How to Create Self Discipline - Brad Pedersen @ Pela
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Summary
In this episode, I sit down with Brad Pedersen, co-founder and CEO of Pila, a company that focuses on making quality toys that put smiles on kids' faces. Brad talks about how he built a company from the ground up in the prairies of Alberta, Canada, where he grew up in a family of carny carters and chiropractors, and how he went on to build a toy company from scratch in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Transcript
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He said in life, you're going to pay one of two prices, the price of discipline or the price of regret.
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To be fit, going to the gym, there's a price you're going to pay.
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It hurt your body, but the price of regret weighs tons and won't crush you.
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For those that don't know Brad, he is one of my best buds.
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He's my adventure co-partner, all things crazy,
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all things risk-taking, snow biking, snowboarding,
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I mean, and we're still discovering new sports.
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kiteboarding and i am lucky and privileged to be involved in pila your current company that you
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co-founded i sit on the board which is kind of bananas considering that you know jay-z was an
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investor and we've got larry on the board that kind of represents his capital um and dude you're
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just somebody that uh i turn to often for advice a handful of people and i've told you this in
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private uh so people need to pay attention to what brad's gonna share but brad you know you've
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got a pretty cool story if you took a few minutes kind of go back and kind of shared from your
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perspective that journey i know it was over kind of a 20 plus year period um what did that look like
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so without going into all the gory details because i think we went or you could
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well we may tease some of that stuff out but first of all thank you i'm i'm flattered by
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your affirmations. And yeah, I consider you one of my closest friends and really enjoy
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all the adventures we've had together and really looking forward to many more.
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As you know, one of my mottos in life is 3M, make more magic memories and increase them in
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frequency and intensity. And I would say that in the last 30 days, we've had many.
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Many mountaintop experiences. And I think your logo is actually a good epitomization of that,
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right? Like striving for the top of the mountain. So yeah, just a quick background. I mean, I grew
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up in a great home, uh, with great core values, uh, really salty earth people in the prairies
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of Alberta. Um, and I was sort of predestined that I was going to go down this path of being
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a chiropractor. Um, this was what I was supposed to do. Cause my father's a chiropractor, his
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father and mother were chiropractors. And my great grandfather was actually the first
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chiropractor in Denmark. So ever since I was just a toddler, people would tell me, Oh,
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you're going to grow up and be a chiropractor like your dad and your grandpa one day.
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And I just assumed that's what I was going to do.
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But as luck would have it, I decided to sort of pursue some of my passions.
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And that led me on a path of just saying yes to a bunch of things that for a period of time turned me into a carny.
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And chasing entrepreneurial pursuits that ultimately led me to the toy business.
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And, you know, starting a toy company coming from the prairies is like starting a fishery if you lived in Saskatchewan.
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It doesn't make a lot of sense because there's really not the right resources or things in place there.
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But that journey took me to Toronto, where I spent close to 20 years.
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And I'm a toymaker from the north and built things that put smiles on kids' faces.
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And we've shipped billions of pieces of plastic around the planet.
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It sounds like it was really awesome and aspirational.
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I would say it was, but that journey also had a lot of challenges in the way, including going
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bankrupt twice, including, you know, some really near death experiences, some incredible tragedy
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in terms of members of my team. But all of that for a purpose of putting me where I am today,
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which is really feeling empowered to be a founder of a startup that is making a difference.
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And we can, we can talk more about that as this interview goes on.
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Yeah, I mean, when you say the real life Santa Claus,
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but the Air Canada Lounge, random chance encounter,
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when we opened it, we had to hide 90% of the toys
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because it was more than we would give to our kids
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you know, I'll be honest, man, I would have gave up.
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Phil Knight's book and just the amount of crazy situation
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in your story. Talk about those moments where, you know, the two bankruptcies, what caused you
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to keep going versus just giving up and starting from scratch? Because you didn't. You didn't leave
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your investors high and dry, and you ended up building a nine-figure company. And, you know,
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I mean, it's just a crazy story. What belief did you have during that moment that kept you
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pushing forward? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I would tell you that, first of all,
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let's just wind back in terms of how I got there. You know, when I started the company and I started
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my business, we were on an incredible tear. And it started off with, when I said it was a car,
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and we literally had kiosks and malls. And that just snowballed from kiosks and malls. Well,
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actually it was at fairs to kiosks and malls to eventually a distribution company. And that
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distribution company ended up becoming the largest distribution company in Canada. We just
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continued to grow. And there was this period of time where really we had the Midas touch,
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like everything we touched turned to gold. We just kept growing the business and felt like we could
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not, you know, not do any wrong. We were really unstoppable. And, you know, what added to that,
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of course, was the accolades from the marketplace. We were winning awards. We were on the profit 100
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list, which at that time, you know, was what it was called. I think it's now called the Growth 500.
