Bill Douglas: The Link Between Health, Happiness, and Revenue

Apparently I was going 54 miles an hour when I hit the snowmaker and I stopped. So my chest caved in, it broke 13 bones, collapsed along and I was paralyzed. And they took me in a helicopter. Hey, this guy Phil came to me and he was 310 pounds and he and his wife had been on a vacation in nearly seven years together. They were empty nesters. Two years later Phil had lost 100 pounds. No medicines, nothing but exercise at food. His business went from 110 million to 130 million. In the same time he lost his weight. He ended up selling it. That was just a revenue. He ended up selling it from multiple of that. Hello everyone, I'm super thankful for the opportunity to have Bill Douglas at a Denver Colorado bill. Bill, an entrepreneur in his whole life, he's helped start and sell and scale businesses. He's had some challenges in his life that we'll talk about today and he's overcome that with resilience. He's known as the resilience guy. He founded that company. He now helps executives and entrepreneurs get a hold of their health and he's also in the real estate space. He works for and is the CEO of OpticWise and he also is a podcast host and an author for a company called Peak Performance Properties. Sorry, Peak Property Performance. Without further ado, Bill, thank you so much for being on the podcast today, man. How you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Brian. It's always a pleasure to talk about real people being us, not pitching and talking about acronym, heavy industry stuff. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you. I mean, there's a lot from your story that I'd love to talk about today. I'm super passionate about business like I mentioned. I'm passionate about real estate. But in my mind and what I believe is if we aren't healthy both physically or mentally, it's hard to perform professionally. And I just wanted to kind of share with our listeners a little blurp from your bio on LinkedIn which says you were talking about resilience guy and you said, how I turned around a life that once included severe diagnosis near death experiences, burnout and loss. And you clearly had a lot of challenges and you've made some huge strides. And I'd love to just ask what was transpiring in your life that kind of created those challenges? And at what point in your life did you make a decision to change? And maybe we can start there. I think the impetus of 61, right? I think I was 29 or 30 years old sitting in a doctor's office because I used to play competitive volleyball. And one night I was at a match and I didn't see the ball coming. I hit me in the head. I ignored it for a couple of weeks and then I was on a business road trip and I was driving and I had double vision. Vertigo, things like that. Driving through a canyon in Colorado and your vision's not good. Not that smart, you know, because it's a long way down. So I finally went to the doctor and after MRIs and spinal taps and things, he's sitting there two months, two year old is sitting on my lap. He's sitting there telling me that I had multiple sclerosis. So I followed, you know, I ignored it for six more months. I'll just handle it. And then it started getting more frequent in being the exacerbations. Anybody with MS or knows somebody with MS and I was it's unpredictable and when it hits you, it hits you. And the rest of the time you could ignore it. So I ignored it until I could it and then I started on what I call their medicine, like the doctor's medicine. It was a shot every day of an inner fear on and it was trial medicine. I took that for the better part of 10 years. I really couldn't play competitive sports anymore. I could do endurance, but I couldn't do weight training. I could fast twitch. They were all kind of going away. And I lost a lot of weight. Like I am sitting here, like I told you, I'm 230 pounds sitting here at 10 percent body fat. I am going to tell you I was 171 pounds at 35 years old. And I don't even know what my body fat was. I wasn't measuring it. I was a wafer. I send a picture. You can put it up and show notes if you want. But I was genuinely really, really sick and we had, I was married. We had young kids in elementary school and I had no energy to keep up with him. I'm running a company. I was doing really well. The company was doing fine. Then, but when you don't have physical energy, over time, your team sees it. Your customers see it. Your bankers see it. Your vendors see it. It's hard to hide. I started with or away because I was living in fear of this disease. And it ate away. It ate away on my marriage. It ate away on my energy. It ate away on my business. Which ate away on my finances. In hindsight, I could see it, but it's like dying a death of a thousand cuts. You don't see it when it's happening. A boil of frog, picking an allergy. It's just a slow, slow thing. And then, it wasn't until after I got divorced. Actually, when I got divorced, I decided to stop the medicine. I wasn't going to live like this anymore. I walked into a gym, picked out a trainer. I liked the way he looked. He's just some young man. I hadn't been in a gym in a long time. Hired him, joined a gym, joined a country club. The day I got divorced. Because I wanted to change things. And I thought, I can't live like, I just stopped the medicine. The doctor said it was the absolute worst thing to do. I'm not advocating anybody listening, stop their medicine. I didn't have any ramifications, but apparently that's rare. By stopping 10 years of daily shots for multiples grosses. And then I started my comeback trail, as I call it. We dug the business out. It was a 2008 drop. We lost 80% of our revenue to go from 12 million to 2.5 million was quite a hit. Back in a small private company. In revenues, it was a low margin high volume business. We built it in the internet era. So it was an exchange product for medium sized manufacturers. And it's still the margins maintained the same, but the volume went way down because the economy, we couldn't control the economy. Everything was dropping. So we focused, handed the business back to the team and said we need to cut costs. We went from a couple of dozen people to five. And those five. Two years later, we were earning 25% of the revenue, 28% of the revenue we did before. And we made more money in that. Because we ran that much more efficiently. We cut the office. We cut everything we didn't need, except for features to the customer and the customer continued to pay us. Even a quarter of what we used to earn, we made more net. So it was a