Why More Tactics Won’t Fix Your Business but Consciousness Will

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If I need $50 million to feel secure, And then you gimme $50 million and I go, cool, I'm secure. And then tomorrow I buy a Snickers bar. Well, I don't get $50 million anymore, do I?

Right.

I got less. It might be going away. And I've never played the game called don't lose it so fast. Right? It's just, it's just, it's gonna be replaced by another game of chasing something versus the things we truly desire. Security, safety, peace, love, fulfillment, worth.

Consciousness is the most powerful lever in business. And we're going to talk more about that. I'm going to say it again. Consciousness is the most powerful lever in business, and we're going to discover why. Welcome to Inside the Speakeasy Podcast. And I'm so excited today to bring in our guest, really amazing human person, business leader, guru, coach, et cetera, et cetera, mentor. I learn every time I talk to him. Townsend Wardlaw from Scottsdale. He spent the last 2 decades selling before he ever called himself a coach, and it taught him the one thing most coaches never learn. People don't buy expertise and they don't buy effort. They buy an outcome they can't yet create for themselves. So well stated. Over the last 10 years, he's served more than 300 founders and walked more than 3 dozen of them all the way through an exit. Very impressive. And what he found is that the ones who broke through didn't get better tactics. They got a different relationship with themselves. The consciousness shift came first, enterprise value followed. Really, really cool. I'm excited to tap into that. Welcome, Townsend.

Hey, good to be here. I like the et cetera, et cetera. I think that's my best qualification.

That's right. Well, I mean, there's so much to unpack here and I know you've had an interesting career and a lot of cool stuff happening and you've had a lot of learns along the way. Like a lot of us entrepreneurs, you thought you had it all and then all of a sudden kind of things fell apart.

And then I didn't.

And then you didn't. And then you're like, well, wait a second. Maybe there's a hidden message in there that I needed to see the whole time. And I had to go through the suffering in order to get there.

Yeah.

And so I want to unpack that story. I mean, so walk us through the beginning a little bit. Where did your career start? Where'd you grow up? Yeah.

So grew up in the East Coast, Connecticut, went to school in upstate New York. And as I was finishing up college, I went to Skidmore in Saratoga Springs. As I was finishing up college, all my peers were going to Boston and New York to go work in finance or insurance or something. And I was an aspiring bicycle racer. I wanted to be a professional road racer. So I packed up my car, went to California, and I was determined not to have a real job and not to, not to get, you know, too, too serious too quick. As I like to say, I didn't have my first real job until I was 27. I worked in bike shops, worked for some bike manufacturers, had just an amazing set of adventures all around the world in and around the bicycle industry. And I remember waking up one day and I was in Boulder, Colorado. I was living there. I was about 27. And I just had the thought, I probably should get a real job if I want to procreate, find a mate, things like that. I mean, literally it never occurred to me before. I was like, yeah, I should probably do that.

So you woke up, you're just like, one day it just hit you and you're like, okay.

I was like, yeah, one day I should get a job where I can make real money. And Being thus unqualified for anything else, I decided to go get a sales job. Now at the time, the way you got a sales job was pretty simple. You take a shitty sales job with your options at the time where you could sell copiers, pagers. We were still selling pagers at the time, believe it or not, or long distance. Now, for those of you who are younger folks in the crowd, long distance used to be something you paid for. So I went to go work for a regional reseller of long distance.

Well, that was a battle of what was like AT&T, MCI, and I remember that.

Sprint. Sprint was another one. Yep. And then there were the resellers of AT&T. So we were a reseller of AT&T and MCI. So I would drive 45 minutes from Boulder to the tech center, make 150 cold calls a day, get told to go pound sand most of them and maybe set 2 appointments. And then I'd go out and present. And our presentation was a notebook with a pointer, which was like a retractable car antenna or something. And anyway, I did that for a few months and I leveraged that into a job with AT&T, which was actually a legitimate company. And I started selling into B2B and long story short, over the course of 7 years, I went from working in bike shops to a VP of a Fortune 500 making, I think it was $250,000, $275,000 a year. You know, had it all. I was married, had a house, 2 car payments, vacations, all that. But I was miserable. I was living the dream and I was miserable. So I decided to quit and start my own company.

So what made you miserable? Like, what did you identify? Because as we go to the entrepreneurial shift, like what was inside of you?

Mediocrity and being around a bunch of mediocre people who didn't seem to care very much about anything other than doing the same thing every day and getting home in time to watch their favorite shows and, you know, sit in front of the television, watch sports. And I wanted to build something. Any founder Any entrepreneur watching this, any entrepreneur knows, like, there's 2 kinds of people in the world, people that just need to go fricking build something, even if you don't know what it is. And those that are like, you know, I want security, stability, safety, right? I had all that. And it was like repugnant to me. I remember waking up Sunday mornings and just like dreading Monday. Now, now remember I'm making incredible money. I had all the autonomy in the world. I had this great role where I didn't have to do anything I didn't want to do, but it was just like, I don't belong here. And it was sort of odd because this was the dream, wasn't it?