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And the thing I came to understand is a little bit of ego
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that you can actually grow too fast, too quickly.
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And if you don't have the right capital structure,
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Like, and it's on me that it was a surprise, right?
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I should have been inspecting what I was expecting
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I showed up from a vacation shortly after Christmas
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You don't want to be in the special loans department.
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Just everybody, hopefully you never have to experience this,
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but there is a special department inside the banks
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Like, you know, it's outside of our comfort zone.
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I think every entrepreneur who starts a company,
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the one thing that they fear more than anything else
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you have to make mistakes and fail your way forward. But you're a failure when it comes to
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an end, like you can't get up anymore. And literally, you know, I was sitting at the
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precipice with this company after growing it, after, you know, bringing in seven figures of
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friends and family money, accolades, awards, and everything. And my entire identity was wrapped up
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in that company. And suddenly it was about to be lost. And I remember at the time I felt very lost.
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I felt like there was no future. And how was I going to overcome this, this, this challenge?
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and you know looking back now i recognize that if money can solve your problem it really isn't a
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problem i mean it was a problem to me at the time but i still had my family had my health and quite
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frankly those two things are what allowed me to get through the next period of years that were
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very very uh tumultuous and um you know my wife who if you've met her which dan has i married way
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up she's an incredible woman who stood by my side through thick and thin i'm pretty sure that
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when she said for better worse she could have said but not for this crap and uh because she
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went through a lot i mean when the lawyers show up at your door and serve you and let you know
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that they're going to be taking possession of the house that's a really bad day um and you're not
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even home that's right you're on the road doing your thing that's right yeah and she calls you
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and and and there was this other incident i remember she was just telling us uh the other
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day about when she was driving a car and you forgot to get the insurance and she gets pulled
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over and she has, I mean, there's been some moments. Yeah. Well, that's, that's, you know,
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there have been some moments for sure. But that's what makes the adventure amazing is that you go
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through those moments, but yeah, to unpack that story a little bit, my wife, I was on a business
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trip in California. We were bootstrapping the company. I was in my mid twenties and we decided
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have kids at a fairly young age. I was 23 when I had my son and 25 when I had my daughter. So
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by most people's standards, that's pretty young. So I don't recommend the life plan of bootstrapping
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a company and having young kids at the same time. It is extremely challenging. And I couldn't afford
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insurance because on top of that, when you're a young person, the insurance on vehicles is pretty
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expensive. And so I was supposed to look after the insurance bill and I didn't have the money to do
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it. I went away on this trip and while I was away, she got pulled over and this was in Calgary in
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the wintertime and she's got an infant in her car. And the police officer gets the vehicle towed
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and literally leaves her on the side of the road with my son. Calgary winter. Calgary winter.
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You can only imagine my thoughts in terms of what I would have done if that police officer had come
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within my sight. But needless to say, again, that was on me. I should have taken the necessary steps
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to be able to look after my family and the resources. And quite frankly, the fact that my
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wife stood by me through that, plus all the other adversities that would come, is really just an
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incredible testament to who she is as a human. She's an incredible person. You know, Brad,
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one thing you said a second ago was that you need to inspect what you expect. And that's like
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something I love about you. You know, you've always got these kind of one-liners. And I know
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it's been this like, you know, years of investing yourself
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in ferociously learning, when did that all start?
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Like that journey of let's call it personal development
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He's just very stately, he's tall, he's very wise.
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When he speaks, he speaks with compassion, but authority.
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I had somebody, one of my cousins recently say,
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And I thought, wow, that is a perfect description of him
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because he really was all three of those things.
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And at an early age, I watched him read a lot of books,
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because of course that was how we got content information.
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that I decided to kind of start one of my entrepreneurial paths.
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it was immediately a series of tapes, books, seminars, and embeddement.
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And I can still remember one of the very first books I read
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But at the time, I thought this guy was such a stud,
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you know, in terms of what he did to take an idea that-
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mcdonald's is is he's the he's not the original founder of the restaurant but he's the guy who
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learned how to scale it right and there's a difference between being a founder and a scaler
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right those are two different capacities so um but he talked about um you know the he said in
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life you're going to pay one of two prices the price of discipline or the price of regret the
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price of discipline weighs ounces right to be fit going to the gym there's a price you're going to
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pay hurt your body but the price of regret weighs tons and will crush you and when i read that
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it seared my conscience. And I literally, with a marker, wrote that out and put it into a frame
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next to my bed stand. And every morning I woke up, I read that. And it was literally my motivator
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to get out of bed early, to do the things I didn't want to do, because I understood that they were
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going to be the necessary steps, the compound effect of doing these small things over time
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eventually add up into a meaningful outcome. And, you know, my father was the inspiration behind
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that. He's the one that started that journey for me. He's the one that pursued network marketing
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and in betterment that got me involved in that.
