Creating Cultural Moments - Neil Emeigh - Fractional C-Suite Retreat - Episode # 43

Growing a business is hard, but it does not have to be. Once a week, we take a break from the hustle and bustle in business to talk about innovations and what's new in the C-suite. This is the Fractional C-Suite Retreat, and I'm Joseph Frost. Pull up a seat at the fire, grab a drink, smoke a cigar, and just join me as we relax, learn, and get inspired. This retreat is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow with better marketing strategy. Welcome. Today's guest is a good friend of mine. He's a business owner and a powerful leader of a remote-first company. He's passionate about having a well-rounded company in today's crazy times, and he is founder and CEO of Sprius, which is now known as what, Neil?

Rayobyte.

Rayobyte, formerly known as Sprius. Welcome, Neil, Amy. Neil, welcome to the program.

Thank you. Thank you, Joe.

Joe and I, when did we meet, Joe?

It was probably at the start of EO, just a couple years ago.

We were introduced a while ago from Eric Sullivan. Yes, our lounge days. Thank you for having me, Joe.

Oh yeah, thanks for being here. And we've had a chance to get to know each other real well over the last couple years and traveling together and being in Entrepreneurs Organization together. It's been Been fun. It's been a fun ride, and I'm excited to have you on the show and talk about some things that are near and dear to your heart right now. But the first question I'd like to start with, Neil, is what's going on— what's something that you are aware of or interested in, that an opportunity you think other C-suite leaders or business owners should be aware of?

Something I'm very interested in and I believe to be an opportunity, at least from my perspective right now, is the— as our culture of work is shifting, has been accelerated from COVID switching to remote. We were always a remote-first company, so we were fortunate that this was an easy transition for us to handle.

But what has—

our tools and processes have caught up. But what I don't believe has caught up is how the heck do we do culture remotely?

And companies who are remote first, like ourselves, since the last 7 years, we've had our first crack at that, but we're still not great. And it just kind of accelerated our awareness. And geez, we were actually really far behind. So we were remote first and we're still—

I feel a bit ashamed that we are where we are. Things I'm learning and very interested in is, is with us all being on a Zoom call, not the in-office 8 to 5, seeing each other, seeing each other's body language, each other's feeding off the energy, going to the water coolers, water cooler talks. How do you create this connected culture of people who are motivated, inspired, What stops them from between their meetings going on Indeed and looking for the next job and going to the next company?

I'm very interested in that.

I have a lot of ideas to share on that, but I'm curious, Joe, what you see with your companies and what that's looked like from your perspective.

Yeah, well, I'm certainly curious of your ideas because that is something that I've been pondering quite a bit. We also are a remote-first company. We were remote before pandemic and grew exponentially during the pandemic. So we're, uh, it's been top of mind because it's, for many companies, they're just realizing it. I don't think we understood that it was an issue. We just kind of assumed it wouldn't be a problem. Culture is culture, right? But the realities are we have to be much more intentional about creating cultural moments during our meetings. And I think that's a really interesting thing that most companies are very intentional. And most systems and processes that you learn about with respect to running a good meeting are all about keeping it succinct, short, tight agendas, get people in and out as fast as possible, no BS, let's go. And so that's how we've ran our meetings forever, most of us. Well, with remote first, the meetings are the time where you build the culture. That is it. That is the only time. We have taken our traditional meeting agendas and thrown them out the door. We've taken that traditional strict adherence to time in the agenda and thrown it out the door. We've allowed for much more conversational open time scheduled during weekly meetings. That's been a Big, big benefit to our, what I've seen in the short term of doing that, significantly more engagement from all members of the team inside that Zoom meeting that we didn't have before, just by throwing the agenda out the door. And we still get things done, we still have objectives, but.

Right, and that's what's interesting to me is that us both being remote first, weren't aware of our deficits until COVID happened. We were so remote-first and we were just kind of going status quo. And that's, I believe, one variable at play that we've had to like, kind of, oh crap, we're behind the ball, is that all these companies are going remote-first now. Employees who value working remote can now have more options to choose from. And we as leaders, Gary, you've materially changed a lot.

We've materially changed a lot. And so all companies are like, oh crap, we have to be the dominant player.

And what are, what's one thing or a couple things that you've done that you've seen have been helpful?

Well, you mentioned meetings and one of my areas that I'm leaning towards this direction, but I can see the arguments for the other when we talk about meetings. I'm becoming more and more of the belief to remove meetings and work as asynchronous as possible.

This is talked about a lot. This book is now getting more popular, but I read it maybe 3, 4 years ago, Remote Works by the founder of Basecamp.

