8 Figure COO: The Moment I Started Valuing Myself, Everything Changed

I actually understand my own value and I don't need somebody else to tell me what that is. And I don't need to stay with, you know, whoever my current mentor is that they set the price of what my value is. I can have a different allocation of that based on my own needs and wants and my own understanding of my value. And if that's not met in a monetary way, cool, we can have a conversation about that, right? But it doesn't have to end in this situation of, well, You know, I mean, they're going to have to take my value from what they say or run away.

This is such an interesting arc because I think it really is so common and fundamental to entrepreneurs and high performers is how do we calibrate our value? How do we determine our value? And whether it's from a boss or from the marketplace, whatever it is, most of us, at least when we're young, look externally. We take in the data and we find our value in external validation, whether that be achievements, whether that be how much money we're making, you know, whether that be accolades, like whatever that looks like, right? We tend to look outwardly and we can start by, and this is kind of where you started, is, hey, objectively, I've brought this organization from here, you know, from X to Y to Z, right? And I deserve to be compensated with aligned incentives, right? Going back to the original thing. But even so, yeah, there's compensation that's really important, but cultivating and building that sense of worth and that sense of value internally is something even bigger. So how has that shift impacted you and how you show up?

Yeah, you know, I have always been thirsty for knowledge and education. When I had that cool event marketing job, I, you know, I think I read 180 books in 8 years and, just crushed, you know, crushed through things from many different, many different topics and different industries. And I had gotten into personal development a little bit. It was not really deeply looking inward, right? It wasn't, it wasn't until I started asking the questions of how did I get here and what's really inside and who am I at the core that I actually started to understand and unfold those pieces. And so I've done a tremendous amount of work over the past, you know, really 4 or 5 years asking those very tough questions. Obviously, we've cultivated a, you know, a great area where we can do that. Sana Squad allows us to really take a nice objective approach with others who we can be extremely vulnerable with.

Right.

And so it speeds that, speeds that up because you're not just inwardly thinking about this, but you actually can take action from it. So I think for me, doing the work, and it's no one specific thing, right? But, but doing the work and watching the unfoldment over time of, of seeing, okay, I've had this realization or, or this, this new insight. How do I take action on that without thinking this is it, right? This is, this is the big thing. This is the big breakthrough. Oh my God, I finally figured it out. But knowing this is just part of the path. An ongoing, forever-present journey that is going to help me get more aligned to who my true self is and understand that at my true self, there is a true core value there. And so I've had some great external validation continued, right? Because that is helpful. And I think, you know, in the entrepreneurial journey, we talk a lot about product-market fit. It's really hard to find your pricing structure for your product or service if you don't have external validation from the market of what people are willing to pay for that. And, you know, all day, every day, you can think that your service is worth $1 million, but if no one's gonna buy it, then, you know, the market is just not going to— not going to handle that. I think the, the interesting thing for that, for yourself, is there's not a product-market fit for you, right, necessarily, unless you are the service, unless you are the goods. But you can figure that out through the inner work, and you can figure that out through a combination of that and the external validation. And for me, the big shift was the inner work and my own sense of value was now a piece of this equation, not just the external validation.

I think that's really well said because it's not an on-off switch. It's not a binary decision to go from external validation to finding value internally, right? It's actually somewhere along the spectrum. And external data is actually really useful to calibrate. We still want to calibrate off the real world, right? You can't just go, I'm worth $1 million and then magically charge $1 million. That's not how things work. You do have to validate the ideas in the marketplace, but it's no longer the primary or only consideration or factor, right? You can, you can actually start to go, okay, wait a minute, does this line up with my view of what I know I'm bringing to the table? And then if not, you can start making decisions, right? But you can at least articulate that value and start to have those conversations. What I would love to dive into, I would like to double-click on Sauna Squad because in my view, we've stumbled on something kind of unique. We set out with an intention. We did. But has really been one of the most important factors in my growth, in your growth, and our third member, Carm. So let's go back to the beginning of Sauna Squad, how it's evolved, and kind of, kind of deep dive this thing because I think it's really unique what we've created. And I think there's a model here for other people to be able to do the same thing.

Yeah. Well, it started with you getting a sauna. So step one, step one, buy a sauna. You know, I think, I think there's an interesting— we laugh about that, but there's an interesting piece for there because we were never the guys who went out to the bar with each other to catch a game, right? We weren't going out and getting drinks outside and like meeting up on a Tuesday night and doing that. We were, we were gathering together in a home with our spouses and lots of other people and having great conversation. And it was deep, but it wasn't this, we're going to meet up every week with the intention of actually bettering ourselves within this group. Right. And so that first intention was really important. And we had something other than let's go to a bar to do that. And it was early morning. We actually started with exercise. We don't do that anymore because we're all exercising the other 6 days of the week. But we had this, this thing that was really exciting, like let sauna and cold plunge together. And there was an element of heart with that, right? And then, there's also the cadence of we have to rotate out of the sauna and into the cold plunge that keeps this succinct. So, it's not just this like this overarching drawl of we're just going to bullshit for the next 90 minutes to 120 minutes. There's some structure around it. That structure is changing shift over time, but I think, If I look back, like, set and setting, right? There is an importance to creating this around something. And I think there's a lot of successful, like, athletic groups. There's a lot of successful, like, morning meetups and walks. It's important to be able to, like, breathe and talk and go deep. So you don't want to, you know, groups that meet up and work out in the morning and then maybe, like, go get coffee afterwards. I don't think that meets the needs of what we were trying to create.

Yeah.

We were giving ourselves an opportunity of long-form conversation with people that we believed were out on the path and at the same level of us. And over time, you know, I think we had an inkling because of friendship in the beginning. Now we have this level of deep trust, deep respect, and an ability to take action from the things that we learn in Sana Squad that is unlike any other group I've ever participated with in my entire life. Life. And I think it's the, the combination of those pieces— the people, the setting, the intention that goes into it, the time domain, the fact that we show up every week for years— is what's turned it into what it is today.