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That mindset of, you know, feeding yourself the right things.
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Because I just thought it was just such a clear example of, you know,
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I actually got this from my mentor, Darren Hardy, who I highly recommend as well.
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I think he's just very clear in terms of how you understand human performance.
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But, you know, I held up a glass and I have a glass here.
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so he said you know your mind is like this glass and it is non-judgmental it'll hold whatever you
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put into it so if you put arsenic in there it'll hold arsenic if you put clean water in there it'll
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hold clean water and we're no different and uh he then takes the glass and he pours dirty water
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into the glass and he says every day that you expose yourself to media feeds to the news to
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Gossip, you're just filling up every single day
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I mean, the media knows that in order to get you to watch,
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It's like fear, flight, that's what we're thinking about.
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which is what we're getting every single day just by living,
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only way to clean it out is by continuing to pour clean water in. And literally, if you do this
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experiment at home, put dirty water in your glass, then take a vase of clean water and start pouring
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into your glass, you'll see that eventually the glass just starts to flush itself. And so this is
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just a great analogy in terms of what we should be thinking about every single day, that starting
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our days with gratitude, that mindset of what do I have them grateful for? I'm grateful I have both
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my arms, my legs, that I live in the best country on the planet, that I have freedom, I have security,
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I have food. There's just so much that we just take for granted. And if you travel around the
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world, you realize that it's not something that everybody has as a luxury. And then from there,
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what do I need to read? What do I need to consume that's going to help inspire me to become the best
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version of myself? How do I continue to expand my possibilities? You know, one of my favorite people
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is Jim Rohn. And he has this saying that I just love. He says, you know, you may not be able to
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do all you find out, but make sure you find out all you can do. And that literally sticks with
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me because I know that when I'm laying on my deathbed, I want to be able to recite that I
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fought the good fight. I finished the race and I kept the faith and I made the most of every moment
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and that there was nothing. I left it all behind on the field of life. Played full out. Played full
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out. You know what I love about that analogy, Brad, is that, um, you know, it takes a second
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to pollute the water, but if you're pouring water
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you gotta be careful, cause it could be like reading,
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going down this rabbit hole of reading the news
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You mentioned, Darren, you mentioned the compound effect.
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Who are some other people that have had an impact
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And I get asked this a lot, who are your mentors?
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And I would say most of my mentors I've never met.
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Most of those people are people I've read their,
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by reading their books or listening to their podcast
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or, you know, being immersed in their worldviews and ideologies. And I think it's also
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prescriptive. I think that it's awareness of what it is you're looking for at this season in your
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life. Like, what is it you need? You know, no different than if you felt you needed, you were
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lacking, you know, vitamin D, you'd go get some sunshine. Or if you felt like maybe you're getting
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sick, you'd have vitamin C. There's awareness to what are the things I need to do to supplement
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myself but certainly you know some of my favorite thought leaders have been people like um dale
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carnegie historically he's been a guy that i think you know he got it right a long time ago and to
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this day i still read and reread uh how to win friends and influence people because i think
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that's just it's the mainstay of how do we interact with people um you know all the heroes
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of antiquity from the bible i mean you know obviously jesus without uh giving him credit
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for ultimately who I feel I've got my faith and my future in,
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but just the life he modeled beyond any of the religious stuff.
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And, you know, I would say in terms of business,
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I've really appreciated Patrick Lencioni, John Maxwell,
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Man, he's probably one of my favorites of all time.
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just going through the top five or six that I really have leaned into. And, you know, I've
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been fortunate as well that I've had some real life mentors, that I've had people in my life
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who've stepped in at certain times to help me with my financial literacy or my business acumen,
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you know, stepping in a role of a chairman. Well, that was a new, you know, skin to try on. I hadn't
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tried that on before. So who do I need to talk to that could help me with my chairmanship? So
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Tom Kennedy, who's somebody you and I both know has been somebody who's been really
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the energy that you exude, the way that you just love
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You've got, I mean, and this is back to the saying
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that you live by that we repeat to ourselves frequently
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uh around you know creating more magical memories and increasing with intensity and frequency where
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did that come from because that seems to be our first principles approach to our days which is
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going to get me in trouble with my wife if we keep it up because it's it's a lot of fun but um i mean
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everything from the way you create events to host people at your house to um you know huck it off
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cliffs in the back country like you know jumping off the wharf after we went downhill mountain
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biking it was like we could not go because it's going to take an hour or we could do it because
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it's going to create this magical moment where did that when did that start you know i i that's
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a great question um ever since i was a little kid i always wanted to just see how high it could go
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i think it started climbing trees and you know the funny part about that is until when we lived
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in ontario and toronto before i moved here uh there was a big tree in front of my house and
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every year i was the only tree that was lit up right to the very top and that's because i climbed
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it to hang up all the lights right to the very top and our members used to always say wow your
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tree looks amazing and i just think it's a metaphor that i just wanted to see how high i could go in
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everything and anything I do in life, whether it's business, whether it's adventure, whether
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it's relationship with your wife. You know, I think you said you're getting in trouble with
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your wife. Well, actually making more magic memories is a principle to all of life, not just
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into the outdoor adventures, which we share a lot. It's about how do we do it in every area in our
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life. And I don't remember who said it, but this really has continued to be a great metaphor that
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I think about often and it's the idea that in life we're juggling rubber balls and crystal balls
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right and we're constantly like it's hard to have awareness of what is balance but it's easier to
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be aware of when you're in balance right it's like when you're driving down the road you constantly
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making small corrections to keep yourself going straight and it's just awareness you got to
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constantly be doing that no different you have to have awareness in your life of when you're out of
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balance and when you need to apply more effort in certain areas and there are certain balls that
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we're juggling, but some of them are crystal and some of them are rubber, meaning that you drop
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the crystal ones, they shatter. You drop the rubber ones, they bounce. So what are the crystal balls?