It's a pretty short book and they describe Basecamp, and this was written maybe 7 years ago, so before all this. And he writes how they run their remote culture. And it's very inspiring, but it's very extreme. Like there's no meetings. He talks about it's too easy in our culture today that to look at someone's Google Calendar and put your meeting on their calendar. Whereas he said at their company, you have to make it as hard as possible. You have to message somebody and type them. Yes, it's inefficient, but like things like Calendly and looking at each other's Google accounts have allowed us to interrupt our days.

And so he talks a lot about the interruptions that we've created now with this remote environment.

So I'm pondering a lot about meetings. So I was curious to hear you saying we have to do meetings in a different way. I'm not sure yet where our meetings—

I definitely agree that's our opportunity to, to connect in those moments, but I'm pushing our company to have less meetings. The second example that comes to mind is, so as the Basecamp example, I just found a couple months ago, so GitLabs Git is a program in terms of Git, the way we commit code to a repository.

GitLab has their entire company, I think they're like 2,000, no, not 2,000, thousands of employees, big company. They have their entire company playbook down to what headphones they recommend their employees buy, all publicly online. There's over 2,000 pages that they say, here is how to run an async remote company. And oh my gosh, you can just like drill and drill and drill. I mean, they have like, they have like their whole strategic planning and like all the way up to the highest level, their OKRs, how they set OKRs, how do you communicate down to, again, like I said, like here's a choice to buy and here's a choice not to buy.

And so this idea of asynchronous, they're the, I think they're the gold standard when I look at that.

And I'm asking like, oh geez, that's pretty intense to get there, but We're exploring it.

I really like the asynchronous idea. I had not heard that. I'm familiar with Basecamp. I've been using them for a dozen years in one of my companies. So it makes sense that they came up with that, that they wrote that book before others were even thinking about it. I need to dig into that. And I love the idea of stealing somebody else's playbook and just taking the best pieces of it instead of recreating ourselves. But the other thing I know you do and we do, or we don't do it, we're doing more of, I should say, is we still prioritize in-person meetings with the remote team when practical and as much as possible. And those are, those are contrary, you know, those are, those are hard to figure out how, what's, what's, what's the maximum amount of time, the practical amount of time, but Most recently, we made two changes, one with our client work. We do all of our client remote work remotely as well. Our clients also don't get a chance to meet us in the same way. We're not in the same rooms with them often and we're a fractional CMO company. By definition, we're also not just their one— they're not our only client for our CMOs. A year ago, we realized that The in-person kickoffs were critically important, that when we were doing those virtually, but we, to build the real rapport and trust with our clients, we mandated company-wide that we would go back to in-person kickoffs for all new engagements with at least one of the partners also being there, just to show our support and to stay connected, and then strongly encourage quarterly. In-person meetings. We're 100% on the kickoffs, we're probably 50% on the quarterlies because it's also a burden sometimes for the client to make time for an in-person meeting when Zoom becomes so easy, but it's less valuable to them, I think. It's more valuable to us because we get that one-on-one time with a client when we're in person. We get it about 50% of the time, but Even though we're 100% remote, everybody's virtual around the world, in-person first is a big deal for us. What have you done to connect your remote teams in person?

Right, so as you said, on the employee side, we now are doing a yearly company trip. This last year, it was November, November, so about a year ago, we flew, we were able to get maybe about half our team, about 25 people, and they could optionally bring their spouses, significant others, to Cancun, Mexico. And for a lot of our guys from Ukraine, for example, that's like a—

that kind of trip just doesn't happen. It's way too expensive, it's way too far, it's, it's a big, big thing for them to come there and experience that.

It was just a really strong building moment just for all of us to like be together.

Most of these guys haven't met most of our most of us hadn't met in person. So that was just like, wow, hey, you're a real person.

Cool.

So that was like our first year of doing it company-wide, and we plan to continue doing it.

I know one of our competitors who has about, I think about 300 employees, they also do it.

I've asked their CEO like, what's been the greatest value? They've always been remote the last 12 years.

And he said, that's the greatest thing, is that always the yearly company trip, make it a top priority.

Don't let it be an optional expense on your budget sheet.

It has to be mandatory.

So I'm hearing that quite often. And on the client side, you kind of gave me an aha on—

I never framed it this way. I saw the value in it, but now the framing is a bit more clear to me.

This last September, so a year ago, it was—

I went to Europe for about 6 weeks.

And I was meeting, I think, with one client. And in our industry, the industry I'm in, web scraping proxies, we're dealing a lot of times with CTOs, tech guys that—

I don't like to say it. It's not insulting. I'm the exact same way.

If a sales guy reaches out to me, I'm a tech guy.

I don't want to talk to a salesperson.

So our clients, by nature, we're getting close to a commodity as a product. It's like, does it work or does it not? Yep, it does.

Is it close to the cheapest price?

Yep. I don't need to talk to you. There's no need to have a QBR, quarterly business review.

