Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Steve Van Diest, President of Acumen’s New Front Range Region

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

Steve has been married for 29 years to his wife Christine and together they have 4 children; Jonathan (Najda), Benjamin (Jayde), Isabela, and Jacob (ages 24-16). Steve earned an undergrad degree from Cal Poly (Mathematics) and a graduate degree from Bakke Graduate University (Entrepreneurship). Steve spent the past dozen years as an entrepreneur and founder of 2 businesses in the fast-growing sleep space. The first was a franchised multi-state retail mattress concept that grew to over 4 regions nationally (Steve also owned 4 area Denver locations), and the second, was a B2B and B2C e-commerce natural pillow manufacturing business. He spent the first half of his career in non-profit leadership internationally with Cru which took him to living in Chile, Spain & Mexico. Steve is quoted as saying he “loves the entrepreneurial spirit and seeing leaders make something out of nothing and radically impact their family, community, and companies.Learn more: https://acumenimpact.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-steve-van-diest-president-of-acumens-new-front-range-region

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with this Steve Vandis, who's the president of Acumen's new front range region. Steve, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Mike. It's a pleasure to be here. You're welcome. Hey, I'm looking forward to learning from you and learning what you do and how you serve your community and your clients.

But give us a little bit of your background. What's your story? And how did you get into the world of entrepreneurship? You know, that's a great question. I grew up in Southern California in a Dutch dairy family. And I always saw grandpa, my grandpa as a dairyman. But it wasn't until my 40s, I probably saw him as an entrepreneur. I think there was an element of going, wait, he had nine retail stores all over Southern California, had, this is back in the early 80s, had 1,200 head of cattle in Southern California, produced our own milk brand. I just said, it's like, oh, he's a dairyman, a farmer. But as I began to kind of just self-evaluating going, who am I and where am I, and all the things that I've done, it really shaped me. And my wife and I come from kind of an interesting, she's a Texas gal. we meet in Brazil 31 years ago.

We've got four kids. Yeah, four kids. The oldest is married. The older two are married. 24, 22 are both married. The oldest actually got married in the exact same city. My wife and I met 31 years ago in Brazil. Wow.

Just crazy. So we've got this soul. And then we've got an 18-year-old daughter heading up to school and a 16-year-old son. So we've got this crazy story of we just have always seen the world differently. And we did nonprofit work and we started initiatives in southern Spain. We started initiatives in Chile and we started large citywide projects in Mexico City. And we've always gone, what can we do to go love, serve, and grow different communities and pockets and partnering? And then in my mid-30s in a transition from full-time nonprofit work, I landed myself with a group of friends starting a mattress franchise here in the Colorado Front.

range. And then that ended up me having four retail stores up and down I-25 here, as well as helping the franchise and giving leadership to launching another 13 across the United States. So just a really neat experience. And then we got just a little crazy and creative and said, you know what, frustrated with the stuff we're buying and selling. How about we just start making some of our stuff? And so we started making our own all natural customizable pillows. and tested them in our stores and realized customers liked them than anything, more than anything we were selling. So we launched this B2B brand and we knew what retailers wanted and we were frustrated with. So we began to communicate that side. We played both sides. We played manufacturer and we played retailer.

And we knew their heart and we just launched it across the U.S. and to quite a few stores. And a few years later, I decided to go, gosh, it would be fun to be in the e-com world, fun being in quotation marks. Because it sounds fun with the front end until you find out the work and the, yeah. Yes. It's totally different. It's not just relationships calling a retail app saying, hey, we got this great thing. Test it out, feel it, experience it, talk to your customers, and then it sells itself. And you're telling a story in a very different way.

Yeah, we sell some great success, and I partnered. It wasn't necessarily, yes, the product was amazing. could we have done better on branding and marketing and all those things? Yeah. But what was the greatest success I think I've learned throughout the years was partnering with the right people. And so I was friends with Oprah's sleep doctor from my days in retail and sent him a couple pillows.

And he goes, these are amazing. And I remember Christmas Eve, my mom calling me going, I think your pillows on L.A. News. Oh, wow. And I'm going, what? Yeah, in Southern California, and she sends me a little iPhone recording. And yep, there he is. He's talking about my pillow. And then a few months later, it shows up on Good Morning America or the Today Show.