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Your family, your faith, your fitness, and your finances. Those four, they're crystal. You can't
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afford to drop those ones. You've got to constantly keep moving those around. What are the rubber ones?
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Fun, friends, freedom, which is pursuing outdoors and those kinds of pursuits, and then what I call
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finishing, which is putting the final touches on you, continuing to be the best and brightest
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version of yourself. Those are the ones you could drop once in a while. They'll bounce. You can pick
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them up later, right? You can't, you don't necessarily have to have, you could have a
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period of time where you had not a lot of fun because you were focused on really getting an
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important project off the ground. But it's all coming down to that we're juggling and constantly
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aware of when we need to have balance. But in all those areas in our life, I subscribe to,
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I wanna make them the most magical, the most memorable.
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to the end of my life where I said, I left it all behind.
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drive every opportunity that it had to offer me.
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You know, obviously, as I think people are picking up,
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you've got a lot of these principles and sayings
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of having children younger so you can, you know,
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and then kind of have them just like you were exposed to it,
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what do you feel were some of the guiding principles
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from a parenting point of view as an entrepreneur?
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Well, first of all, we've made lots of mistakes.
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And so I think every parent should just acknowledge
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that there was no manual that came with your kids
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and clip the cocoon before it actually came out-
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because the fluid wouldn't have actually gone to the wings. And I just think that's such a
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brilliant metaphor for our kids and what they need to face in terms of adversity. So, you know,
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Eric Gretens, one of my favorite authors, wrote a book called Resilience. And in that book,
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there's this incredible quote that he talks about, you know, as human beings, there's a few things
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we need to live a life of optimists. We know we need food, we need sleep, we need water, we need
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love, we need sex, we need relationship. All these things are a part of our human fulfillment,
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plan. He said, beyond that, I'd add struggle. In order to be fully human, we need to go through
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struggles. Just like that butterfly. We need it. We need it. It's a part of who we become.
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You know, gold is refined in fire. You know, a diamond is a lump of coal under a lot of heat
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and pressure. So that doesn't mean you should be go seeking it for your kids, but certainly it's
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about letting them learn and grow. Allow it to happen. 100%. Don't protect them. And so Kelly
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and i have really i would say we are uh we certainly are a backstop from them ever hitting
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you know ground bottom you know the rock bottom rock bottom thank you but at the same time we want
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to let them learn through the adversities that they're facing just like we did like it's what
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it made us who we are 100 so if we want to help them we really need to let them go through that
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And then I think Maya Angelou said it the best.
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but they'll never forget the way you make them feel.
00:27:27.820
And I showed you recently, my daughter, super proud.
00:27:34.540
Well, you know, my kids, they grew up around a dad
00:27:40.140
And so my vehicles were always like a rolling university.
00:27:45.780
The thing that we were listening to all the time
00:27:51.400
CDs when they came out, and now it'd be podcasts.
00:27:55.880
And, you know, it was just a part of who I was.
00:28:00.580
I need to get my kids to listen to some of this stuff.
00:28:02.380
And once in a while, like I'm sure you've done,
00:28:06.660
or I got to get this person to hear this. And what I've learned is that, you know, it is not
00:28:11.760
about actually, you know, you lead the horse to water, but the horse has to be willing to drink.