There's no need.

We don't need to talk. They mostly ignore emails and everything. So I have one client that finally agreed to meet. I can't remember which one.

And what I did was I emailed our top 10 customers who are also in Europe.

And I just said, hey, and I lied.

Hopefully none of them hear this, but I lied and I said, I'm going to be in insert country, their country.

Do you have time to meet up for lunch? I wasn't going to be in their country, but I just said that and they said, well, yeah, they're going to be here.

Sure.

I'm like, oh my gosh. So in 7 years since my company, I had only met, I think maybe 3 customers in person and maybe in total, like video calls, I'd probably only have had like 20 video calls over 7 years across tens of thousands of customers because our customers just Aren't those people? I finally cracked the code. And I suspect one of those reasons is kind of what you're saying, how kind of framing is like, we seek human connection. We as humans do. And if there's an opportunity like that, like, oh, someone's here and rich. Yeah, sure.

Why not go get lunch with them? What's the worst?

It's just an hour out of my day. We pay them a lot of money per month.

Why not go meet?

And since that, oh my gosh, what's been untapped with with our business relationships and then introduced me to other customers. And it's just been profound.

So the value in it of itself, meeting in person with clients, has been mind-blowing for me. Yeah.

Yeah, I love that. I'm going to be in your neighborhood.

You're right.

If you say yes to this email, I certainly will be there.

So it was 7 countries in 6 weeks that I did in Europe. 'Cause I just got like yeses all around. So I just had to navigate my schedule. Some of them I was there for 2 days and then I have to get on a plane to hit the time.

Well, we both share the realities of having employees all over the world and yours are mostly based in Ukraine. And I know with what's been going on and what your company and you went through, and more your employees certainly than, than you. But, um, how did you, how did you navigate the support for this remote batch of workers that you had in Ukraine in the middle of a war?

Yeah, so what did you do?

Yeah, back up for a context.

So we had 19 guys that were a part of our tech team from Ukraine that started when the sport started. We're a tech company.

In our tech company, we have 19 employees who are tech people.

You can do the math. It's every one of them to keep our lights on.

That was not our first concern. That was the reality.

It's like, holy shit, these guys are in trouble. What are we going to do to help them?

One thing we reacted, we went to Upwork and found sysadmins to fill spots immediately. To backfill as quickly as possible to keep the lights on for a company.

When then, as we look at the start of the war, first thing is how do we support these guys?

One was money, salary.

We continued paying them their monthly salaries and fees. We also gave them additional money for them, their family.

And so from a monetary standpoint, and secondly, we had our administrative team remotely was able to logist— Those guys, you think about it, you have missiles going off, it's chaos, people are freaking out, you're freaking out, your family's freaking out. The last thing you want to think about is researching online your next Airbnb. Hey, where am I going to stay? And so we were able to, as a remote company, to ask who on our team can do what to help support this effort.

And so we had our administrative team search all kinds of options to to, uh, to find different lodging options for all the different guys.

I was tapping into different EO and YPO networks to say, hey, anyone can get some help.

And so one thing we were able to do as well, we found through a connection with YPO—

there was a guy who knew, um, a head of security in Ukraine, and basically we were able to fund and pay for an armed security escort out of Kyiv to the western region. And so again, through, through just navigating, all of us swarming on this, we're able to get our guys and their families out.

Many of them— well, they're all safe, but many of them did 3 different cars, so about 15 total people were able to, to get out.

Monetarily, we made sure, hey, don't worry about your gas prices are going to be skyrocketed, people are going to be scrambling for food. All these different money worries completely gone. And then logistically, we had just different team members focusing on different areas of— so they can just focus on, I just need to get to safety, I need to get to the west, and that's number one priority.

We will handle everything else.

Don't worry about where your next paycheck's coming from. If you need more money, let us know, figure it out. Thanks to a lot of also donations as well, unfortunately.

Well, I watched that happen, Neil, and it was pretty amazing what your team was able to accomplish for the rest of your teammates. It was just inspirational. And gosh, I remember the— I'm just kind of tearing up thinking about it, 'cause I just remember how much you were impacted by that individually. How did you handle that? You're safe, right? But yet you're empathizing with your team. So how did it impact you? How did you deal with all of that as well?

Yeah, I think first and foremost, it starts by saying my pain, my trauma is nowhere near what theirs is. And so when I share this, it's not saying like for me, because for me it's— but I will share my perspective on it, knowing or emphasizing that there's like— I can't, I can't put myself in those shoes. Um, for me as a leader for the company and leader of remote company, I see, I see those guys once a year.

Um, many of those guys—

not many, maybe 4 of them have been working since day one. So it's 7 years I've worked with these guys and helped them build this business from ground up and went through the stresses and turmoils over the years. So to say they're friends is an understatement. They're brothers to me.