I can't remember what you was. And so it's just a great partnership with people that shared our same values. And so I look back and going to partnership with my wife, the partnership with people in different countries, learning from what they have and what we can serve and love and care for them. really shaped me into who I am today. And I exited from the mattress business about three or four years ago, exited from the pillow business two years ago, and then began this great adventure with Acumen here on the front range.

And very grateful. So question for you, because when I was listening to that introduction, there was a kind of a recurring thread running through it with partnership. And so I know like, you know, the husband-to-wife partnership, that's a relational partnership. Question, which I think I know the answer to, but your connection with Oprah's sleep doctor, was that a partnership like, oh, when you mentioned my pillow, I'm going to share

revenue of X. Probably not. It was probably just, I heard from you, and he picked it up and it was like, you know, like earned media. You know, I think with the best partnerships that may end up financial, they start with relational. And so in the early days, it was I sent him a couple pillows. He goes, these are amazing. And it began this no financial transactions for a majority of the time. And then it was me going, gosh, how to actually honor this relationship? He didn't initiate it. I initiated it and said,

can I, can I give you a royalty piece of each cell? And then it became more transactional, but it started with shared values and shared relationships and shared care. And then in the mattress world, it also started with three friends. And I'm super grateful to be able to partner with my advisors at that time, where my two best friends. One was a franchisor and one was my business partner in our four retail stores. And to be able to have those partnerships that started really early as handshakes. And later on, they turned into more contracts and operating agreements. And there's some highs and lows and all that, but I'm extremely grateful to be able to partner with people. There's some lessons learned in that now 15, 16 years later.

So how would I have done that wiser, better, deeper, and all those pieces? But partnerships, it's interesting. I really, my life's purpose I find now in my 50s is I'm going to do three things, love and care and serve my family, help them grow and develop. Amen. I'm going to love and care for and serve marriages. and I'll tell a little story about that, and then love and care and help develop and grow business leaders.

And the marriage piece, it really came through, we laughed sometimes saying, hey, we're on our third marriage to the same spouse. We never got divorced, but there were some clearly definitive breaks where we had to grow up

and get help and therapy. Yet now we're partnering in this different level, and I still remember, gosh, probably eight years ago, deep into counseling. And talking about this contract of a marriage,

marriage going, yeah, but we've been married at this time, 20 years, we've got this contract. And I remember my counselor going, would you rather be in a contract or would you rather be in a loving, passionate, erotic marriage that chooses each other? And that it really informs even how I do business partnerships, because I'd rather be in the latter. The contract is great. Because, you know, people, from a marketing and sales perspective, that reminds me of the phrase I heard from Jeffrey Gidimer, the sales speaker years ago, that people want to buy, but they don't want to be sold. And in marketing, it's like push marketing, buy, buy, buy, deadline, scarcity, or attraction, pull marketing. Like, hey, here's what's what, here's what is all about this thing,

this widget, this service. Here's the pros and the cons. Let me teach this. And here's this white paper to read. And then hopefully the target audience goes, oh, I need this. So it's just like what you said in the marriage, the contract is the push. Well, you, You don't want to be confined. You want to be drawn and pulled to giving and serving and honoring because it's out of your own volition. It's so true. And it really changed how we are solid in our own feet and we can care and love and she can do her thing and I can do my thing. But there's this deep want for each other, not a need for each other.

And it's a choice. And in the business world, there's an element of that as well. And yes, I want wisdom and I want customers. and I want them around me, but I really want to be a relationship so where it's more transformational than transactional. It's really informed how then I build in my new world. From the lessons learned of the mistakes, it's like, oh, I loved my partnerships,

yet my greatest pieces of wisdom and advice in my business partnerships with my franchisor and my business partner were us. But we really were co-mingled as well. I had no outside. I didn't have the mics of the world. I didn't have a peer group or a mastermind feeding me and protecting me for myself and my blind spots and my weaknesses, but also protecting me from those strengths and weaknesses of my partners. You know, sometimes you don't know what you don't know.