Yeah. There's a mismatch. The entrepreneurial beast hasn't come out yet.

It's just like, I gotta get outta here. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

So, I mean, what's your, what's your wife saying at the time? Is she like, what's wrong? I can't just be happy with that.

You know, what's interesting. And this was my first marriage. And to her credit, she believed in me and trusted me. And either that, or she realized there was no other way it was going to go. I'm not sure which. I never really asked her, I guess. But, uh, yeah, it was one of those things where I knew I would make it work somehow. I didn't know how, and she signed off on it, or, or, or maybe, maybe I didn't really ask appropriately. I just said, hey, I quit one day. But, uh, I guess, you know, I can be pretty convincing if I want to be.

So, well, it's sales entrepreneurial instinct. So you just quit and said you had an idea to start something?

Yeah. The original idea was I wanted a sales consulting company, right? I was really good at selling. I was a great salesperson, very successful, also really talented at building systems and process and implementing technology. And I was like, oh, I can take this out there and sell it to companies. And I actually had a bunch of clients lined up for, for when I left and had these contracts signed. So it all seemed like it was going to be smooth sailing. Unfortunately, it was somewhere around March of 2002, right as I was quitting. So the dot-com bubble was bursting and every single client that I had signed up and committed to work with me called me up and said, hey, we got to push. All our funding's been taken away. So that was a problem, or I should say an inflection point. It was, you know, go back and get a job or You know, find another way and I wasn't going to go get another job. Yeah.

Caught the bug. Yeah.

I pivoted and I would love to say that everything I did was strategic. It was literally just, I got to find a way, figure out what works and put my head down and do it. So the first move was, okay, if people aren't going to pay me to help them figure out how to sell and learn how to sell, maybe they'll pay me to sell for them. So I started what at the time was one of the first, uh, bespoke high-end sales outsourcing agencies. So we would literally work with emerging software companies, work on a contract plus commission basis, and go and bring their stuff to market. And turns out there was a lot of demand for that. You couldn't find qualified salespeople and they were expensive and they could get a team for about what they would spend for one and manage their risk and all that. So it actually was an incredible business model with one exception. And that is I couldn't find enough real salespeople who knew how to sell in the way that I did, right? There were a lot of people who were used to selling telecom and cablecom and hardware and stuff that were more like order-taking. There weren't a lot of great salespeople at the time, believe it or not. So I got pissed off one day and called the University of Colorado in Boulder and started an internship and said, I'm going to make my own. So I started taking college kids and turning them into salespeople. I'd put them through a bootcamp, put them on the phones. Like it was just this harebrained scheme. About a year and a half into that, one of my corporate clients got wind of what we were doing because we were doing a little bit of consulting for them, but they asked, where do I get my salespeople? Because They're really good. And I said, well, I make them. And I was actually having lunch with the VP of sales at the time, or no, president of sales. It was a company called StorageTek. They're gone, but they were a Fortune 250. And we're having lunch and he goes, make me some. I'm like, what are you talking about? You're a— like, you have an HR budget that's a multiple of my revenue. And he proceeded to explain that they were really having a hard time finding qualified talent that they could bring in, train them. It took them a year, blah, blah, blah, all this money and people would leave. He goes, how much would you charge me to make me a salesperson? I'm like, well, how many How many do you want? He goes, uh, 20. I said, all right, give me, give me, give me $500,000 in 3 months. I'll make you 20. He goes, done. Wow. And I'm like, and then I'm like, shit, now what do I do? So we literally had to pivot the company from, you know, what we were doing with this outsourcing business, move offices. We had to recruit. I think we intaked about 100 or 120 people for that first class. And we launched this sales institute to start making salespeople. And 3 months later, we produced our first batch of, you know, 20, uh, certified sales associates and placed them all over the world.

Wow.

And We're like, maybe this is the business we're supposed to be in. So long story short, that's, that's kind of how we pivoted the business. We, on the outside, looked like an outsourcer because we would outsource demand creation, cold calling, setting appointments for, for B2B companies. On the, the backend though, we were a school, we were an institute. And in a given year, we would take in about 9,000 resumes. We would start about 1,000, you know, students in various cohorts and we would graduate 200 to 300 a year and then place them. So we were making millions of outbound phone calls and creating these salespeople and putting them all over the world. And it was this really cool, interesting model. And we were actually doing really well with, again, one unforeseen situation. And that was, I didn't know shit about growing a company. And I made every mistake in the book. By 2009, roughly, I had— actually it was '08— I had 80 people working for me. I had a leadership team of 7. We were doing upwards of $3 million a year. But I was cooked, right? Everything was on my shoulders. Everything was up to me. I had the illusion of a company, but it was really all me spinning all the plates and my sanity was gone. My money was gone. My health was a wreck. And that's when I say everything fell apart perfectly.