And no one saw this coming.

Obviously, it was a complete shock. I was in Spain at the time on the day with— happened to be our CTO, who now lives in Poland. He is a Ukrainian national. He left after the 2014 crisis. He said, I just don't trust it's going to keep happening to this country. And then get out. He had to pull, unfortunately. Him and I were in Spain doing some leadership retreat stuff, and I just woke up that morning and I checked my phone.

It was just as clear as day, a headline that says Russia invades Ukraine.

I get goosebumps, just like stunned. I didn't know how to react.

And I knew Max has family.

His family lives still in Ukraine. He's closer to many of these guys than I am. He knows like the owner of the company we contract with. And I remember I was just paralyzed a bit and I walked out to the living room and he was sleeping in the Airbnb. I remember seeing him there laying on the bed like so peacefully asleep. And I just, I broke down, like started crying before I could, I go wake him up, like hear him to give him the news that, hey, our friends, your family are, are at risk for their lives. And he, I admire him so much, and I said, you see this, I admire you so much, he just jumped to action. He didn't let the emotions control him. He said he started facilitating all these logistics and helping our guys with the safety in those chaotic first moments. And, um, he and I were able to share this for about 3 days before we had to fly back.

But yeah, that, um, that was, that was the first day.

And the one that, that makes me relive it the most is our sort the general manager, his name's Alex. He, uh, he's been with me since day one, closest, closest friend of mine. And picture yourself in his shoes. He has a 10-year-old, 10-year-old son, Timur, and his wife Ilona. They live in Kharkiv, which is the eastern city that was talked a lot about in the news. It's the largest eastern city, million people who lives there. That was the first place they shelled with the missiles. And, uh, I called him. I called him maybe a few hours into waking up. This all happened at like midnight their time, so they had already been trying to get the hell out of there. And I, I called him a few hours after I woke up, so maybe noon time. And I called him, I said, Alex, how you doing? I think they had two cars, maybe I didn't quite understand that context. He says, how you doing? And he gave a shaky, shaky, I'm doing okay, Neil. This is really crazy chaos. We're parked on the side of the road right now. And I said, Alex, are you sure? Come on, man. Really, how you doing? He just lost it. You know something's real and powerful when a grown man just— you can just feel the release. And he was just crying, sobbing on the phone. He said, you know, I'm terrified. I'm on the side of the road right now with my wife, my 10-year-old son. I don't know what to do. There's missiles flying around. There's smoke everywhere. I don't know what to do. And I just, I cried with him. I said, I'm so sorry. And I had to do my best to show my confidence and say, hey, we're working on it. Our team, everyone's working. Our entire company is working. We're here for you and we're going to get you out of there. And, and through luck, safety, will, we got them to the west and into a safe house. They had to drive all the way across the country, so like a 2-day trip. They had to navigate, so we helped them understand like which— again, I hadn't seen the picture— help understand which roads are blocked off, which roads are drivable. And so forth. So all this to circle back around is a remote company culture.

This, this underlined what, what it means to be a remote culture.

It's beyond the Zoom calls. It's saying we're here for each other. It's as sincere as it gets.

Yeah, I mean, thanks for sharing. That's a powerful story, and it's certainly the extreme of, you know, people are people on both ends of the Zoom call, and that, you know, at that extreme, and it certainly is— makes it more real, but at lesser extremes Not to take away from the severity of what people are going through in the Ukraine, but we have people in the Philippines and just a few weeks ago they had a big typhoon go through there. And all of our team, we have a team in Mexico and the US, was texting and WhatsApping and emailing, "Is everybody okay? Are you guys doing Doing fine. How is it over there? And then that Monday morning, everybody jumped back on and everybody was fine. But they were so— everybody was so grateful that we cared, that we reached out, that we asked, how are you doing? And that's just human nature that transcends the digital world. But it can be fostered. Even more. And I think that that's the opportunity that we need to figure out as leaders with remote-first companies is how do you take that human nature and that desire to be together and want to help each other out no matter what's going on, where it's going on, how do you bring that to life in a virtual way?

Right, right, right. Our actions speak more than the words and moments and crises. And I think the question is, is like, how do we embody it outside the moments of crisis?

How does the team know that we really do have their back?

How do we embody that connection and ability in a day-to-day remote work? That's kind of a big open question.

Yeah, well, it's, uh, something we'll continue to figure out as we go. Like all good entrepreneurs, we're on a journey and we're just trying to to figure out where we're going next. With that in mind, I know we'll segue a little bit to your journey. You also have been doing some very personal kind of feats and changes of your own. Talk to me a little bit about— I know yesterday you ran a marathon. How are you feeling?

