truths. What would you say would be your three truths?

God can dream a bigger dream for you than you can for yourself. You have a knowing inside of you and it's always right. And God in every single one of us is love. And we're all connected.

Yeah.

I love that. What's something you wish people asked you that they don't ask you?

How are you so funny?

Because I'm really funny and people don't know that. I would say that. How are you so funny? I'm really funny.

And my husband's so funny.

And so like, he always just talks about how he's funny, but I'm really funny. You're funnier than him?

He's pretty funny.

He's pretty funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's pretty funny. Do you have a good day?

I'm really funny.

Is there such thing as a mom joke?

You know, those dad jokes.

I don't know. You should come up with some mom jokes.

Some mom jokes.

That'd be a great book.

I'm gonna work on that.

A little coffee table book, Mom jokes.

You're right. Has anyone, I don't think I've ever heard mom jokes. I have a couple friends, Damon John.

Whenever I talk to him, he always.

Starts with a dad joke. With a dad joke. And they're just, I don't know why.

They crack me up when someone tells.

Me a dad joke, because it's so dumb that I just laugh so hard. Yeah, they're so funny. Well, I want people to get the book and I want to acknowledge you, Jamie, for, you know what I'm noticing during this, you have this childlike wonder about you. You have this reflection of your younger child just keeps seeing the seven, eight year old Jamie inside of you who is coming out. And that's what I'm noticing when I'm with you. So I appreciate your childlike hunger and desire for truth, for answers, for creating what you want, for dreaming big. I think kids have big dreams and they go after it. and you continue to do that and you accomplished your dreams, a lot of your dreams, you still have more to do as a mom and as an entrepreneur and everything else. So, I acknowledge you for your childlike joy that you bring now and day to day. I really appreciate that. And I know you have a lot on your plate and you carry certain burdens and I want to remind you that your child joy is always there for you. and I don't know, I felt like you just needed to hear that. So it's always there for you to support you. Of course, this is, people can get the book anywhere online. They can go obviously on stores if you can get into stores right now. Amazon, where can we connect with you online personally?

Yeah, so Jamie Kern Lima.com or Instagram @jamiekernlina and then yeah the BelieveIt.com, if you... BelieveIt.com. And anywhere you grab the book at, wherever it's sold, we're doing a big launch promotion. So if you go to BelieveIt.com, the books name is Believe It, lots of free stuff. So, downloadable action plan. Of course I'm doing all that you get for free in celebration of the launch.

So if you buy a copy or two, then you just go there and you submit the information and you get.

The And you get all the free stuff. Yeah, and it's really like at the heart and soul of this book, it's anyone who wants to go from not believing themselves to believing themselves and learning how to trust themselves and know they're enough. And thank you, by the way, for talking about Childlike Wonder. You know, my daughter's name is Wonder. I don't know if you remember, she kept calling Jay Shetty Dada. Do you remember this?

Vagely. I was like, I think it scared him.

Vagely. Dada. No, he's not here yet. But, Literally like 10 minutes leading up to this interview, I don't even know why you and I are just laughing, like giggling. So you have childlike wonder and it's really cool. It's really cool to experience that. Thank you for bringing that out in me. Of course. I don't think I've laughed or giggled like this ever. Like in an interview, I can't remember.

Like just laughing. It just makes it easier, you know?

Yeah. It makes you relax more when you laugh.

Because you ask tough questions.

I know. You know, you gotta light the moment too, though.

You gotta have fun.

And sometimes I laugh when I'm like, I don't know if it's nervous or more like I laugh when like something is really like you'll share something that's bad or like that's a shock and whatever reason I laugh in those moments. Cause I'm like, that's crazy to think about and I just laugh. So, believeit.com, make sure you guys get a few books. I recommend getting a few copies always. This is gonna be powerful for you. Final question for you. What's your definition of greatness?

Stepping into all of who you are and knowing it and knowing it. You have a peace when you do it. You just feel it. Thank you.

Appreciate it.

If a person's income is not continually growing, then it's dying. Our income should be continually growing.

And I think you should always want.

To earn more, not to have it.

But to be able to use it.

But it's going to cause you to reach. Money is a reward received for service rendered, so you got to provide more service. So whatever you're doing, you got to do it better than you're now doing it.