So when you say money was gone, is it because you're, you're basically spending money just to solve the problems and you're like, as more people came in, more money, more problems, right? As you get—

And of course I had to learn, right? Because everything had to go through me. So I had to learn finance and make all the mistakes there and cash flow and debt. Uh, plus we had the 2008, you know, financial stuff go on and all the— yeah.

So let's— So lesson number 1 for those that are on a good rocket ship, I mean, there's gonna be a lot of lessons here. Knowing what you know now, what are like 2 or 3 things you wish you had done, your wiser self back then to have not caused such a—

Well, this gets really to the heart of my work that I do today because there's nothing else I could have done. And that is because everything I created, I created from how, what I'll say the world occurred for me or who I was, who I am, who we are produces what we think and what we do. So the human that says, I'm going to start a company despite having a quarter million dollar a year job, safety and security with no real plan, has an idea of themselves in the world about possibility, about who they are. Who I was at the time was it's up to me, right? A founder of a company must start a company with the idea that it's up to them. It's all on them. Nobody can help them. They know everything. And that's what they do. And they start to grow and they start to make some money. Then they start hiring people and doing the things required to scale, but they haven't shifted Their self, their identity, their I am. So now it's all up to me, has 6 people around them or however many as the leadership team. And they complain, nobody's good enough. Nobody's competent. Everything still runs through me. Well, is that because they're not doing the right things? No, I read all the books. I read all the things. What I hadn't done is shifted my essential identity, my way of being, as I like to say. And a lot of people think that what you do will transform your way of being over time. And it can, but Ultimately, I've done this now for 20+ years working with founders. For founders to grow, it's not what they need to learn how to do or the things they need to say or think. It's how will you shift the fundamental idea of who you even are and what your place is in the world from it's all up to me, it's all on me, nobody else is good enough to other ideas about how the world might be that will then produce different thinking and different actions and even different people you hire.

Love it. So let's drill down into that.

Do it.

Let's take the younger Townsend having had to go through that to figure that out. Well, there's like a bunch of questions I want to know, like how you finally figured it out. Like what was the spark that hit you? And then I want to go backwards and say, okay, well, if you had been able to be your coach to yourself, like what could you have said earlier?

Yeah. So many great questions. First thing I'll say is I never figured it out. The universe stepped in to put a stop to what was going on and how I was doing it simply by I like to think of it as you run out of rope, right? The idea it's up to me, nobody's coming. I'm the one with the answers is a very powerful idea that creates powerfully right up until the point it fails catastrophically, right? It's one of the reasons that so many founders, regardless of where they get to, whether they fail or have the big payout, often have these really deep, profound, and disruptive crisis of identity on the other side of it, right? Well, what is this all for? So what happened was the company went under, right? I exited. And by that, I mean, closed it down and walked away. My marriage failed. I went bankrupt and, you know, everything was gone. All the money. I mean, really my health was down to nothing. So that was the moment that at some point, I guess on some level, some part of me said, maybe that way of creating doesn't work. Right. Because up until that point it was work harder, do more, get more plates spinning, you know, find better people because these people are idiots, find better processes.

I'm unstoppable. There's always a way I'll figure it out.

I'll figure it out.

Right.

I must figure it out until the universe is like, yeah, no, there's no figuring it out from who you are. And if I'm being unkind, what I would say is I was arrogant. What I would also say is there's no way you build a business from nothing without that level of arrogance. What you don't know how to do is swap out. I think of it as fuel, Eric, right? It's up to me is powerful fuel. No one's coming is fuel that drives us. Well, it also carries a cost. What we don't realize is there are other kinds of fuel. And another way that I think about my, my fuel and a way of being that could describe who I was at the time was it's up to me. I need to do more. Everything was about doing more. Right. And that works.

Right.

What we don't realize is there are alternate fuels, just like, you know, you got gas and you got electric. There's a fuel called I've done enough. There's a fuel called there are other people who can do this besides me. It's not up to me.

Yeah.

Right. There's fuel called help is on the way. I just have to be open to seeing it and receiving it and working with it. And these aren't, these aren't cute expressions. They're not affirmations. They are literally, I think of them as lines of code and programming that are installed at a very young age and get reinforced as we go. Right. My whole life has been one big story of it's up to me. I'll drive to California. It's up to me. I'll break into the corporate world. It's up to me. I'll get myself promoted. Right. Like it's up to me has no concern for it's not going to work. We'll find a way.

And I think the ego starts to really muddle that up too, because it's like you're having the successes and you've had the big wins. You're like, I've done it before. I keep doing it. I'm the superhuman person. I'll find a way.