Bad. Knees are gone. I feel like I'm 80, or at least what people say they feel like when they're 80. Do something like that.

But yeah.

What motivated you to want to do a triathlon just a few months ago, uh, ahead of this marathon just yesterday? What, what inspired you to try to start pushing your personal limits?

Yeah. So as you can see my back for the video watchers, there's my wetsuit right there. Um, I started, I did an Ironman in July. An Ironman, for those who don't know, is, uh, about 2. 4 miles of swimming, followed by 112 miles of biking, and then followed by a marathon, 26 miles of running.

I did that in July. I started training in January. It's only 6 months from—

I never did a triathlon before.

I never had swam before.

I knew how to keep myself afloat, but I could do one lap in the pool before I ran out of breath.

When I tried it in December and I looked at my friend who's trying to help me, I realized I counted up, I have to do 80 laps.

To be comparable.

I can do one without just being out of complete breath. I'm like, there's no freaking way I'm gonna do 2.4 miles, 80 laps of this. But day after day, you just keep training and you show up to race day and it just kind of, this kind of happens.

Um, my driver of it, and there's a blog post I wrote about it called Everything's Right, and learned a lot of valuable lessons out of it. Obviously didn't know those lessons were coming until after the fact. My why of it—

why did I originally do it? It kind of started back in September when I was in my Europe trip.

I was realizing I was in a bit of a rut in terms of like pushing myself above what I'm capable of being. And there's an amazing American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, that wrote The Hierarchy of Needs. A lot of us probably learned that in Psych 101.

Then he states, what one can be, one must be.

He has a lot of empirical evidence to support that there's something to this.

And I couldn't articulate it in that way back then, but I just, I just felt like I would do maybe like 15 minutes of workout. I was still healthy.

I considered myself to be healthy. My heart rate was good. My weight was great. So I felt like a healthy person. I still didn't feel like I was self-actualizing. And so I compared that and that bled into all parts of my life, personal and work. I compared it to, I ran a marathon. My first ever marathon was COVID marathon. So I ran by myself, which sucks not having the race adrenaline, um, back in, right when COVID started back in April of '19.

And I did this marathon and leading up to the marathon, I was training.

I was doing all the runs and staying on a consistent rhythm. What that did is it kept me on my toes.

It said like, I can't not do this 10-mile run today for my training because I'm not going to succeed in the marathon. And it was just always this kind of like this little subtle tick saying, Neil, no, there's no excuses. Whereas there's no goal, there's no race.

To, to keep you on your toes, you kind of say, ah, you know what, I just don't feel like it today.

And that's what I was doing that too often. That bled into all decisions in my life. I just didn't want to—

or you— there's too many like, ah, no, I don't know, day after day, and that just compounds over time.

So I felt like I was missing. And so in October of last year, I got an email from an EO member as part of my EO, and he said, hey, I got this— there's this great race, I'm going to sponsor it.

Um, with this race, You get a ticket to the race and you get this great coach that's going to teach you how to coach you to become an Ironman.

I said, all right, that's it. That's my thing. It's, that's going to keep me on my toes for sure. And I don't know anything about this, but let's do it. I signed up and like, I didn't really know the extent of what an Ironman really was. It'd be like, you hear it conceptually, like, oh yeah, it's that many distances.

But like, when you actually start training for it and you're like, crap, this is like a lot to be able to do in one day.

And, but anyways, I signed up enthusiastically and the training started on January 1st. And it turns out, sidebar on like what this race was like, this is the most sought after race triathlon in the world. There's, uh, over 200,000 spectators, over 4,000 racers, and it sells out immediately.

I got tickets to it because of the EO event.

And then it turns out my coach, he. I read about him in this email, but I just didn't like, I didn't think much of it. It's like, oh, he's really great. He's like won this race.

I'm like, oh, okay, great. Well, it turns out my coach is the first person ever to run under 8 hours for an Ironman.

If you think of those distances, and again, it's a bit conceptual, like a bit relative. Like I didn't, I was like, oh, 8 hours. I don't know. Like, sure.

Maybe that's cool.

But like I did mine in 15 hours. So he did it in half, almost half the time. Like he was running a, like a 5-minute mile for a marathon after doing this bike and after doing the run, and he's still sprinting like a 5-minute mile. And I'm like, oh my God. And then like, I get to meet this guy and he'd like won this like race, like 6 times. He was— and the biggest kind of like one that we can all relate to is he was sponsored by Nike. Nike doesn't sponsor anyone but the absolute best. And so here I am a complete novice. To triathlon, and I'm signed up for the greatest race of them all, led by this, this mid-middle 50-year-old, uh, German guy. This, like, German as can be. Like, if I ever had, like, a concern, he'd just say, you know, don't you worry about it, you'll be okay. That didn't help me at all. But here I was. And so, yeah, my— back to your question, as my sidebar, like, why did I do this? It was to keep me on my toes. And sure enough, It works. I mean, I— that 6 months was grueling. Towards the end, I was training about 16 hours a week for about, about 2 months almost straight with a part-time job.