great business case study about how in the world do you have four times of the revenue two years ago. When you earned less money than you do now. Payroll was big. Office technology expenses. They weren't cloud expenses. And you had to have your own server racks, things like that. We're talking 2009. Yeah. Yeah. So that started my comeback. I was a single dad. Had my kids half the time. I wanted energy to keep up with them. I saw like we ski, we hike, we things like that. And over time, I was just letting that dissipate. I was giving four going time with my kids. And I didn't want to do it. So one day, one step at a time, I just started to focus on fitness and focus on food. If food can be a poison or it can be a fuel and I studied, I dove in hard. I studied it and I tried a bunch of different foods. What happened? I logged everything. What happens if I do this? What happens if I do that? What if I eat this before my workout or after my workout? I mean, I tracked all the macros. I even tracked water for a while. Like is this affecting my sleep and how much energy do I have and all that kind of stuff? And I'm not going to say I was organic, but I was eating really, really clean. Well in one year, I gained 38 pounds of muscle, like the gentleman. It was actually, I gained, I lost fat. So I had gained more weight than that. I lost fat and gained 38 pounds of muscle. And I was 44 years old when that happened. So I was out of a freak show. I went back in to see my neurologist, manual. And he said, you didn't ask me for a prescription refill. And I said, well, I stopped. And he said, I don't even know who you are. Like you look entirely different. You have muscle tone. You know, my hair started growing back. My skin had texture. My face had, you know, if you're not healthy, it's obvious. And as I was doing the physical, I made myself focus on the emotional. I wrote my bathroom mirror because I was struggling with depression, positive or nothing. I couldn't think it, do it, or say it if it wasn't positive. And I was the only one that could control that. And then after just a couple of weeks of that, I wrote 100 days of positivity in which man, I had to make somebody else smile or laugh every day. Somebody I did not know. It forced me to engage with people. So I found that when you're more focused on helping somebody, you forget all about your stuff. And it was simple. Like my boy's used to accuse me of flirting with the grocery store clerk. And I'd say, no, no, no, I have to make somebody laugh today. And you guys don't count. Yeah. I have to make somebody smile. I have to compliment somebody in a way that I have to positively impact somebody. Yep. And in giving it, it was so heartedly beneficial to me on every level. Now, the business was kind of healing itself because I had such a good team. I was focused on me. I was, I was not going to the office very much, like honestly. So within two years of that, 210 pounds, it's 2010. I'm skiing with a customer one day. And foolishly, we're racing down first run of the day, down Breckenridge. And I go over a knoll. I used to ski super fast. And I used to like to jump. And I went over a knoll and I was tucked. And there's a snowmaker right in front of me. And you can't turn in the air. Yeah. You can't turn in the air. Right. Every skier knows that. I'm just going to repeat it. But the second and a half I had looking at it was, you know, and it's right under a ski left. So there's witnesses and measurements and everything. Apparently, I was going 54 miles an hour when I hit the snowmaker. And I stopped. So my chest caved in. I broke 13 bones, collapsed along, and I was paralyzed. And they took me in a helicopter after they operated on my lung because I collapsed it. They put me in an helicopter and flew me to Denver and I woke up in Denver. No regulation of in between. I have 30 or 40 seconds of memory in an ambulance going from Breckenridge to the hospital there where they did the chest tube. I don't remember the helicopter at all. It's too bad because it was $35,000 and it was a beautiful day apparently. It was a bluebird day. Yeah. But I was unconscious. So I had to like, I woke up in this ER room basically waiting for surgery, my next surgery, in a room full of friends. Somehow, you know, thank God for texting things like that. Somehow word passed down by the time I got there. I woke up six hours later. A bunch of friends were there and I thought, what's the party? What am I missing? I was so out of it. They said, dude, you're paralyzed waiting for surgery. We're just standing around laughing, telling bill stories. So it was like having a funeral, but I was alive. It was really a moving experience. Like these are my closest friends and these are what they're saying of me because I heard it long before I woke up. So I've been feeding myself positivity and then I got it back because I had this accident. It was my own fault. I didn't see this ski area or anything like that. Yes, there was no sign, but it was my thoughts. The guy next to me and I see you hit the same thing, but he compounded fractured his legs. I don't, never walks normally again. I walked out of the hospital and then took about a year and a half to recover. Couple surgeries and a couple of fixes, but I was healthy when I hit it. If I was, if I was not wearing a helmet and I wasn't in good shape, I would have died right there. Hands down. Yeah, because I was fit, I lived through it. That made me even more focused on positivity because I had to, I mean, I had just gone through this whole thing and gotten healthy and go out of the bottom, start over again. Like you just gained all this weight and I lost it because you couldn't, I split my sternum and broke seven ribs. You can't lift weights like that, right? I broke a lot of other bones too, but if you collapse your lung, you break a lot of bones. Usually, your body stops. It's like I was doing 50 miles an hour and I stopped abruptly. Yeah, so that, that was a $7000 mistake that insurance company paid to fix. But I had nine months of basically working on me. So I couldn't work for three months. Another pivotal, you know you have a good team. I went to the office after three months. Business had grown. In that quarter, business had grown over 20%. That I wasn't out like doing nothing. I couldn't pain meds and surgeries and all that kind of stuff. And the team said to me, "Hey, this is work and just fine." Basically, you're in the way. So why don't you just spend time talking to customers. We got everything else. Come to the office on Fridays when we have our food ball