Yeah. My way of being has evidence that this is the only way it's going to work.

Yeah.

Right. Yeah.

And you don't know, right? And it's the blind spots that you didn't have at the time that tells you, wait a second. Like you said, there's fuel this other way. There's like, you completely missed the leverage fuel, which is how to leverage the team around you kind of thing. But yeah.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Well said. Well said.

So obviously the big thing, which I think we hear you talk about it, I think Atul understands, but it's another good story of how many founders I've seen that have the systems and the delegation issue. Exactly what you talk about. Like they just build, build, build. It's going to take too long for me to explain that thing, to do this thing. I'm just going to do it myself. It'll be faster, quicker, easier. It'll get done. It'll get done correctly this time. So I'll just do it.

There's another one that's very persistent and pervasive, and that is It's only worthwhile if it's hard, right? What founders know how to do is work hard.

Right.

And they have a lifetime of evidence that working hard gets them what they want. Now, there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is you can work hard to get to a million, twice as hard to get to $2 million, and maybe 10 times as hard to get to $10 million. At some point you can't hit the more hard button anymore.

Right.

What you don't have is a mode called, well, this is easy.

Right.

The easy path, because that's not how life is. And even if there is an easy path, there's no glory in that. There's no validation. So you won't take it.

Right.

You'll reject ideas because something might be wrong.

Something might be wrong. Is it too easy? So it can't be that easy. So yeah, that's right.

Yeah. So, you know, I knew how to do things hard. I didn't know how to do things easy. And that's what I've spent the last 20 years working with founders on is helping them see that there's nothing wrong they're doing. It's just not the only fuel they could use. Now, the first 10 years I did it as a consultant, right? And I really didn't have an awareness to what I talk about these days is consciousness, right? So When I say consciousness is the ultimate tool for growing business, creating value, revenue, exit, I mean that not as, you know, some, some kind of cute to say. I spent 10 years as a consultant working with founders, building businesses, being there through the exit, creating, you know, a billion and a half in exit revenue and wealth for founders through process system tools, et cetera. So I did that. The problem was on the other side of the rainbow with $30, $40, $50 million in their bank account, That founder was still miserable. The founder was still dissatisfied. The founder was still disconnected from their family. The founder was still estranged from their children or divorcing their wife and now having to cut that big pile they just made in half. And I got frustrated with that. I'm like, this is— I'm not going to spend the rest of my life helping people make a lot of money and be miserable. There's got to be a better way. And at the time, I was starting to experience my own, we'll call it journey with transformational coaching and coaching at the level of consciousness, had the chance to work with some extraordinary coaches and mentors. And I remember waking up one day and saying, I'm done telling people what to do and how to do it as a way to get what they want. I want to do this. And again, I didn't really know how I was going to do it or the path, but I was committed to my life will be spent serving founders from helping them see how they occur to themselves and how the world occurs and working with that rather than another system or technology or tool or process that will be a pain in the ass to put in and maybe stick around for 3 months until they find something else to work on.

Okay. A lot to unpack there. I want to go back to something you said earlier though, and I want to double down on something you said because it also reminded me of our good friend out in Scottsdale, Joe Polish, and his whole concept of ELF, easy, lucrative, and fun. You know, like how do you stay in the lane of easy, lucrative, and fun on the things you're working? And to me, what was so profound is actually it hit me in something that you and I are familiar with in Speakeasy Mastermind. For me personally, going through that journey where like I'm grinding, grinding, grinding, and this dinner group that I happened to be running in San Diego, Which everybody would say, oh my God, that was like the best 3-hour dinner. Like, that's incredible. You should do this in other cities. Like, and to me, I looked at that and just dismissed it. Why? Because it felt easy for me to do this. It was just like, I can't have a business on this. This is just like, what's so hard about organizing? Until I had enough conversations with people that says, Eric, no, that's your gift. You think it's easy because you're good at wrangling the entrepreneur, providing value for everybody in the room, all these things. And it actually had, it was remarkable over the last really 2, 3 years of discovery for myself at 54 now to say, Wait a second. I should be playing in this lane. This is the lane I'm going to enjoy life in as I continue my path because it is easy. I shouldn't run away from it. So it was so relatable when you said that earlier. I've been doing it the hard way for a long time and not happy necessarily.

Well, yeah, but let me ask this question. What's your first memory of hearing the idea you can have anything you want as long as you're willing to work hard for it? And who told you that? Yeah.

That's what you learn from as a kid, right? You just got to work hard to get it.

You, you learned it as a kid. Right. Who'd you learn it from?

Family, parents, you know, dad, mom, whatever.

Right. Yeah. Well, you learned it, so you did it and it worked.

Right.

So you're like, hmm, that's cool. Let me do it again. And it worked.

