EntreLeadership - How to Manage Fear and High Stress with Bill Smith

Episode Date: June 13, 2022

Join us as our host, George Kamel, talks to Bill Smith, the founder of Shipt—a company he sold to Target for $550 million in 2017. He’s also the founder and CEO of Landing, his new venture. Bill shares the story of Shipt, including a dark time where he almost called it quits and shut the company down. He unpacks how he dealt with stress and the fear of failure and how he turned it all around. Later in the episode, George chats with Brian Williams, a Ramsey Solutions board member and the senior executive vice president of Ramsey+. Brian is known for tackling some of the most challenging problems we face as a business. He talks about ways you can manage the stress that inevitably comes with running your business.   You’ll learn: How one solution saved Shipt The biggest success principle most companies overlook Something that most entrepreneurs don’t realize If you should be friends with coworkers   Support our sponsors: BELAY: https://bit.ly/351P9AE Hite Digital: https://bit.ly/HiteDigital Kyro Digital: https://bit.ly/KyroDigital NetSuite: https://bit.ly/NetSuiteEntre Trainual: https://bit.ly/TrainualEntre   Links mentioned in this episode: The EntreLeadership Podcast: https://bit.ly/TheEntreLeadershipPodcast Shipt’s website: https://bit.ly/3m2Lqbk Landing’s website: https://bit.ly/3x7eBR7 The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek: https://amzn.to/3x36Wln How to Play an Infinite Game with Simon Sinek: https://apple.co/3x03CHO Learn more about EntreLeadership Elite: https://bit.ly/3x40ASS Share your feedback with Tim, our producer: https://bit.ly/3bJOSmi   Learn more about EntreLeadership Events: EntreLeadership Master Series: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipMasterSeries EntreLeadership Summit: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipSummit   Learn more about EntreLeadership Coaching: Elite: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipElite Advisory Groups: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipAdvisoryGroups Executive Coaching: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipExecutiveCoaching Workshops: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipWorkshops   Listen to all the Ramsey Network podcasts anytime, anywhere in our app. Download the Ramsey Network app: https://apple.co/3eN8jNq Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today's episode, how to handle fear of failure that can come with leading a team at a successful company. And then how to deal with your stress as you step into hard situations. From the Ramsey Network, I'm George Camel, and this is the Entree Leadership podcast, where we help business leaders like you grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. Today, I'm sitting down with Bill Smith, founder of Shipped, which he sold to Target for $550 million in 2017. He's currently founder and CEO of a new venture called Landing. Bill's going to share the story of Shipped, including a dark time where he almost had to call it quits and shut down. He's going to unpack how he dealt with that stress and fear of failure and how he turned it all around.

So let's get started. Here's our conversation. Bill, super pumped to have you on the podcast. How you doing? I'm doing fantastic. Thank you so much for having me today. I'm excited to be with you. Well, I'm really excited to talk to you about your favorite topic, failure. That's something that you've had some experience with, but you've had massive success to go along with it. And that's what every entrepreneur can hope for when it comes to this. So let's get into it. You grew up in an entrepreneurial house.

Your dad was an entrepreneur. And at 16, you drop out of high school and you start to pursue these entrepreneurial pursuits. And eventually that led you to Shipp. So where did that idea come from? So the idea from shipped came from my own frustration with having to wait on things to be delivered. You know, if you think back about six, seven years ago, if two-day delivery was considered fast, and I originally started shipped to offer same-day delivery for big box retailers. That was my initial idea.

And then that obviously transitioned to what we know today with grocery stores and, of course, being acquired by Target and some incredible, incredible success. But it wasn't always this way. Take us back to 2014 when this idea that you had for shipped wasn't gaining the traction you thought. and by the end of 2014, you thought about just calling it quits. I did. So my initial idea was we would provide same-day delivery from retailers like Target. Target was actually the first company that I wanted to work with.

But other companies like Best Buy and et cetera. And what I found was a chicken egg problem. So I would call these huge retailers and say, hi, I'm Bill Smith and I'm starting a same-day delivery company. Would you be interested in partnering with me? And you can imagine the answer was, who are you? and we have everything figured out. We don't need your help.