tournament. Okay. Like I was blessed. Like I had, like we, this business was 12 or 13 years old at the time. It was not a startup. It was running smooth. I'm an engineer. George Attack taught me that. MIT taught me that. Make it run smoothly. And it did. Not that anybody listening wants to go through that to find out if their business will run. But run the scenario. If I'm gone for three months, what happens to my business? Start asking your team. I didn't do it, but thankfully it took care of itself. Ironically, we were selling business continuity services as a subset of what we were doing. The joke was, well, our business ran without the leader. So after that, I just realized that no matter what life throws at me, I'm going to be okay. And it has nothing to do with what the world thinks of me or the market thinks of my business or the bank thinks of the amount of money I do or don't have in there. Because during divorce, I came home once and there was a foreclosure notice on the door. I'm being very vulnerable and transparent. Like we were, we were rubbing nickels. Like. Yeah. We couldn't keep up with the spend that we had built, even though we bought the house way under market and renovated it. Like, so we had a lot of equity in it. But that was one during the foreclosures going on, no bank wanted to refinance, especially for somebody whose business had dropped 80%. I couldn't get the equity out. The whole market had dropped because of all of the, you know, the big short basically. So I had what was equity, you know, a lot, but I couldn't get it out. It was intangible. You know, and during the divorce, we agreed to sell it four years later when we got it out. It was to be foolish to try right now just to take the loss to get a dime on a dollar. Sure. So it was quite the learning experience. So the school of our docs teaches you a lot. But I coach entrepreneurs because I, I've been, I've had success and I've had failures. And it doesn't change the person because my business failed. I have had failures. It doesn't mean I'm a failure. It means that idea failed. It fails fast. It's even better. But because I don't know anything we do it. If it fails, it doesn't mean I'm a failure. But our reaction is, oh my gosh, I'm stupid or I'm a failure or I can't run a business. That's not true. That's not true. You had a theory. I got hypothesis in science class. You had a theory. Is your hypothesis correct or not? My biggest regret about a business was I didn't close it fast enough. I waited a year and a half to shut it down and I knew it at eight months. It was just my ego. I'm going to grind this out. All I did was grind up my debt. I didn't grind the business out. I grown, I ground me into the ground. Yeah. So money's recoverable. Time and energy are not. Yep. So I believe food is fuel. Watch what you eat. Yep. It'll either make you sick or it'll make you healthy. And I've been saying that for decades, not just because it's been a topic of late, you know, with the FDA and all that. Entrepreneurs, I believe, think they have to work. I don't know where we got this idea in America that if you're not working 60, 70, 80 hours, you can't be successful. I completely disagree. Busy to me, busy is not successful. Room on your calendar. Room to breathe. Room to think. Room to be strategic. Room to. And to spend time with the ones you choose to and the ones you love, that is successful. I'm not busy. I do have busy days, but I do that on purpose. And then I stopped working and then I had to go for a walk with my wife. Oh, busy in the confines of busy is great. But if your life is too busy and you're not laughing or you're not getting vacation or you're not exercising or God forbid, you're not sleeping, that's not healthy. So you're not doing your business any good. You're not doing your employer. If you have a job, you're not doing any good. You're not doing your portfolio any good. You show up looking haggard, your on-site property management team is going to see right through it. They're going to start looking for jobs. Like you are the poster child for your business. I can tell you from personal experience. When you're in shape and you walk into a conference or an airplane or a restaurant and you're fit, people assume that your business runs well. They ask you a lot less questions about Hoelge. How old is your business? How much does it do? What if it goes out of business? If they just look and see that the leadership is fit. I don't mean like go stand on a bodybuilding stage or go around the Olympics. I just mean fit. Like, okay, we could walk a couple of miles in this meeting. We don't have to sit here. One of my favorite things to do is have a walk and talk. If somebody or go to breakfast, I don't like going to dinners because people want to drink. Let's go for a walk and talk. Let's grab a coffee and walk around the lake. Yeah. So much better conversation than if we just sit there. Yeah. Put activities into some of your meetings. Yeah. If you get tired to get somebody to golf because that takes so long, skiing is another great one. Just doing things makes people really feel that they know you. And if they know you, then they trust you and they will open up and you can solve their problem. All I do in my whole career is apply technology and apply process to solve problems that businesses aren't doing themselves. Well, you told me to walk through the time frame. You know, I just, I just want to say thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for being on the pod. Thank you for being vulnerable. You've clearly been watched over. I mean, it sounds like you should have been paralyzed and you've come out of that and it was. It was a long four days. You've had a lot of personal challenges both with relationships, but also health. And it's just cool seeing your enthusiasm right now and it feels like right now you're just in such a good place and now you're blessed. I think there's a lot to unpack with what you said. And I think where I want to focus on two things. One is positivity. That seems to be the common denominator for you to overcome challenges. And then this idea of generating energy or having energy to be healthy. And so my question to you is when executives and entrepreneurs come to you for coaching, what are the patterns that you see with these individuals that is causing them to be negative or having negative mindset? You know, because you talk with a lot of different people and people have different experiences, but are there patterns that we can learn from today? And how do you start to put a framework together on changing