00:28:17.520
It has to be thirsty. And, you know, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. So
00:28:21.980
my daughter for years heard this. It was kind of like, ah, this is dad's stuff. You know,
00:28:26.300
it doesn't apply to me. It's business. It's whatever. And a year ago, she decided to become
00:28:31.780
an entrepreneur suddenly she had a need you know here was this this moment knife and i'm super
00:28:37.380
proud both my kids they both have got these career paths that they're taking and both of them have
00:28:41.760
actually reached out to me since saying hey i want to learn i want to become the person i need to
00:28:46.040
become to be worthy of a life that you've created and um so you know the amazing thing is is that
00:28:53.080
you know subconsciously she knew what what to do already because i had been living it both kelly
00:28:57.800
and i'd been living in front of her so she instantly started reading books like she bought
00:29:01.220
think and grow rich and how to win friends influence people and we did the seven habits
00:29:04.780
together and i've been through the compound effect and right now we're in a course with
00:29:09.240
darren hardy called the hero's journey and darren had actually asked me the question he said hey
00:29:14.080
would you mind coming on and me asking you some questions about your parenting style and and and
00:29:19.280
as it turns out i said you know that that would be good but even better why don't you ask my daughter
00:29:23.800
and dude i mean i was so proud of her like her getting on in front of like 5 000 6 000 people
00:29:29.600
online and talking about this journey she's gone through, where she's now come to a point in her
00:29:36.200
life where she feels, I need this in my life to be better. And quite frankly, it was her idea that
00:29:41.840
we do the hero's journey. And since then, my wife has joined and my son's joined. So we're doing as
00:29:45.740
a family. And today actually we had a session and afterwards, you know, the texting back and
00:29:49.460
forth with the family, it was awesome. So the engagement is high. Super proud. Dude, how cool
00:29:53.900
is that going, you know, full circle from, you know, doing everything you can when you're starting
00:29:58.140
off feeling like sometimes you're not as there as often trying to set the example and then full
00:30:05.080
you know in in the early 20s for them to come back and ask you i know they both ask you to mentor
00:30:09.520
them you know and have them participate in this hero's journey and be able to share that that
00:30:14.500
would be a dream and um i think for a lot of people listening it's something to aspire to
00:30:19.140
um you know one thing i want to get back on the business stuff brad because you know you are one
00:30:27.760
like C-level strategic issues that I give you a call
00:30:36.820
I mean, and I know it's from real, real experience.
00:30:40.780
There's a lot of people on the internet giving around advice
00:30:49.180
your new company that you're the co-founder of,
00:30:51.460
you know, being, I think it was top 10 fastest growing
00:30:53.960
companies in Canada, an incredible growth ride.
00:30:59.660
and part of that to a very small degree on the board.
00:31:03.320
What have you learned about the people side of the business?
00:31:06.280
Like, you know, people want to talk marketing tactics,
00:31:08.580
growth hacks, et cetera, but let's talk people.
00:31:23.400
from my wounds um you know first of all the business of business is people right we are in
00:31:29.820
the people business whatever you're doing i've heard people say i'm in the sas business i'm in
00:31:34.140
you know the consumer products business i'm in the food business no you're in the people business
00:31:37.520
we all are in the people business and let's get clear on that because without people there is no
00:31:41.580
business and then behind that it's how do you get the right people to help fulfill your vision and
00:31:48.680
mission for a company how do you then unleash their potential and empower them to to live up
00:31:54.380
to their potential and quite frankly the potential that the company needs you know there's there's
00:31:58.820
three things that are constantly breaking when you're building a business and we've identified
00:32:03.380
them as their capital your processes and your people they continually need to be reinvented
00:32:08.580
you know growing a business actually is stressing a business like when you grow it we all want to
00:32:12.920
grow but you create stress right and so the the i the repercussions of choosing to grow a company
00:32:22.360
especially a fast growth company like we've built is that we are constantly reinventing those those
00:32:27.500
areas and so and again capital people and process correct yep those are the three and they're the
00:32:33.960
vital three and you got to be continually like you know we just finished a fundraise as you know not
00:32:38.540
that long ago and i'm in the middle of fundraising and we don't need it yet why because i know we're
00:32:43.380
going to need it at some point in the future it's a part of just any growth company you're burning
00:32:48.040
capital we are in the process of hiring continually why because we know even though for today if i
00:32:54.320
look at today i have the right staff i may even have too many staff i know that in six months
00:32:58.520
we're not going to have the right people in place to fulfill the vision at the time and our processes
00:33:02.740
are a continual working process because we're constantly breaking them there's there's constantly
00:33:06.540
going to be breakage across an organization because what worked from getting you from zero
00:33:10.180
to one won't be the same thing that gets you from one to 10. So you've got to continually upgrade
00:33:14.480
and improve them. I mean, you're the king of processes. You've got a lot of SOPs for everything.
00:33:19.360
So, but on the people side, you know, the first and most important thing is, you know, the CEO
00:33:24.880
of this company and Matt, my, my co-founder, he's a brilliant CEO. He sets the cadence, you know,
00:33:30.300
he's the person who really sets the, the vision, the mission, and then the values of the company
00:33:35.960
in terms of what it is that we want to accomplish long-term,
00:33:42.500
in terms of the way that we show up and interact.
00:33:45.120
And then his job, better than anyone, including myself,
00:33:56.860
And then we're collectively involved in going out
00:33:59.880
and finding the people who uphold those values.