Right.

And it works and it works and it works and it works. So why would you not use it? Now, what nobody ever said was, hey son, the opposite's true also. Right. So at one point we wake up in life and we trust one truth. I can have what I want as long as I work hard. And we have No basis to trust the other truth. So it seems absurd. So we no longer go through life choosing to work hard or work easy. We're not actually making a choice. Life is hard. I must work hard. That's not a choice. That's just how things are.

That's what you've been taught, right? And that's part of what the consciousness, you know, that we've been pushed inside. It's so funny. Again, as you say that, I'm sitting there thinking to myself, even recently I've had this new realization. This is like, wait a second. It's find your area of genius that you love to work in and you'll be successful because naturally you're going to be great at it. And that's probably a little bit of a twist from what you're saying, probably the way you've been taught. Everything you hear on this show comes back to one idea, proximity. I wrote the book on it, literally, Proximity Pays, my bestselling book available now at proximitypays.com.

But the same principle directionally, right? Like some people were told throughout their lives, well, you're not going to be able to make money doing what you really love.

Right.

So that became their truth. So when an opportunity, like it really relates to how the mind fundamentally works, right? The mind is not a perfect receiver of information, right? It's a projector of attention, right? There's simply too much information for us to pull it all in and decide what's there. We start with an idea of the world and we project onto it the meaning of it. So if life is hard, I have to work hard. We'll walk in a room and we'll see all the ways that I can work hard to get what I want.

Right.

We won't see, we won't even receive the ways that we could do it easily. They won't even be possibilities for us. Somebody else will come along and say, well, what about that? That would be easy. And we say, well, that's not possible. And we'll produce evidence, literally produce evidence, project evidence of why it won't work versus trying it. Right.

Right.

Our belief about the world creates the world. The world is not objectively anything. The world is not inherently anything. The world isn't hard or easy, good or bad, right or wrong. You know, wealthy or poor, scary or fun. The world is what we put up here and then project out onto all the stuff. Now, what's fun is when you work at the level of consciousness, you start with, well, what does somebody see? Right? Like my first question is, so how does the world look to you? And they'll tell me exactly how it looks. That's not what's wrong or right. They're not looking at it the right way. That's just what they see. What they've never considered is there's the exact opposite out there.

Got it.

They can't see it until they start to shift things up here.

So part of your work, I'm starting to understand it. So part of your work is obviously a lot, I assume a lot of questions analysis to get in the head of what people, the way they're viewing the world, which is the stuff that's been installed with them. And you're like, okay, here's the box that you're playing in right now. And there's this whole other field of stuff that you don't actually, you haven't opened yourself up to yet, the possibilities because you're in your box. Is that a little bit of what you're—

It is with one tweak I would put, and that is you can't tell anybody that where they're looking from isn't the only way to look, right? They have to see for themselves, right? When somebody is sitting on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, well, what they see is the Grand Canyon. And as far as they know, that's the only view there is. You could sit there talking about the other side and how it's different and they won't relate to that. And they'll probably just argue with you about how they like this better. Right. Not long ago, I was working with a gentleman. He worked for a private equity funded, uh, you know, one of these roll-ups of orthodontist offices, you know, $3, $4 billion outfit.

Yep.

And he ran 3 regions. He calls me one day, he's a client. He goes, I got a problem. So right there, he created something. There's a problem. And he spent, spent some time starting to talk about the situation that he has. And he was explaining all the things that were wrong, were challenging, could bite him in the ass while he's talking. What I see is something different. I see another million dollars for him in compensation between cash and equity. Now, if I had said, you're looking at it wrong, it's actually this from where he's looking, he can't see it. Right. What we can do is kind of metaphorically start to walk his view around whatever it is he's looking and change where he's looking from. And at a certain point, as we're just sort of saying, what do you see? And what if you looked here? And I can't even get the questions across in a simple way. At one point, what comes outta his mouth is, oh, wait a minute, this could be $1 million of additional comp for me. And I'm like, exactly. So the idea is everybody knows what to do and it's the perfect idea, but only from where they're looking. So whenever I'm talking to somebody about something else they should do, or a different strategy or a different tactic or a different go-to, I'm wasting my fucking time because from their point of view, it's impossible, right? What I can do is help them see what they think they're looking at differently or from a different angle or see themselves differently. Their mind will magically begin to produce new ideas about it, new strategies, new tactics, new go-to-markets, et cetera. And then they'll have the whole picture, right?

Love it. Love it.

Think about the idea of life has to be hard. Well, that's not the wrong idea. That's just one perspective. From life is hard, you'll find all the hard things. Now life is fun and easy is also not the right perspective. It's just a different one. What I like is if you have both, you have the whole set of options and you'll choose what works best. And sometimes it's fun to do things that are hard. Sometimes I want to do things that are hard because it does feel more rewarding. What I don't want is a life where the only possibility is to do things that are hard. I want that to be an option.