that pattern and have it to create more of a positive mindset? I think the most common pattern I see is executives tying their happiness in their own mind or their success to their business. Like their identity is their work. I have learned over time. I used to do that in my 30s. I did. I'm guilty. Through my 30s probably. I'm guilty of that, but I'm an advocate of my, I love my work, but it provides me the ability to have the life that I want. And I control my expectations. Like, happy to see it goes reality minus expectations. I can't control reality. I can control my expectations. I'm not a billionaire in order. I want to be. Do I need $10 million cash in the bank? No. And when changing my life, I get to do what I want to do when I'm happy. So I'm not saying that being a billionaire is wrong. I'm saying I chose not to give up that much of my life to chase that. I wasted a decade thinking I was. And then I realized it wasn't worth it to me. So I tried to get the person asking me to help them to look at the other sides of their life. Where are you spiritually? Are you spiritual? Even an atheist has spiritual, right? I'm not saying religion. I'm saying spiritual. Where are you health wise? Where are you relationship wise? The underlying factor to all three of those is time because of work is already over here. I'm assuming work is successful. Sometimes I coach people that are not work is not successful, but they have had success. So they have cash that they're burning as the business isn't doing well. So they have more of a runway. So I'm putting it in context because most of the entrepreneurs that engage with me to coach are on the other side of success, right? They have businesses. I do coach startup entrepreneurs, but it's is that game is moving. Faster and faster and faster, a more of an advisor than the full time coach. I get involved with the coach and help them strategically, but that young entrepreneurs right now have a plethora of tools that we didn't have. So I have to put my skill set into context. I've seen way too many of them executive earning millions a year from business that's doing eight or nine digits a year in revenue that doesn't want to go home. They're more comfortable at work. They're domain. They're more happy there. They will work till 10 o'clock a night and go home when their husband or wife is already in bed because there's no relationship there. It's gone like it has failed a while ago. They get up in the morning, have their coffee, leave early, go to the office. First one, their last one to leave. Think and their mind that they're setting the example for the rest of the company, but they're not. They're just driving themselves into the ground and they're not facing the other things that are a problem for them, but they're making money or their business is successful. They're on the cover of the Fortune magazine or whatever. To them, that was success 15 years ago, but they reached it. And now they don't know what they're, what they want next. So they hide within their business. And I think it's really, really dangerous. Like I, this guy Phil came to me and he was 310 pounds. And he and his wife had been on vacation in nearly 7 years together. So I said, do you want to be married? Yes, I do. Okay. Do you want to die in 5 years? I had to get kind of in his face and we started first with fitness. But I involved his wife in that. We sat in their kitchen and I said, because he said, well, she makes dinner for me and she likes to spoil me and she makes these really extravagant meals. Well, he's 315 pounds. So she was the key to him losing weight. So I involved her and in doing so, they all of a sudden had a mutual cause. And it was Phil's weight loss. Two years later, Phil had lost 100 pounds. He hired a trainer that knew how to deal with obese people and his wife got on board with the food. Because it's both pieces. You can't just exercise it away. You have to change the food. And then you know what happened? His business grew. He didn't even try to make it grow. He just started showing up with energy at the office. He started leaving on time because he had to be home in time. His wife made this dinner that he already said he wanted to do, right? This calorie controlled fat controlled dinner, high protein, you know, medium carbs that monitored by his trainer. And then they got involved. They got more excited about staying there. His turnover went down. And the same time he lost his weight. He ended up selling it from multiple of that because he wanted to. He realized he didn't need to hide in his business and he had enough money. He had other shareholders, but he did quite well, right? He went from feeling trapped inside of a business. Even if you move the decimal point one or two over, and if that was 10 million or one million, it's still notable. He went from feeling trapped to feeling like, now I can envision a life outside of work. Entrepreneurs think they have to do this to have happiness. This being the business. Then the business fails or succeeds. And they realize they don't have any bearing on their happiness and had bearing on their financial. But I've been broke and been happy. And I've been, I've had a lot of money and I've been happy. And the converse is also true. So I have learned over time that my happiness does not correlate to my income. I correlate so much time I spend with the people I want to. I have a saying in my house and my business, I'd rather do than have, or rather do something than own something. And I pursue the use. USE stands for unique shared experience. So over here at Christmas, my son's and I sit down and plan our uses. And they're out of the house, they're grown adults. We plan our uses. What are we going to do this year? We going to Moab or we going here, we going to Mexico and I'll make it happen if it's with my kids. So what's the experience you're seeking? You'll find a lot more joy. I shouldn't say it that way, pardon me. Let me reframe that. I find a lot more joy out of an experience than anything I could buy. I bought new cars. I bought new houses. I bought new clothes. That experience, that trip, or we were going on a trip, it was a road trip. Got a flat tire, changed to the tire, a hundred yards later the boat trailer tire goes out and we're stuck on the side of the road on the way to Lake Powell. So it's in your neck of the woods in Utah. And the nearest gas station is a hundred miles away. So our spares flat, we got a party of 12 going to a houseboat. We talk about the road, the side of the road board that we talk about being on the boat. How are