And in those moments and time looking back on it, you needed this thing. You didn't know you needed it. But then when you got it, it was like, Handor's box opens up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I am grateful for those wonderful highs, the great successes, the lessons learned, the impact on people's lives, the growth and be able to play in multiple strategies and live in different places around planet. And then come together here in my 50s to go, ooh, I'm going to focus on three things.

Family, marriages, and helping business owners grow and taking those lessons learned, I go, I feel like I converge into my 50s into a wisdom piece going. It's no longer just about knowing. It's about pulling all those relationships and those partnerships. And if you think about those three things, those three things really aren't three separate directions. Because if I'm, you know, I'm going to presuppose that this is accurate. So you can correct if I'm wrong. When you're working with business owners helping them learn from your mistakes in the past

and your lessons in the past and your guidance, you can integrate in your marriage, you know, flavor into that, even that business relationship because that business owner needs to understand a lot of relational things. And then when you are doing that, you then are your best self for your family. So it's not like, oh, now I've got to put my family hat on and serve and love my family. And, nope, it can be like, here's everything I'm doing. And it all kind of intermingles in a great way.

It does. And I love seeing the wholeness to what I can help them do, my family, my marriage. It's no longer splitting. There's not really this idea of, well, I'm going to balance work. I'm going to balance family. I'm going to balance my faith. I'm going to balance my fitness. No, it's all one.

I know. It's crazy to think there's a, it's a balance. It's just, no, what today can I listen? If you believe in a higher power, can I listen to God? And what is he saying to me today to love, serve, and help grow other people, my family or business owners? And then it can help them not split those pieces as well, so they're running just ragged. And so I'm really grateful for the acumen experience because it's really brought a lot of those

pieces together in one place. It's not, it's picking up. nonprofit experiences around the planet and helping build communities and growing people and developing them and mentorship. And then it's this business entrepreneur piece of how do we grow businesses? How do we do the business skills, the P&Ls, the balance sheets, cap raises, hiring, firing, expansion, marketing. And then it's also this piece of, gosh, for 31 years, my wife and I have been up and down

having to grow up as individual humans. And Acumen's pulled all that together to sharpen, inspire, and challenge. owners and CEOs. So really, really grateful. Love it. So now let's roll into what in the world is an acumen and why should a CEO in the front range of Colorado be interested or anywhere? Because I know acumen's all over the place, but give us a little bit of overview of what acumen is. Yeah, it's a peer advisory group. It's a mastermind cohort. And there's all different formats of it. There's virtual and there's live and there's more networking ones and some that are just more

business accelerators, there's heavy faith-based ones. I think we find ourselves in the middle. We are not, we're live. We are live. And we put together of same affinity, same geography, business owners and CEOs, and put them in a peer mastermind group, an advisory board. And it is solving business issues. We're going to grow your top line because we care about revenue. We care about growth. We're going to grow and optimize your bottom line. We want to to do it wiser, smarter, more efficient. But the piece that draws and fulfills those two pieces, even though we lead with the top line and the bottom line, is we want to enrich your storyline. Who are you? How is your faith attached to it? How is your impact in your community?

How is your family draw this? So we want to enrich your storyline. And whatever industry or service or product or widget you do, we believe there's a story to that. And so there's basically four legs of our table that we do. We have a monthly council. It's where we put for five hours. We put these men and women that run these companies of substantial size. And they do a little check-in. They do a personal assessment and how are we doing and they share that. And then really for the bulk majority of our time, we're solving their business issues. They're getting 25 or 250 years with a CEO and business experience, not just for me. The reality is the wisdom in the room is from the other 13 members.

They're getting perspective. They're asking questions. And it's not just with strangers. They've known each other for two to three years. They're growing together. And it's no longer about just best skills and practices that can listen to our podcast or read a book or watch on a video. But I'm living and breathing it from people that have sat in the same seat as me.

And then they're giving advice and solutions. And then they're checking in for accountability. So it's not just an accountability group. It's not a business's mission group. It's right in that middle piece where it's doing all of it in growing your top line and optimization your body on it. So that's one piece, monthly council. There is one-on-one coaching.