Love it. Love it. Love it. And I'm going to go back to something you said too, which I feel like a lot of Mentors, consultants, people around you. It's the, I think of the, you should, and I know EO Entrepreneur Organization is really good at, at, you know, Gestalt, get rid of the word you should. As soon as you say you should, you're telling it. And what you're saying is, yeah, it's not going to work. Not only are you guiding them, but they're not even going to understand what you're talking about because they're not seeing it. You got to guide them to the path. Like you said, let them see it for themselves and have that own discovery.

Yeah. As a consultant, I spent 10 years telling people the right things to do and how to do them. And it worked to a certain extent, Now I, in my best days, I don't tell people anything. I ask questions. I have them look at places and they, they see things differently and come up with their own new ways of seeing it.

You're leading the witness, if you will, in the right direction.

Yep. There you go.

A couple of things. So one is you have these clients, you just gave me an example of something, you know, this guy's really successful. He calls you. How do you, you know, especially people listening to the show right now, watching the show in a couple sentences, like what do they call Townsend for? Because it's a little bit of a different than I've heard from a lot of other coaches, consultants. You have a different angle. So what is the pain I'm feeling? How do I know when I'm ready for you?

That's a great question. Well, first and foremost, my business model is a little different, right? Because I don't try to create clients. I don't sell my services. My clients are founders and their companies. So I have a handful of clients. It's the founder. It's their leadership team. It's the entire company. And I'm embedded in them and they're very long-term relationships. Now, for a lot of years, I would meet people around the $2, $3 million range on the way to $10 million, because there's some very specific phenomenon that occur at that juncture. That founders start to get stuck. These days it tends to be, you know, north of $10 million on their journey to $20, $50, and $100 million. But where they tend to find me is at very predictable moments in time when what got them there is keeping them stuck. And now it looks like they can't get any further. What they don't realize is it's not something they're doing wrong. It's how they see themselves and how they create even, even what it means to be a founder or CEO. So typically I'll find somebody, you know, these days a little north of $10 million and they've just been bought or partially acquired by PE. So now they're on a whole different game, right? The $10+ game is entirely different.

Yep.

It's all up to me and I make all the decisions that got us here has now been unceremoniously ripped away with all the things that PE wants to do and a board. And sometimes they have a boss for the first time. So it's not just, can I learn new things, but can I shift my identity fast enough and who I see myself as to keep my job, right? So sometimes it's the board calling me in and saying, hey, we'd really like my, you know, this, most founders post-exit stick around a year, year and a half. If it's, if it, you know, why is that? Well, they're not incompetent. It's the being, the operating system that got them there is incompatible with the next stage. And nobody says, hey dude, we need to do some reprogramming here. So that's, that's one way it happens. And it's, it tends to be very predictable, at least for the founders.

Right. That's interesting. So it's a really cool, cool niche of people, group of people. You're right. Like mentally, They're going from, they are the boss. They are the people that don't have to report to anybody. And then you're right. They're going to quickly be miserable within probably less than a week.

Yeah. They're really unhappy.

Pretty miserable saying, holy shit, I got somebody to report to. I can't, you know, I don't have this freedom and flexibility to do the hell I want to do. And it's a total mental mind screw on that. And how do they get through that?

That's wonderful.

And you're like, well, look, you can, but just lead them down the path.

Yeah. It's inflection points, right? We all go through these inflection points in our career or growing a company or, you know, I mean, health, wealth is an inflection point. You know, you talk about somebody who just exited and they got $20, $30, $40, $50 million. Why are they miserable? Well, I'll tell you why they're miserable. They've spent their entire life telling themselves that when they had this money, things will be different. And that drove them, fueled them maniacally to get the thing that they wanted.

Right.

And then they woke up one day and had it. Good news is they no longer are ruled by the fear of not having what they want.

Right.

Bad news is it's now replaced by a new fear, losing what they have that they've always wanted. And nothing has changed, right? So think of the crisis of consciousness at that point. My whole life has been a pursuit of, I'll feel different when I have this, and now I don't, and I don't feel any different. Well, maybe you move the goal line a couple of times, but eventually that entire narrative collapses and you go, wait a minute, I'm still not happy. I guess I'll never be happy. I'll never be fulfilled. I'll never be at peace, whatever the fix is. I'll never feel secure. So many founders chase money for security.

So you're saying they're not feeling secure because they're worried they're going to lose it. They had this huge exit. Now they're just still running around, running, doing the same things they were always doing because they just don't want to lose it now.