And so it was very slow, very slow start. Fast forward a few months to the end of 2014. It was actually December, and I was looking around thinking, man, I'm going to have to close this thing down. I'm going to have to let go of all my employees. I probably had 10 people at that point. And that weekend, my wife and I went to the grocery store

for the first time with a one-year-old and a newborn. and we quickly figured out that grocery shopping was a huge pain with little kids. And in the parking lot of the publics, I looked at my wife and I said, I am going to start delivering groceries with Shipped, and I'm going to solve this problem. And that's what led to Shipt ultimately becoming a success. Wow. You know, every great entrepreneur sees a problem and they go, I think I can do better. We can solve this. And that's exactly what you did with this company. But it wasn't always easy, as you described. There's times when you're in this business and you're going, this ain't it. I thought it was going to take off like lightning.

And as we've seen with many great companies, it can take a while to find that traction. How did you eventually get that traction where you went, okay, this is going to work? So the first thing I wanted to do is see if anybody cared about my idea of getting groceries delivered. You know, I was a little burned by my initial idea not taking off. And that idea didn't take off because of the supply side, the big retailers. On the grocery side, my number one focus was consumers, and I wanted to prove, will people pay for this? Shipped started initially as a membership-based company, so everybody paid $99 per year for unlimited same-day delivery. And what I wanted was 1,000 people to pay me up front for a year before we wrote the first line of code for shipped.

Wow. And so I put together this video and a little walkthrough of what it could look like. We put it up on a website. We did a little local marketing, and I was able to get 1,000 people in Birmingham to sign up for a year before I even built it. That's incredible. So the idea here was let's start small and let's have some proof of concept before we go build this massive thing that no one cares about. And you did exactly that in Kickstarter fashion, which is really cool. Exactly.

Yes. Oh, that's awesome. So how big of a risk did you think it was when you pivoted from big box delivery to grocery? That's a pretty big shift as an entrepreneur. Yeah, it was a big. risk. You know, at that point, I had already invested, I think about maybe $500,000 and shipped up to the point that I initially had this idea. And I could have just moved on. I could have taken the ride off, started something else, tried to figure something else out. But I thought

there was something there. And so I pushed forward with this idea. And we saw so much demand early on. I knew I was on to something. Now, we were nowhere near guaranteed to have success with only 1,000 initial members. We ended up having over a million members when the company was acquired, but we did have that little start, and I believe that there was something there, and ultimately, it all played out really well in our favor. Yeah, that's incredible. So you were stressed out early on, but you didn't throw in the towel on this idea. What did that force you and your team to do? What was kind of the next steps as you started to pivot and go, all right, we know we weren't doing it, how we may should be doing it. What are the next steps you took?

So the first step I wanted to take is to see if there was a financial model that actually worked for this. Everybody wants groceries delivered, but can I actually make this work in a way where it will ultimately be a profitable company at scale? And so I spent a lot of time just figuring out the unit economics of how much we'd have to charge per order and what the minimum order needed to be and what we'd pay our shoppers to make deliveries and all the other costs. So I spent time on that. And then we spent a lot of time solving the technology and operational problems. One of the most unique problems with starting shipped was actually knowing what was in the grocery store. So the typical grocery store has about 50,000 items. And none of that information is available online.

You know, there's nowhere to go and just download what's in a typical grocery store. And so we had to figure out how to solve that. And we got really creative. We had people with shopping carts and gopros going through the store and making videos of every aisle. And then we had a bunch of people that were going through all these images and creating products in our catalog. So we had a lot of complicated operational problems we had to solve before we could launch the product. That's really impressive. I can't even imagine tackling a problem of that magnitude and scale.

But as an entrepreneur does, you figure it out and you got really creative and it worked. So you are not the only person that was in this space. We got to talk about Instacart. They show up on the scene. Did that stress you out? When was the day you realized, okay, this is a competitor in the space, here's what I'm thinking, here's what I'm feeling, here's what we're going to do. So a friend of mine sent me an article, actually, and it was about Instacart having announced,