00:34:05.560
they're the most important part they're the constitution it's like the rules of engagement
00:34:09.380
for how we do life together uh as people and um you know if you get the right people and you get
00:34:15.560
the right talent density anything's possible you know i would put a uh an average idea with the
00:34:22.720
right people over the best idea in an average team all day long and the one thing that uh i'm
00:34:28.980
extremely um i guess vigilant about is just our process in terms of do we have the right people
00:34:38.320
that will help us fulfill the vision mission for the company.
00:34:50.960
Unpack that because it's burned me a couple of times.
00:34:55.560
I think every entrepreneur has had this happen.
00:35:02.960
Well, it's definitely not the first, but it won't be the last.
00:35:04.900
You know, entrepreneurs are optimists by heart, right?
00:35:10.020
including in people who don't see it for themselves.
00:35:13.520
And the problem is you can't give what you don't have.
00:35:19.580
even though you see those seeds of greatness inside them,
00:35:26.420
the odds of them actually rising to that potential
00:35:34.480
between you know going from um like i've had examples in my company where i hired somebody who
00:35:40.980
showed the potential but didn't necessarily show their full potential and then we've been able to
00:35:46.920
pull full out right but i've never had the options where someone had potential but didn't you know
00:35:51.980
you saw it but they weren't exhibiting in any way ever get to that so you know we are constantly
00:35:57.760
looking for people who have to show some a semblance of potential in their life so that we
00:36:02.780
can see we can then cultivate the full potential out of what's possible through empowerment through
00:36:08.240
personal development through getting them surrounded by like-minded people right and
00:36:12.600
that's the one thing i would say i'm the most proud of i think the talent density in this
00:36:15.280
building is incredible like we have done an extraordinary job of people putting people
00:36:20.480
through a gauntlet that we're very proud of that flushes out as many decoys as we can
00:36:24.980
right because the only thing worse than having the right people in is having the wrong people
00:36:29.580
in your company that potentially could be sabotaging the culture hurtful and and what do
00:36:34.680
you think's different about your leadership style that first-time entrepreneurs or people that still
00:36:38.900
haven't scaled past that 10 million level what what do you do different in your interactions
00:36:43.620
or your communication style um you know we talked a little bit about this about the ceiling of
00:36:50.060
complexity right that um and it was dan sullivan who i first heard this from and i i think it makes
00:36:57.140
a lot of sense he said you know i've got and as i know you do a lot of grit i can go longer and
00:37:03.640
harder than most in fact i used to pride myself that that was a big part of how i built my first
00:37:07.720
companies is that i just would just put it all out there and leave nothing behind right um and
00:37:13.500
dan sullivan recognizes that a bunch of entrepreneurs have that and he says and what
00:37:16.820
happens is they set a two times goal and because they know that within their own efforts they can
00:37:21.920
do two times it means they have to work 80 hours a week that means they have you know don't take
00:37:25.380
vacations, they can get it done. He said, what you need to do is set a 10 times goal. Cause he
00:37:30.140
knows that you will realize if you set a 10 times goal, there is no way within your own capacity
00:37:34.540
that you can actually do that. You will have to learn to leverage others. And I would say for me,
00:37:40.220
one of the hardest things for me to learn over the years, and it's something I'm still learning
00:37:43.540
is how to let go, how to let go and to delegate, not abdicate, but delegate properly, give people
00:37:50.600
clear instructions in terms of the outcomes that they need and then trust them to be able to
00:37:55.700
deliver on those outcomes and you know my journey particularly even more so like I would say in
00:38:02.560
2012 is when I had this first aha in terms of like I need to get better people because I was
00:38:08.340
sitting around my my boardroom table and I was the smartest person in the room and that's not good
00:38:13.840
and i can honestly say that when i left the toy business in 2017 as i sat around that
00:38:20.900
that boardroom table i was not the smartest person in that room in marketing sales product
00:38:27.840
development manufacturing any of those but i was the smartest person in the room for recognizing
00:38:33.480
to hire better people in me in those areas and empower them to do it and as we've moved on to
00:39:01.160
Like what is your process for that kind of communication?
00:39:06.140
Because at the side, you guys have grown like crazy and continue.
00:39:09.320
And I'm just fascinated by how you've built your executive leadership team and the rhythms.
00:39:13.660
How do you coach your leadership team to build leaders in the company?
00:39:18.920
So I think just about every entrepreneur is usually their own worst enemy because they
00:39:25.100
It's good when they have a lineup at their door and people that are coming to them to
00:39:29.260
I'll tell you, as you scale and as you get older, it starts to wear.