I'll show up like I do today. We have a conversation. What's going on? And how can I help you and ask questions? Be in awe and what else. And then every quarter, we have an advanced leadership workshop. What I love about the Auky rhythm is you've got 10, 15 teams across the region in Kansas City and Colorado, starting in Phoenix, and starting in Florida, and potentially in North Carolina,

we're pulling these teams of 12 to 13 to 14 CEOs and owners that see each other every month. They build relationships. They have coffees and drinks together. But we're going to pull them together once a quarter with their C-sweets, with their key execs for a world-class speaker and author and teach them and grow them. But we're doing it together. So there is CEOs, I think, why would a CEO want to be in this world? they're lonely. It's hard. I had partners. I had I had best friends that are doing this,

but I needed other eyeballs to do this with. Sometimes my wife just didn't want to hear about cash flow issues or payroll issues. And she'd hear it and listen, but I didn't have the advice. And so I'm lonely. I want to grow. I want to accelerate it. This is not a community for struggling businesses. This is a community for accelerating businesses, for high growth businesses. with big boy business problems. And so then the fourth leg is because we value relationships, we go on vacation together once a year. And that's where a lot of the magic sauce happens.

So we believe that you're going to have an ROI that's going to be in your influence, your investment on your money, you're going to improve your life and your skills. You're going to integrate your faith into your work and your community. And you're going to grow in your intellectual insights as well from each other. It was interesting yesterday. I was asking a partner that's been in for two years.

And someone was asking him, hey, what's the value? And he shared just kind of loosely, it's been great, it's relationships, it's this, I've learned a ton of. And he goes, but in two years, we've grown 5X. They were already successful with 250 employees two years ago. And they've grown 5x. Wow. Just by solving two or three problems in the last two years, when those problems that these

business owners are dealing with are worth half a million or two million dollar issues, to be able to have that wisdom shared on your, on your issue is life changing. And so he was extremely grateful. I was grateful for him sharing it. You know, it's interesting. You say that because it reminds me of the book, The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. Have you ever read that one? Yes. Yes. Love it. And the gist of it is you don't need to make monstrous, unbelievable changes, make a little 1% change here, a little 1% and then the cumulative compound effect is, huge. Well, your example right there is it made one or two changes, not 48 because you feel overwhelmed if you've got to think, man, that's a huge mountain to change, but just focus on this. And from the

outside looking in perspective, that the peer advisory group is like, oh, have you ever considered, hey, here's how we solved. And then now this person is seeing insights that they never would have, because they're too close to their own business sometimes. And you get that outside influence. So I think that is a really neat insight. Mike, that you're exactly right, because you don't get to a point of running a company of $2 million plus. We've got companies of $2 million in revenue up to about a billion dollars. We've got companies with 10 employees to 2,600 employees. You don't get to that position just by luck.

You're actually pretty talented. You're smart. You're gifted. You're hardworking. You see the matrix different. You've taken risks. Yet if you're truly wise and humble and self-reflective, you realize you don't have it all.

And so when I watch these men and women that are in this team, I get the front seat of watching massive transformation in businesses across the front range. They've all grown. They're all expanding and they're tweaking and changing and growing. But you're right. It's microchanges. It was interesting that the gentleman that shared yesterday about 5X growth. His business partner was there who's not a member in Acumen shared, yeah.

He goes, the stuff I learned just from him. is transformational. And so there's a leak over into the company. And so it's pretty profound and interesting. We're watching the community in Kansas City who's got 10 or 12 years on it. We're two years old here. And we're seeing it grow in a way that's not just transactional, but it's transformational. I love it, Steve.

It's been so wonderful learning about your background and now your passion and heart for serving others around you. So if someone is interested in learning about the Acumen peer advisory groups, what's the best way they can do that and reach out and connect with you? You know, the Internet is probably his best way. And Acumen Impact.com, A-C-U-M-E-N-Impact.com. And there you can find some resources, some e-books. But there's an assessment that we'd love to take you through.

If you're a CEO and owner of any size of anywhere on the Colorado Front Range or across the country, submit an assessment or submit a contact us. And we'll find out if you qualify and if you fit in the team and if you're a right stage of business. So we can help you also to next your business. I love it. Well, Steve, thank you so much for coming on. Today's been a real pleasure talking with you. Thanks, Mike.

Have a great afternoon. You've been listening to influential entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, Visit www. www. Influential EntrepreneursRadio.com.