we going to deal with this? We have women and children on this group. How are we going to do this? And we still laugh about it. That was seven years ago. Our friends laugh about it. So the experiences is really what I encourage people to pursue more than the money because if the happiness attracts success, money may or may not. It revolves around the person. But genuinely believe health, physical health leads to mental health and mental health leads to success and you define the success. I don't. You should not care what I think about whether you're successful or not. You should sit down with your wife and determine what that is. You know, like last year I took, we took the kids on spring break and then Julie and I, we like to go to see live music. So last year we had eight weekends that we saw live music. Some of them were in Denver, right? Six of them were not. So we had six road trips. They gather, they call it a date weekend and you get mama out of the house and she can relax. Think about that investment. Some people say, "How can you do that? It takes so much time." Well, you leave Friday and come back to Sunday. It doesn't take that much time. Like, you can make it. If you know what's coming, you can take Friday off. If you can't, there's something wrong with your organization. And we come back full of laughter. Like, yeah, we went to a couple of live music shows but we saw this city we'd never been to. Like, we went to Savannah, for instance. We went to Huntsville. Yeah, we go to all these little cities. It was awesome and that was so much better than buying a new car. We don't need a new car but a lot of people think they need one. So I just throw that out there as an example. Yeah. So, man, these stories are so cool and I love your acronyms and you're like, your minds are going to be like, "I think you kind of alluded to this but this is really fascinating to me." When someone decides to invest in their health, it feels to me like what the people you've helped advise and coach. The business side becomes more successful or the business starts to turn around. Can we just double click on that? Like why? Let's say I'm not eating healthy. I'm overweight right now and I'm trying to grow my business. What is it about focusing on health that will then translate into more revenue? Have you kind of alluded to it but do you mind just sharing a little deeper maybe? It's really cool. It's a cool thought to think about. The times in my life I was not healthy, I had a hard time being happy. Okay. So I believe that if you're genuinely happy, you attract the same. You can't manufacture it. You can't pretend it. When you and I consider in a meeting and I could say I'm great but if I know that I'm really not and I'm trying to hide it, you'll say he was a cool dude. But if I come in, I try to come in and be fully present and then you know it. Roll that into your business if you have the energy, even if you're not perfectly healthy. We go through times in our life where we're not perfectly healthy. My wife had cancer last year. She was bald and chemo but she sat there and made jokes the whole time and smiled. There's a picture I took her to the sphere to see dead and company when chemo was over. There's a picture of her looking at the ceiling with no hair on. I think it's beautiful. She's just joyful. Didn't wear a wig, didn't anything. Her happiness, we didn't know anybody went into the sphere by the time we left. The 20 people around just all wanted her number because they thought it was so cool. She's just trying to be happy. It attracts happiness. The same thing is successful business attracts more clients but they don't only want to deal with people that are easy to be with. There are businesses that have cultures that are very antagonistic. We don't do business with those people. I'm not judging them. I'm just saying it's so hard. If we hire a client and we realize that their culture doesn't fit because we spend a lot of time interviewing our clients before we take one. If their culture doesn't fit, we will help them move away from us. It's not a hard conversation. It's just like, this isn't working. How could we move you to one of our competitors or how could we change your services so this pain point goes away? But when they're on and they realize you're being honest and transparent and the culture in your company is actually real and it's around accountability like I think it should be, then they want to give you all the business they can. They refer people to you. Think about, hey, this group actually has fun, but man, their stuff never breaks. Their stuff runs forever. Their stuff makes me a lot of money. I don't even know. I've never heard of them. So and so referred me like we don't spend any money on advertising. We do the book in the podcast because we're trying to change the mentality around commercial real estate relative to data and digital, but we don't advertise. But when you get a raving fan, they're a raving fan. When I walk into a room and somebody says, "Tude, you're big or you're fit." Yeah, it cracks me up somebody and say, "What's the shortcut?" I was like, "There ain't a shortcut. This is 15 years." I've been in this business 10 years, but the body that you see today has been training regularly for 15 years. So I'm not saying it's going to take that long, but you've got to put it in a couple years before you see it and then people respect it. Your mindset is based on foundational strength and happiness versus fear of failure. When I was 171 pounds and the market was going like this, interest rates were going like that. Customers are bailing. It was easy to spiral. I had to find something to turn around and I didn't know what that was until I got divorced and then it was there. And I realized, wow, I got to be a. There's no teamwork anymore. I have my kids every other week. So I had to step up. Yeah. Talk about a motivator. I was not going to be that guy whose kids came home and played on the TV. Like, you know, I wasn't going to be that guy. The nor was my wife. She was awesome as a single parent too. Next wife. So thankfully, the boy's benefited from that. It's hard as the divorce was to see your family break up. But I think that positivity attracts positivity. And if your body isn't there yet or you're dealing with physical struggles or financial struggles or relationship struggles, you can genuinely choose happiness. And once you wake up in the morning and I got a meditation, I say to myself at night and when I say in the morning, if you say it out loud, it's even better. But it's up around gratitude. So