00:39:32.100
so a simple principle that we've applied and is incredibly uh productive in terms of problem
00:39:39.020
solving is called one three one and basically the idea is you cannot come to a leader not nobody in
00:39:45.400
the company right down to the very you know base level of the company line workers you can't go to
00:39:50.320
your direct report with a problem unless you present it with one problem three possible
00:39:56.160
solutions and your one recommendation after you spend some time thinking about it and it has been
00:40:01.460
the forcing function of getting everyone to feel empowered to think to problem solve because
00:40:06.760
everybody in the company has capacity to grow sales reduce costs and mitigate risk in some
00:40:11.400
level right so we want them and that's typically what problem solving is triaging those three
00:40:16.840
things and so we've given everybody that ability to do it and um i think after you implement that
00:40:23.600
i think you're going to find that within a very short period of time you're going to flesh out
00:40:41.060
that they're not the right people for your organization.
00:40:42.840
Because they're not adding management bandwidth.
00:40:55.880
becomes exponential to getting to your outcomes.
00:40:58.400
You move, you can bend time with that principle.
00:41:04.000
You've mentioned this a few times, you know, doing life,
00:41:07.280
you know, and we talk about this where you're like,
00:41:20.560
Obviously that is something that I almost feel like
00:41:36.780
You know, sometimes we need interrupts in our life
00:41:49.660
Actually, you know, being a super elite Air Canada member
00:41:55.640
Um, and, uh, you know, in 2017, when I was, uh, abruptly, uh, uh, removed, released to the
00:42:05.680
market, that's what I said. That's right. Released to the marketplace. It was the forcing function
00:42:10.280
of allowing me to get clear on, you know, sometimes in life, it's hard to know what you want,
00:42:15.260
but then get clear on what you don't want. And it's easier to figure out the things you want.
00:42:18.940
And so going away from that experience, I sat back and says, what were the things that I was
00:42:22.900
doing that i don't want anymore in my life and i landed on three three principles to this day i
00:42:27.760
live by the first was life plan before business plan in my entire life i may have paid lip service
00:42:32.860
to it i might have said oh yeah my family's my priority and you know my faith's my priority and
00:42:36.500
all this but truly look at your calendar that tells the truth like where you're investing your
00:42:41.280
time that's where you really are um as a person the second was uh only awesome people aka life's
1.00
00:42:53.460
because I think you're personally, I think it's,
00:42:59.300
Like, I mean, you had, you merged with another company.
00:43:02.500
I don't know if you're comfortable disclosing some of that,
00:43:04.580
but you know, that was just one of those wrong read
00:43:17.820
So bankrupted the company in 2006, fought to try and fix it.
00:43:24.800
Bankrupted it again, finally took a sabbatical.
00:43:33.300
And similar to this situation, went away and got clear on what were the things I didn't
00:43:38.580
want anymore so I could create a new business model.
00:43:40.960
Started a new company in 2009 called Tech for Kids.
00:43:44.700
uh it it went through you know the birthing process like any startup right lots of challenges
00:43:51.000
and difficulty but we were really fortunate we were really lucky right ideas at the right time
00:43:55.040
and that business scaled very quickly um in a different capacity instead of being a distribution
00:43:59.780
company we're now a manufacturing company instead of being focused on canada we're global we
00:44:04.400
eliminated the warehouse from our model and did fob only so we had really a much more lean efficient
00:44:09.760
model and it was working really, really well. I had brought along the investors from the original
00:44:16.200
company into this new company because I was, you know, personally. You wanted to do right by them.
00:44:20.460
Do right by them. And I was personally guaranteed as well. Yeah, there's that.
00:44:24.100
So there's a few things that motivated me. You know, I talk about that. I didn't want to make
00:44:29.920
money. I just want to get back to zero. It was like, you know, we were going through the valley
00:44:33.360
of the shadow of death. But in any event, you know, when you bring investors into your company,
00:44:44.260
And we had done a couple of dances with different people
00:44:50.940
but nothing really formalized that was meaningful.
00:44:54.560
We got actually into due diligence with one company,
00:44:57.440
but it was just not gonna be a good culture fit.
00:45:08.000
you're going to make in life is who do you marry and who do you get in business with
00:45:11.380
because that requires a level of trust that is unique, right? I mean, you know, this is what
00:45:18.260
I love about Lencioni's five dysfunctions of a team is that he talks about if you have trust
00:45:22.800
at a high level, then you're willing to get into conflict. You're willing to not conflict for the
00:45:27.820
sake of conflict, but you're working for the best. You're willing to have hard conversations.
00:45:44.620
their company, which was doing about 60 million.
00:46:03.440
And we were supposed to be co-leaders and yada, yada, yada.
00:46:08.440
It turns out that we had very different worldviews
00:46:16.740
I knew early on that the cultural fit wasn't perfect,
00:46:24.840
Right, emotionally, mentally, and quite frankly,
00:46:27.720
I owed my wife some liquidity, quite frankly,
0.99
00:46:30.560
based on all the crap she had been through.