Well, if I need $50 million to feel secure, and then you give me $50 million and I go, cool, I'm secure. And then tomorrow I buy a Snickers bar. Well, I don't get $50 million anymore, do I? Right. I got less. It might be going away. And I've never played the game called don't lose it so fast. Right? It's going to be replaced by another game of chasing something versus the things we truly desire— security, safety, peace, love, fulfillment, worth. They're inside jobs.

So using your analogies again, they've been sitting on the same side of the Grand Canyon forever, building, building, building. They don't know what the other side looks like. They've now got this pile of money and success. And you're like, well, wait a second. There's a whole other way of looking at life. You got to stop looking at the way you're looking at it. Or let me— you're not telling them that. You're showing them the way again. You're leading them in seeing a different viewpoint.

Yeah. Well, and money's fun to make. It's my favorite game to play is create a pile of money. The problem exists when you associate making money, having money, something outside of us with anything inside of us. The minute we have the idea that money will create safety, security, peace, happiness, love, worth, satisfaction, we've got a problem. We have a fundamental challenge because it's actually not how it works.

Keep going. Walk down that path a little bit more because—

Well, it doesn't work that way because it doesn't work that way. I mean, fundamentally it's sort of like, to me, it's a truth like gravity. Right. Money doesn't make somebody secure. Right. Right. Now, somebody without money says, well, let me find out. Right. And they have a deep sense of insecurity that drives them to create money. Right. Now, what happens when they have all the money? Are they secure? Has anything actually changed? What I'll tell you is from firsthand experience, no, it has not. More importantly, the thing which gives them security that they have, they no longer have to chase, but they now have to protect. Right.

So they're just, they still are just playing that game.

It's the same game, but the other side of the coin.

Yeah.

Yeah. Right. You actually don't, you don't get any relief. You don't get a prize. You get a new game, which is just as shitty as the old game.

That's very interesting. It's eye-opening for that. And I'm, and I'm in my mind relating to some people I know in my world that have gone into that phase now. And it's just, it's just funny as you're saying that, just me thinking of them and their dynamic and, you know, you're making a lot of sense on that. And it's, it's interesting.

Well, and it can be difficult to, or I'll say challenging to unwind, right? Because as I'm moving towards something that I believe is going to change my essential nature, it can feel like progress and I can tell myself on the, you know, I can sell myself on the story that something's changing or I'm getting there. But when you wake up on that day and nothing is different, and anybody who's watching this, who's had an exit or hit some goal that they said would change everything, knows this feeling. When you wake up on that day and nothing's different, it all comes crumbling down.

So now, Townsend, I'm sure you see this a lot. There's gotta be a mega blind spot. A lot of these people too, where they just They don't even know that it could be better because this is just the life they've been. So it goes back to, I go back to, they all probably need you in their lives. A lot of people, because there's so many blind spots they don't even realize they have. Because this ain't that bad. How unhappy can I be? I got the money and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Even though they're not happy and this, this, and this, and they're probably now, you know, other issues might be chasing them and other distractions, I assume, that are in their way that they have to navigate. Is it that bad? And I wonder, Maybe it goes down to this question. What are the questions you ask them to get them to sort of see that they really aren't as happy as they could be?

Perfect question to ask. And the answer is, that's not my job, right? One of the things I'm committed to is never talking somebody out of the life they had that worked for them.

Got it.

Right. Like I don't have a better life than anybody. I think I do, but not really. Yeah. And everybody's life works for them.

Right.

Who I am for are those who have an uncompromising view of what they want, right? I want a 10 out of 10 life. And by that, I mean happiness, fulfillment in my marriage with my kids, with God. I want 10 out of 10 everywhere. And I'm not interested in compromising.

Right.

Most people go through life and life is about, right back to consciousness, how life is, is you must compromise. You can't have it all. You can't have, you know, okay, cool. If somebody is there, let's just say I wish them well. And sometimes I'm jealous of them, right? Because that's not my life. I'm not one who's going to say, well, this is just how it is and I'll deal with it. I'll live with it. Yeah. So who I'm for are those that align with that. And, you know, for better or worse, that's not a lot of people. Most people are just fine to say, well, you know how it is. You've been married for 20 years. What do you expect? Yeah. It's like, yeah, that's not my reality. That's not the world I want to live in. But if somebody else does, wonderful. I'm here to live an extraordinary life and be an example that it's possible. Yeah. And a life without compromises that is amazing in all aspects is livable. So my sales strategy is simple. I live my life and seek to be the best example of what living an extraordinary life is. Sometimes people get curious and go, so is it really that good? Then we have a conversation. And if they're interested in exploring, that's the journey to go on. But for those that want to suffer and struggle and hustle, have at it. You know, nothing wrong with that. Like, I did it for a while until I couldn't do it anymore.

They run out of their own rope, as you say.

Yeah, exactly.