no matter what I have, I'm grateful for it. And what you have comes and goes, but the relationships and the people are always there. Now, the ones you want to spend time with. You can't choose your family. I'm blessed that I still want to be around them. Yeah. But everybody else you can choose. So choose your friends. Control your time. But what goes in your out of your mind, there's a saying, I used to say it to my sons all the time, show me your friends and I'll show you your future. And your five closest friends, or you are the average of your five closest friends. I will tell you the same thing with the content you consume. What are you watching on that phone? What are you watching on this screen? I'm not judging. I've done it all, but there might be an answer to your lack of consistent happiness just in what comes through those electrons in your eyes. Yeah. It is dangerous. Like we're concerned about it for our kids, but for some reason we ignore it for ourselves. You know, an iPhone and the Android phones, they have apps to show you what you're consuming. Take a second to look at it. You'll be shocked. Yeah, it's pretty wild. If you really want to, if you really want to change your life, show to your spouse and ask for their help. Yeah. That's a, that's a bold question to ask your spouse and I think having that accountability. It's cool. Accountability will change your life. Like, you know, really want a relationship with her. And I tell her there's, there's bother me. Can you help me? Just like Phil and his wife. She's like, yeah. I'll go, I'll go hire a nutritious. I will learn how to cook food differently. I didn't know that you didn't want this and he's sitting there eating it all because he didn't want to disappoint her. Yeah. So it was this doom loop they ran. You could break the doom loop he did. So I think let's say, let's say there's an entrepreneur and they come, so they come to you and they're working, call it 60 hours plus a week on their business. That's their identity. And let's say they go through this process and they go through your advisor, advisor, role or the resilience guy with what you offer and they kind of change their identity. They become more healthy, which translates into more happiness and energy. What I think is really unique about your story is through these challenges and through the accident that you had, your business actually flourished and continued to grow despite you being, despite you being out of the office recovering. What, what could you tell our listeners or what have you learned about building really good teams around you that have that type of autonomy and have that type of belief system to say, okay, our CEOs out, but we're still going to be marching, making decisions and there's that autonomy where they feel like they are owners in their company. So that, so that this entrepreneur to wrap the loop this question back, that entrepreneur once they do get healthy, they can actually have like a 30 to 40 hour week. I think that's really unique about your story and I don't know if it's a deep question or a broad question, but I'd love to learn what are your thoughts about that? Or remember that when I went back to work in the business head grown, it sounds great, but it was a complete kick in the crotch to my old ego. I was in the way. I was keeping this business from growing and putting in context. Once Bill was gone, the filter was lifted and the business grew and it's your business. I went 80% of this thing, right? They grew without me. Like, wow, what have I been doing wrong for 12 years? So I had to swallow my pride and after the ego went away, I was like, okay, this is really cool. Like everybody wants a business that actually runs itself. And then they asked me to go do these things that they knew I was really good at that the customers loved. Okay, I'll just do that. I'll go see every customer every quarter. It's pretty easy trips. We had an office in Pittsburgh. We had one in Denver. Like, okay, I'll just spend my time on the road and on Fridays, I'll be in the office. So I told them I wasn't working any more than 30 hours, not counting travel. So I just set the example and then anything more than that, I had to force myself to delegate. Yeah. We had built, we collectively, because I had a CFO and she is awesome. We had built a culture around accountability. The only reason this worked, it was accountability, accountability, accountability. Not micro managing. I don't even, I couldn't tell you how many hours an employee works or doesn't work. The accountability is around production and customer satisfaction. So I get that. The customer calls me and has an issue with you, then we have an issue. Like, other than that, like, unless you're in charge of procurement and you blew the budget, there's probably nothing you could do wrong. You're going to, your team is going to know if you're only working five hours a week, somebody's going to say, hey, dude, that's not right. After an employee goes through orientation and I don't wait much time anymore, like maybe a week, maybe two weeks, I sit down with him face to face and I have a piece of paper that says, "Bills five questions." And I go through them one at a time. If the answer to all five of these questions is yes, you are free to make any decision you want for the company. Regardless of how much money, bar none, hands off. It's yours. So it's basically around legality and ethics and is it good for the customer or is it good for the company? And then the last question is, are you willing to be accountable for this decision? Just take it. Build five questions is a piece of paper, but I sign it. I learned about it from a mentor of mine years ago. This is not an original idea, but I put my name on it and I sign it and I say you will not be reprimanded or terminated. Well, in the context of this, like we were selling business continuity services. There was a hurricane that blew through the Northeast and my phone didn't even ring for four days. Customer called me on my day and said, "Thanks, your team is awesome." And I was like, "Sweet, what happened?" I was told not to come in the office, right? Well, the situation happened and long story short, an employee, an officer of the company, an employee spent over $50,000 to take care of a customer. We had a guarantee if you ever go down, "Yah, yah, yah, yah, yah." We are allowed to do this and this and this and this and this. So she took it upon herself. She pulled out the build five questions and she spent over $50,000 to keep, yeah, to keep this customer alive. It was all