I was like, it was work, eating, sleep.

Eating was like, like a long thing I had to do each day because I consumed so many calories sleeping.

And then, uh, training was 16 hours.

It was great. It led into my work life. I saw this, like, it's like, all right, I'm just— I'm going— I'm productive over here, I'm productive over here.

And It was cool. I'm glad it did what I was hoping.

I told you before, but congrats on, on completing the Ironman. And, and, you know, if you can't do it in 8 minutes 15 or 8 hours 15 hours is, you know, not bad. I could do it in about, you know, 36 days, I think. But how did you, how did you deal with the completion. You build up 6 months of your life to this one big event, and then it was over. How, how did you feel?

Oh yes, so I wrote a blog post on this, everythingisright.com, and I felt—

well, let me first physically—

this is like a fun share on what physically would happen, like I crossed the finish line and I'm not kidding, moments after, like maybe a minute, my body like knew, my body and mind said, you're done, you know, you can release.

And I just started getting a wave of nausea. I was just like, oh my God. I was like, I was like seeing like some stars and I could like barely walk straight.

I'm like, what the hell is happening?

And I get down to like this athlete pit where they had food and stuff. I had to like sit down.

I was like, I'm going to throw up or pass out. I can't, I don't know. I was just so lightheaded.

And I see around me there's 4 people in this like short period of time, all finishing as well, getting taken out by ambulances, by medical staff on a stretcher, because they also too— and what made me realize from a physical perspective is how much adrenaline, adrenaline, dopamine, whatever your positive neuroceptors are in your body that produces chemicals, that's what got me through. And once I could cross that line, my body and mind knew, okay, we don't have to keep pumping this, you're done. Just— and it was just like, ah, and just like a But that felt really bad physically. But mentally was where I learned a lot of my lessons. I, I, I finished that night, so kind of got home.

I woke up the next day and I was very depressed, very depressed. Here I was, I just accomplished the greatest physical feat in my entire life.

Very proud. A lot of anxieties coming into it, like, oh, what happened if this happened?

Accomplished one of the greatest physical feats that I'll probably ever accomplish.

And I was depressed.

I was sad. I'm like, I don't feel anything. What was the point in all of this?

And I learned that this mantra that I, that I held onto is, and I learned this from my coach before the race.

And it like kind of like aha'd me at the end of the day after, which is everything is right. And it's kind of like everything is right as it should be. And so no matter what happened on that race, whatever happened leading up to the race, let's say my bike had a problem. Let's say one of my concerns I read in blog posts is that I'd shit my wetsuit when I'm swimming.

Like that was a fear. That was a rational fear that I would, but even if that happened, that was okay.

That was what was supposed to happen. It's a bit about the obstacle is the way.

Everything is right as it should be, no matter what. This is everything is right. And I finished this race and these lessons, depression, I realized is that in my life, I have always tried to get to the next level, get to the next level, the next level, the next level. The Ironman was like that next big feat, the next mountain to climb. And then Spree is supposed to be a billion dollar company. And I realized the lesson of it all is that I finished this Ironman.

I felt no joy.

And it proved to me it was finally my aha that everything is right, which is no matter what feat we as humans are trying to accomplish, there's always more.

Once I accomplished the Ironman, what's to stop me from doing a double Ironman, a triple Ironman? There's, there's ultra marathons that are 150 miles.

It never stops.

And we drive ourselves crazy, always going, always going, always going to these next feats of trying to grow a business more and more and more. And I realized that's— once I accomplish that, I'm not going to be satisfied, and there's going to be another one. And that's not a way to live.

And so this Everything Is Right started very tactically at the beginning, like, hey, if the bike has a flat, that's okay, it's as it should be.

At the end, there was this big aha that, like, you know what, Neil, Settled.

Like, how your life is is exactly how it should be, and you don't need to go to that next feat.

You can just be happy with the present moment. So I haven't been taking that greatly since, since a few months ago.

So what is right with you now?

Well, taking that idea of being present, not striving for the next It is a bit of an ironic question, but there's a more purposeful with what that is. So I did a half Ironman just like a month ago.

You might say, like, Neil, you just got done saying how you don't need to continue doing these feats, and here you did another half Ironman.

I did a marathon yesterday, a bit on a whim. It was a hard physical feat. I feel like crap today about it. And so one could argue that I'm being a hypocrite when I say Everything's right, but I see it as being more purposeful in why I'm doing this.