As we kind of wind down, so some of our listeners, you know, I know there's probably some people who aren't at that level yet. They're more in the 1 to 10 range that are still working their way up. What are some words of wisdom? What are some questions that we can all do some reflecting during this conversation? Questions we can ask ourselves to maybe get us to think a little bit more like, wait, there might be something there.

Absolutely. I love that question. So for me, everything works backwards from, I look at life and I have the idea I'm having thoughts about life, right? But for me, it's more like I'm in a movie theater and life is the screen that's being projected from someplace else. So it looks really convincing and it looks like the action's out there, but no matter what I do to the screen, throw shit at it, it's not going to change. There's something creating it. So I like to work backwards from what do you think you see? How is life occurring? And just looking at our thinking. You take a piece of paper, you start writing down thoughts about life. Well, life is hard. I can't have what I want. Nobody understands me. Cool. These are just thoughts. Now, if you make those thoughts wrong or believe this, you know, positive psychology bullshit, like you should have positive thoughts, you're going to, you're going to miss the point. What I say is you take those thoughts and you ask a counterintuitive question. How must I see myself in the world such that that is the perfect thought, right? Every thought is perfect from where I'm looking. So if life is really hard and everything just seems so hard and I always have to work hard, how do I create life? How does life occur to me? How do I occur to me such that I see that everywhere? That's the funny part. When you start looking at your thoughts, they're similar everywhere, right? Well, what I might come to in asking that question is, well, I'm probably somebody who thinks life has to be hard.

Right.

Now, again, if I make that the wrong idea, Well, I'm going to fight it or try to change it, or I'm going to get stuck in it. But if instead I say, what if I was somebody who life occurred as effortless and fun? What would I see? Right? If it's up to me, well, of course I'm going to have all these ideas of what I need to do. Right? So I'll be talking to a founder and they're telling me their plan and in hearing their plan or their thoughts, what I get a picture of is a person who's sitting there saying, it's all on me. I go over here to the other side of the canyon and say, I got a question for you. What if you didn't have to do a damn thing? What if the universe was going to hand you everything that you needed? What would you see? Now, first they go, well, that's not possible. I said, I didn't ask if it's possible. I'm saying like, just imagine for a second, for you were one of those people, and I know you're not, you're one of those people where everything just went your way. What would happen? Well, somebody would come along and offer us a bunch of money. Okay, cool. Anybody in your life that might, well, actually now that I think about it, I could call my buddy Bob. I mean, I can't tell you the number of conversations where we have a simple thing like there's no funding, there's no money. Well, yeah, because from where you're looking, it's impossible. As soon as you start looking from easy, somebody pops in your head you went to school with that you could call that has a bunch of money and will give it to you. And then you do that. So simple example of you got to work backwards. You got to start to reverse the polarity, if you will, of life, not reacting to it, but seeing that I'm creating that. So how am I doing that?

Right.

How am I perfectly, beautifully, powerfully creating hard everywhere versus hard is what's there that I'm reacting to it? And simply asking that question puts you in a different position.

I love it. Well done. Well said.

Can I share one more quick example?

Yeah, please.

Love it. One of my clients recently exited a PE about $60, $70 million, something like that. We started the process in 2025 with a commitment to not just we're going to sell at the valuation we did, but this is going to be the most fun that anybody's ever had selling a company for $70 million. Not we're going to try to get there, but we started with that. And then throughout the year, as decisions would come up and I'd get on the call with my client and he'd say, I'm trying to decide between these 3 courses of action. And I'd say, why are you trying to make a decision on any of these? Why are you doing any of these? And he would say something like, well, so we can sell for $70 million. I said, cool. That makes sense. Let's try this. Let's pretend we already have, like, we know for sure we sold for $70 million. That's not even in question. How did we do it? And he'd say, oh, that was number 2. I said, cool. That's probably the one you should do then.

Yeah.

So simply shifting from, so I can have what I want to, Because I already have gotten what I want. Right. From up here will produce different thinking and different ideas. And that's a quick drive-by and a pretty deep, complex idea.

So, wow. No, that was very helpful. Wow. Okay. This is very, this is very deep. I love the conversations we had. Is there anything at all that we didn't touch on that we should cover today?

Yes. A universe of things, but you know, you only have an hour, so what are you going to do?

Yeah. Well, thank you so much. And I look forward to our continued conversations. Can't wait to see you again.

All right, brother. Great to hang with you today.

You too. Take care. And that's a wrap from the Speakeasy Podcast. If something sparked for you, don't keep it to yourself. Share it, review it, and pass it to the one person who needs to hear this right now. Want in on the real mastermind? Tap the link in the show notes to apply. Until next time, keep scaling, stay sharp, and don't be the smartest one in the room. Hello. I've been noticing you've been following along to Inside the Speakeasy podcast, and if the conversations I'm having out there resonates with you, then I'd like to invite you to apply to learn more about becoming a member of Speakeasy.