reimbursable through his insurance policy. But if she had to ask me, the guy's business might have gone down. That was in, I think that was in the fall. After the first of the year, he called me up and he said, "I want you to send me an invoice for $100,000." And I said, "I always love invoices, but what are we billing you for?" Like, is there a scope of work attached to this? Like, this sounds weird. Oh, he said, "Oh, no, we bought our competitor because we didn't go out of business during the hurricane and he did. And I want to give you a bonus." No way. Yeah, he, that was his way of saying thank you, is let's pay essentially $100,000. Because of the five questions, because this woman was able to make that. So, you know, just positivity breeds positivity. So I took the money and it was not in our budget. The owners didn't get any of it. We gave it all to the employees because that week was hell. So they got relative to their income that we split up to $100,000. Cool, man. They were just past it all through and said thanks because they did crazy stuff. They worked weird hours. I didn't even know this was going on, but they thought, "Okay, this is in our scope of work. We're taking care of the customer." I don't micro manage. Like, they could work 10 hours that week or 100 and I tell them if you work more than 45 hours, I need to know. Well, they didn't tell me because it was a one-off. So, it was a counter, it was the culture of accountability that made it work. We have core values and every company I've done, there's business core values, but they also know my personal core values. And then the culture I prefer is always around accountability because I don't want to micro manage people. I'm not a good manager. I like to lead with vision, but I like to put people in the right seat and let them do what they love. If somebody's not doing what they like, then they're not going to like their job and they're going to leave. So, I just spend a lot of time asking people, "What are you doing that you don't like?" Yeah. Instead of saying, "What do you like?" They'll easily point at that, but I want to know what they don't like. I want to know what makes them not want to go to work that day. Yeah. What do you complain to your husband about when you go home? That's what I want to know. Let's solve that problem because if you solve that, the customers are even happier. Yeah. If you were to boil down, this is probably hard question, but if you were to boil down your favorite core value within your business or previous businesses, it's made the most impact. What one would that be, would you say? We took, I mean, Drew Hall and I took, as I joined Drew's company 10 years ago, he found it up, because I did not. I took a core value I love basically saying, you know, accountability act like it's your company. Yep. So, and we put it in the real estate context because we serve real estate owners and we said, "No renters." Act like an owner. No renters allowed. Yeah. So, we want you to treat this as your business and it comes with being transparent. Like I do an annual report and I show the numbers. If we have a good year, we share the wealth. We don't take it all to the owners. We do have shareholders that we have to take care of, but we make sure the people do in the work feel a good year. If it's a bad year, we don't short them, but we'll say, "Okay, here's what we need you or help doing." Yeah. So, we want them to think and act like an owner, but to do that, you have to educate them enough. Put it in a P&L standpoint out of all its sheets, standpoint saying, "We grew 20% this year, but our expenses grew 24." So, we didn't do as well. Or we grew 8% and our expenses only grew 5%. So, we made 3% net and dollars. That's what this means. So, now you're going to get a bonus. And I always put it in next year. Like, "Okay, we grew 20% last year. I do or don't expect to do that this year." Sometimes we have doubled before. Well, last year we only grew 20%. But we did that without any financing. We doubled without financing. We grew 20% without financing. So, I'd like to tell them about the cash position in the company. So, even if the sky falls, I know exactly how far the business will run. So, they're not out looking for a job. They know we have recurring revenue customers. They even know who the customers are. They could get in and see most everything in the company. Aside from HR files, it's all transparent. Yeah. We want them to treat this like their company. So, that's the biggest one to me. Really? We have some other ones I enjoy, like find a better way. Just because we do it this way, especially for new hires. New hires are great. Just because we do it this way doesn't mean we have to. Like, what do you know that you could teach us to do better? It could be a system. It could be a process. It could be an idea. You need to ask why don't you do this? Because the answer might be because nobody's ever asked. Or we don't know. I'll do it. Teachers. And they love that. They show up and all of a sudden they're immediate. And if they have an idea and you do it, you have a stellar employee for quite a long time. Right? And then another one I always enjoy is celebrate the wins. Don't just sweep it out of the rug when you have a win. You know, have a bell on the wall. Have a little party or if you have a good quarter or a good year, say thank you. Like let people know or revel in it for a minute. Just take an hour and tell everybody get away from their desk. Don't just talk about oh my gosh, we did this and we have to do that. Don't just always have next quarter's initiative or rocks or whatever you want to call them. Celebrate the wins too. Like we don't go to work just so we can struggle all the time. It's supposed to be fun too. Yeah. But I don't mean donuts. I mean genuinely, hey, this is awesome. Like we grew 20.4% last year. That's unbelievable. I had budget at eight. Well, it's sweet. Awesome. I know that's recurring revenue growth. Like that's a real deal. So they have to tell them why it's and celebrate the win. And then now always be learning. We have a culture of education because we're in the tech space. If you don't constantly learn, you get left. So we have budgets for education and training and certifications, but they also need to be doing it outside of that. Like Google lets you play 25% of your time to go play, to go learn, to go investigate. We can't quite afford that much. We're not Google, but we encourage people to always be stretching and do it on a company time. You can schedule yourself two hours here and three hours there to