I did the Ironman for validating myself. I did the half Ironman and this marathon because I just kind of wanted to. It keeps me on my toes. Back to the Ironman, I thought that did accomplish keeping me on my toes, but that was validation.

Like, I'm going to climb this next mountain. Because it was the next—

this half in this marathon, which is underneath the physical capacity.

There's no validation there for me that I need. I just wanted to do these and challenge me. They keep me on my toes. And yeah, yeah.

So, um, you are currently where?

Yeah, so I'm, I'm in the Netherlands right now. Yeah, and I can share where you may be going with this. Another way of presence, another way of living in the moment, let's say, in my life, um, I went to a music festival in Belgium in July and I met my soulmate there. And within— I've had mature relationships in my life and And all of them kind of go to the typical timeline, date for a while, you're fine, and tell them you love them after a few months, maybe, maybe move in after half a year, a year. It was normal timeline of a chronological relationship. This girl I met, within 30 hours I told her I loved her. You know, something so deep and pure to what I saw in this woman. And all this, my race was on July 4th, and with this girl at the end of July. All is converging on an evolution of being present, trusting the moments, saying this is what it is right now in front of me. Sure, I could be thinking about what-ifs and this and this, and oh, this may not work out, who knows. But I've just been trusting my heart more than trying to climb that next mountain.. And I really like this girl, I loved her. And I said, well, we talked for just a couple months. That was back in the end of July, start of August.

And here I am in Netherlands 2 months later, and we had mature conversations.

And I said, I said, hey Laura, you know, it doesn't work, what's the worst that either you and I are out? I'll just move back home. He's like, oh yeah, I guess.

Like, so it's just this way of life that that I'm learning and experiencing more that I had a preconceived notion before that everything had to be a certain way. There's always another goal to climb.

There's always something to do. I had to live within society's means and definition of, oh, Neil, you can't move across the world for a girl you just met. What are you thinking about?

Why can't I? And all these things have different themes and lines, but they all are interrelated.

I think.

And how do you reconcile all that? 'Cause your story's fascinating to, I think, a lot of listeners out there. As a business owner, a C-level executive, how do you balance or integrate all these pursuits you had individually and remotely and trips and destinations and challenges and mountains and with running a business? 'Cause you run a very successful business.

Also.

How do you integrate it all? How do you do it all?

One starts from the core values, which I know is a bullshit answer, but not if you really finally figure it out. One of our core values is freedom. As a remote-first company and started the company remotely, completely remote, no offices at all for the first 3 years. And I always said, no matter what, I want our company to have the freedom to work wherever they want, however they want. I don't care what it costs, what it'll take. Like, we are going to allow every employee.

And so by setting that core value, it enables me as a leader to say like, yeah, I'm working from Costa Rica today, everybody. So there's some, Reference I'm giving here relating to is like, I know some C-suite people worry about what that perception is like, oh, there's a jet-setting CEO that's traveling all around the world. Well, you can too.

Like, there's places you can live for $500 a month on a beach and work remote.

That doesn't make you jet-setter. Any person in our company, anyone in the world really, can work remotely.

And so our company enables that. So that's more from like a tactical, um, from the other side, how do I continue to run a successful company as CEO as these things are happening?

Um, that's, that's come with years of building the right leadership team.

You know, that's another kind of fluffy answer, but can you trust, can you delegate, empower those around you? And just in these last 2 months with these major changes that are happening in my life. And this is really like fresh right now. My team would agree with it. As I'm like trying to figure out like, how am I going to live in the Netherlands? What are the logistics of that? I've had to delegate and empower even more than ever.

So guys, I just don't have the capacity.

I need you to take this over. And what I'm finding out, and I'm a bit ashamed to admit this, and I'm still watching it carefully, is they're crushing it.

Not that I never thought that they couldn't crush it if I would delegate more to them, I'm taking a much more hands-off approach to say, "You know what? I just don't care about this decision." Even if it costs our company even a lot of money, I just don't care because my other priorities right now are not that decision. So take it, I don't care. I'm really just flipping the switch. What I'm seeing as a result is the paradox of it all is like, "Holy shit, everyone's doing great." I see a lot of energy coming from our leaders taking on this stuff and doing this and doing that. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, what have I been doing wrong this whole time?" I don't consider myself a micromanager, but I'm letting go of these big decisions even now and they're being taken over wonderfully. So that's an ongoing experiment right now to see like to what degree can I let go and see the company, my role that then becomes and what it is becoming right now is is strategic.

It's the big picture. Where are we going? How are we going to get there? And then have the visionary integrator, EOS, who's going to do this.

It's fascinating. Sometimes you just have to have— was it necessity is the mother of invention? Like, you have to have just this pressure to to do something different or that's causing something, and then all— then something new is invented. And in your case, you know, you're just— not distractions, but your other priorities forced you to delegate more, and boom, before you know it, it's actually a better outcome maybe than it worked, right?