0.97
00:46:32.720
So I was just kind of turning a blind eye to it.
00:46:35.460
So when we merged the companies in the summer of 2017,
00:46:38.820
within 90 days, I was released to the marketplace.
00:47:00.760
Well, it's a little more complicated than that.
00:47:07.800
because we had been doing dances with private equity.
00:47:10.420
And without getting into all the boring details,
00:47:21.840
and best thing that ever happened to me quite frankly.
00:47:30.360
particularly the people you're gonna be doing a lot of life with.
00:47:35.880
And then the third principle that came out of that,
00:47:37.500
so the first one was life plan before business plan.
0.99
00:47:39.340
The second was, you know, life's too short to work with assholes,
0.99
00:47:46.720
So none of what I hate, less of what I tolerate,
00:47:58.380
and i do my own sort of practice around that but i hear this constant emptying the mind and i don't
00:48:04.060
know about you but trying to empty my mind is like like wrestling a tiger i mean it's just
00:48:08.000
it's frenetic but where i truly have harmony my mind is when i'm in the flow state like when i'm
00:48:14.260
working on stuff that's really blowing my hair back not that i have much back anymore but
00:48:18.320
things that are really important to me i don't have to worry about my mind it's really there
00:48:40.300
And that is the life plan before business plan,
00:48:58.480
which I was like, oh man, he's gonna answer this
00:49:18.860
Who did you need to become to get to this level?
00:49:32.160
because I think it's a part of our human condition
00:49:47.020
and you know as the story goes he's cast out and um you know jim collins when he does his
00:49:54.860
assessment of how the mighty fall he talks about the five stages of decline and the first is hubris
00:49:59.600
pride um i was very proud uh as a kid i was proud of the fact that i could be the fastest kid
00:50:07.500
the toughest kid um and then it just kind of snowballed into my business endeavors and i was
00:50:14.400
just rolling through all of that and thinking that i could basically just roll my way through
00:50:19.380
situations and i'm really grateful for the dose of humility that i was given and i'm constantly
00:50:28.280
reminded that i am human and that i have my shortcomings and that i need to be constantly
00:50:36.020
again grounded in gratitude reminder that you know i'm a speck on a speck floating in a galaxy
00:50:42.260
that's a speck in the universe like take that all in perspective and realize it's not that
00:50:47.600
meaningful but the flip side of that is according to everything we know you're the only version of
00:50:52.720
you in that entire universe so while you're infinitely small you're also infinitely incredibly
00:50:58.040
important because you're the only version of you that's ever been found anywhere in the universe
00:51:01.480
so that zooming in and out and getting grounded about who i am is a part of my becoming because
00:51:09.980
i have not arrived it's a ongoing process and i think in general most people have it wrong
00:51:15.960
you know we look at the media and the media tells us where we're where our shortcomings are right
0.98
00:51:21.520
like you look at an advertisement it basically is a talking to you suck your worth and you got
0.89
00:51:27.680
to have this car you got to do this or do that in order to have happiness right so most of society
0.61
00:51:34.240
it's that you have to have this thing to be happy or you've got to do this thing to be happy in the
00:51:41.700
end it turns out it's be do have who do you need to become that'll then get you to do the things
00:51:48.300
that will give you the outcomes that quite frankly are a byproduct right like having as you know
00:51:56.060
we've had a lot of fun a lot of adventures and those things are not that meaningful to me unless
00:52:00.440
I'm with other people sharing them because on their own, they're not meaningful. But the media
00:52:04.620
tells us, oh, you got to have it to be happy. You got to have that big house, that car, that,
00:52:08.040
that, that, that's, those should just be trappings that help enrich the relationship in your life.
00:52:13.400
Cause that's what really counts. That's amazing, Brad. Um, I know you've got a book project that
00:52:19.140
you're working on and I know everybody's going to want to follow you, but you don't really do
00:52:23.320
social media. But if somebody were to ask, where do I connect with Brad, what would be the best
00:52:27.480
answer yeah i i and again this is no criticism to people who do social media but i just found for
00:52:35.540
myself with the add uh mind um and just limited capacity that i needed to just shut off certain
00:52:42.100
things in social media you know which i was on so if you go on you'll find my names out there
00:52:46.440
if you're if you send me a message i just don't respond because i don't check it um you know the
00:52:51.040
the one exception would be linkedin that's the one area i go so if you do have a message that
00:52:55.680
you want to send, send it to me by LinkedIn. Otherwise, I'm brad at pila.earth. Send me an
00:53:00.900
email. I mean, your audience are cool people. Amazing people. Email Brad. If you have any
00:53:05.180
questions, you want to just say thank you, please email Brad. Brad, I'm crazy grateful for our
00:53:10.000
friendship and looking to do life even bigger. So I appreciate the time, man. Amen. Looking forward