take that webinar or that class or do it. Do it on our time. We give people time offer to donate for their charity. I once had a young man, this is 20 years ago, say I don't have time. I have this charity, but I just don't have time. And I said, we'll do it on ours. You have one day a month to volunteer for the charity you want. And he came back and said, could I use that? That was half a day a month, excuse me. So six days a year, can I use it all at once? And I said, sure. What are you doing? He goes, I want to go to Mexico and build houses for habitat for humanity. And he did it on salary. And he came back. He was a different person. That's cool. He was awesome. He matured, but he came back with energy and stories and pictures. He did a presentation to say, you guys should do this. His so much energy came back to the office. Yeah, he was gone a week and yeah, we all had to cover from. But that disappeared when he walked in with his bundle of positivity. Did it cost us anything? Not really. Not really. Like, we didn't do it for the recognition. We did it for him. Yeah. And then this woman over here is like, oh, yeah, I'm going to go do that. I'm going to do that. And then it just started feeding itself. And they all cover for each other when they're gone, especially for charity. All the team covers for itself. So it's really not much expense in it. And you're giving back to the community. So you're positively impacting others and you're actually doing what your core value says. So I, it sounds like I have all the answers, but remember, I've been doing this thing for 40 years. This entrepreneur thing. I don't have all the answers. School of hard knocks kicked me in the teeth several times. That's all. Well, I love the values that I love. I've got some short stories of how you've implemented those in your business and it's admirable. And I can get the sense you care about your people and your transparent and it's working. I would say the last question on this particular interview today would be if there are, if there's someone that gets starts starts to change their life with health, but falls back into their original state or if there's an entrepreneur that is just really struggling with the business and wants to overcome some challenges and scale the business or if someone has not, doesn't have a good relationship. So I know that there's a lot there, but like what's one simple piece of advice that you could leave with that person today that could get them over the hump to create that positivity, to create that energy. What would you say if you could only say one thing to that person for 30 seconds? That's not linear. Two steps forward, one step back. But remember that we are all walking through the same mud. If this wasn't recorded, I'd say a word that starts with S, right? We're knee deep in mud. Everybody is. Are you going to choose to look down and see the mud? Are you going to look where you're going? Decide where you're going and stay focused on that. There are days where you will go backwards. Undoubtedly it happens. Financially, physically, emotionally, spiritually, relationship wise. And there are days where you'll make two or three, four X strides. But in the macro, you want to go over there. I'm going to maybe you know, like mountains and you want to ocean. I'm going to go to that island. You need to see beyond where you are right now. You are deep in mud, but everybody's there. Now the woman that's a billionaire is there, the person that's sleeping on the streets there. Like everybody's there. We all have mud. If you focus on the mud, you'll see the mud. Now, if you mountain bike, probably in Utah, they tell you, look 10 feet in front of your bike. Don't look as your front wheel because your front wheel is going to find every rock. Right? Just like in moguls. Don't look at the mogul you're on. Look at three moguls down. Is that analogy? So focus, I am going that way. It's going to be some bumps. And you just got to take a breath. But remember, don't overwork. More time, it's like when I was a tech, I could stay up till four in the morning studying. But if I got past midnight, I'm so tired. I'm not going to remember anything. Pulling on all night is the worst thing I could ever do. I'd better off going to sleep and waking up with a clear head with what I've already learned and being done. More at a certain point, more is not better. Especially when it comes to hours for entrepreneurs, for business owners, for employees. Think about being better, not just throwing more time at it. That time, it's precious. But even if you went home and just went to bed two hours earlier, or spent 30 minutes cooking your meal instead of stopping on the way home in a fast food joint, do that for months and watch your life change. Well, thank you, Bill. That was a, I've really, really enjoyed this conversation. If, you know, we obviously, there's a lot more we could talk about on the business side. But on this health and wellness side, I think the listeners are probably going to want to reach out to you or learn more about you. What would be the best way if someone's interested in learning more about the resilience guy services? What's the best way to get a hold of you? Well, there's resilience guy.com, that website, but just find me on LinkedIn. You will see why I'm on LinkedIn. I do casual to Tuesday posts. I do weekend posts that are personal, they're real. All the posts are real. The pictures are all real. I swear they're not Photoshopped. I try to focus on not just being a business person or not just being a commercial real estate entrepreneur. Yeah. Yeah, commercial real estate technology entrepreneur. I'm not a commercial real estate entrepreneur in the U. I don't have a portfolio. You know, you are typically our clients. So I would say go to LinkedIn first, but if you really want to see who I am and what my beliefs are, it's on resilience guy.com. And I like helping people. So yeah. If I can help you reach out, but you can do this, there's I am just an average Joe. I am. Maybe I'm stubborn. But you can be stubborn too, especially if it's your passion. So figure out what you want to do and just go do it. You can do it. Yeah. I'm nobody here is any more special than the next person. I believe in you. Well, I love that. And I hope all our listeners learned a lot today. I think I have certainly, Bill, thank you for your time. I hope you have a wonderful day. I hope you have a wonderful year, both in health and business. And thank you for being on the podcast today, man. Well, it's been a pleasure and honor. Thanks, Brian. Yep.