Yeah, better than I could even do it too. I'm seeing like, oh my God, I was— I'm not a good integrator. Why am I trying to project manage this small project on our team, why don't we just let the ropes go and like turn up as a better project manager that can run that show? Yeah.

Well, that is the dream, to have the dream team so you can all live the dream. I think I love that you shared your core value of freedom as a company core value. You know, it's a personal core value of mine. We never established it as a company core value. And your explanation of how you can get away with it, and I don't mean that like you're getting away with it, but it's so accepted in your organization because it is an organizational core value. It's a good reminder of how important it is to have core values personally as an entrepreneur and leader match with your company core values. So you can truly be authentic to yourself with your teams and not feel like there's anything to hide.

Yes. Yeah. But when we set these core values, maybe 2 years ago, before that, we kind of had painted wall ones like integrity, honesty, like, you know, whatever you see on the wall.

And we went through another process.

All right, we need to look at, let's revisit these. It was a bit of a, it was a democratic process when we created these new, and I was very worried about this. And I work with my coach a lot. And I said, I asked my coach, I said, we make this a democratic process with our— well, we got feedback from our whole company, like describe like what you think our company would be in core values and some different prompts and stuff.

And then we bubble that up to leadership. And then I was giving a great voice to our leadership team.

And I shared with my coach, I said, I'm worried what if the outcome is not who I am.

And as CEO and founder, that worry, because like if I'm not motivated by a certain core value, then you lose the founder's blood, CEO's blood and passion, because he's like, I don't really relate to those, it's not mine.

And I was really worried, and my coach, the spiritual mentor, he said, how do you know that it's not going to be what you think it is? We brought these people to your company, they've stayed this long, do you trust them? Do you believe that you're generally aligned?

I guess, but like, shouldn't I just, you know, just making an authoritarian decision so then I can drive it from there? He said, "Sure, you could. How many other companies do that? How many other companies run their company's core values and mission, vision from a top-down perspective and then employees across all ranges say, don't relate to it. They say, I'm just getting told what to do. I'm just another cog in the wheel." So we made it bottoms up and everyone felt a part of this process.

And then sure enough, the outcome became Like, this is exactly who we are and what I relate to, and I have passion for this.

Yeah, that's fascinating to me. I've been doing a lot of thought, thinking around bottoms-up leadership versus top-down leadership, and, um, then I've thought about core values. And I stumbled across something recently, it was about the concept of tribes. And, you know, people join a tribe and then they start to mold to the values of the tribe. Like, they bring their own, but then they kind of accept their own or they leave. I wonder how much of the outcome— this is where I was going with this question— was because your tribe existed and already had an unwritten kind of sense of core values that the bottom-up allowed it to be articulated, versus if you threw 20 people together or 30 people together and did it that way, Would the outcome be the same or was it you had already instilled the core values of the leader and therefore the tribe was already part of it and of course it matched later? Accepting what the democratic, all right, we got 30 strangers together, this is our new tribe's core value.

Right, right, right. Yeah, day one of 30 new people, it would be completely over the board. So yeah, I think one could argue that Over the years of those blank platitudes on a wall, we were hiring people that fit these current core values and the people who didn't feel a part of the general gist of the company left or had to be terminated in some regard.

So we were more or less in the same.

Yeah, it'd be an interesting experiment to try to figure out how that outcome would be different, or maybe it wouldn't. You know, I don't want to assume it would be different. Maybe you get 30 strangers together and there would be a consensus of core values that was just as good as the one you just got from a couple years ago.

Right, right, right. Yeah.

All right, maybe that's an experiment we can do together. Let's go find a few groups of guinea pigs we can play around with.

Yeah, that could be a fun podcast.

Well, I want to thank you, Neal, for your time. This has been a great conversation. We went through a lot of different topics and ideas, and I hope you got as much value from it as I did, and I hope our audience did as well.

Thank you. Yeah, thank you for having me, Joe. It was a pleasure to work with you and talk to you.

And to our audience, thank you for listening. We'll be back next week. If you want to reach out to Neal, if something he said sparked your interest, uh, we will have the contact information and show notes. But Neil, what's your preferred way to, to respond to inquiries?

I would love—

I just love to talk with other like-minded individuals. So please shoot me an email.

We'll provide my email. I just love to just hear your thoughts and perspectives, good or bad.

All right, well, thanks again, and thanks everybody. We will talk to you next week. And that's a wrap. There's another successful episode of the Fractional C-Suite Retreat. See our show notes and more episodes at fractionalcsuitretreat.com. This podcast is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow, save time and money with better marketing strategy and fractional execution. Visit them at yourcmo.com, yourcmo.com, spelled wrong on purpose.