I think they had raised $200 million when I initially found out about them. And so I thought, man, this company's raised a lot of capital. here I am, I had not raised any outside money. I was only using my own capital at this point. But the opportunity was that Instacart was focused only on the coasts at that time. So they were a New York, San Francisco company. And I saw this massive opportunity in the middle of the country. And ultimately, where shipped became hugely successful, you know, now they're both national companies. But I think if you looked at the data, you would probably find that shipped is the number one player in most of the markets that are in the middle of the country, the southeast, the southwest,

the Midwest. Those are markets where Shipped was able to really grow and become the number one player. And that's how we ultimately were able to win. Yeah, that's incredible. And as a ship user myself, I can tell you it's an incredible product, especially with the integration of Target, which, you know, my wife and Target, they're just BFF. And so it's a super helpful app, super helpful feature set that you guys created, which is impressive. So you started this thing on your own, with your own money, you started slow, and eventually it became a team. So talk to me about your stress levels as you kind of started to go, okay, I need more help. I can't do this on my own. Well, one thing I will correct there is I started with a team. There was an initial group of 10 people

that were instrumental in building the initial version of shipped. I didn't do it by myself. I certainly took the initial risk, but I had some amazing people on my team that took a bet on me and this crazy idea. And ultimately, we were all rewarded for it. But things get really complicated when you move from that first 10 to the first 100 and the first 200. You know, it's much more complicated to manage those kind of teams and attract the type of talent that we needed. So once we had the initial success, my job really shifted to two main roles. The first one was, raising capital and the second was building a team. And I spent just a tremendous amount of my time recruiting, reaching out to people, interviewing people, and focusing on building the team because

the team is ultimately what takes the company to where it's going. Wow. Yeah, you've got to start thinking about things like culture all of a sudden. You're like, I was just trying to build this thing. All of a sudden, people are wondering about the work environment and the culture. That's definitely a big shift that entrepreneurs have to make and business leaders listening. So you grew this thing. to what, 250 employees and 100,000 shipped shoppers around the country? We did. We had 100,000 shipped shoppers, and I don't know how many shipped has today. It's a multitude of that.

And, you know, one of the keys to being successful, to ship being successful, is the shoppers. And we were able to build a culture that was incredible. And the people that shop was shipped are some of the most amazing people. that you've ever met. Their dedication to our members was incredible. The way they would go the extra mile and the way they still do this today, they go the extra mile for their members and take great care of them really made the difference. And I think it's easy for companies to cater to kind of the high-end, the higher-income employees that they have. I always think the software

engineers and all the people that are highly paid that get all the fancy benefits and all the stuff. And the thing that made ship successful is we focused on catering to the frontline people because those are the people that are ultimately making it happen every day. And so we just built a great culture around serving our frontline. Yeah, that's impressive because those are the people who interact with the customers and therefore my perception of shipped is going to be based on those individual shoppers. And you guys realize that early on. Since you're a member, I'm sure you had some amazing shoppers.

Oh, yeah. It's the golden rule type people. They go, well, I'm going to go ask the manager. I'm going to check in the back. I'm going to go that extra mile to find that little menial item that you wanted. I go, wow, that's a lot of effort. Very impressive. So you've definitely built something incredible.

And then you sold it. What was the end price that it was sold to Target for? So Target acquired ship for $550 million at the end of 2017. Wow. That is astronomical. And of course, as a serial entrepreneur, you didn't just, you know, live on a coast somewhere. You decided, I'm going to start another project. So I want to get into that. Tell us about your new venture called Landing.

So I started landing shortly after I left shipped. And what landing is building is a membership for flexible living. So we're enabling people to join landing and live anywhere in the country with us and move around any time they wish. So you could have an apartment in Austin. You could live there for four or five, six months. And then when you're ready to try a new neighborhood or a new city, you just open the app, you pick your next apartment. And you never have to worry about signing a long-term lease or loading a moving truck with your furniture. All these apartments are fully furnished. They include everything. And so it's a very flexible way to live. And we believe it's the future of apartment living. We're really excited about building it. Wow. That's awesome. And you know,

with the housing market the way it is, I think a lot of people are going, all right, I can't buy a house and, you know, get some plants rooted here in this certain state. But I can move around the country and figure out where I want to live and experience some incredible cities. That's right. And that's what I think people are looking for, particularly in the phase of life, you know, 20s, 30s, probably don't have any children in the home yet. You know, it's just nice to be able to be flexible and not have to deal with the headaches. And people want to be able to take jobs in different cities. They want to try different places. And they want that ability just to be open opportunity. And so that's while we're building this. Yeah. So as we're talking about, you know, failure and setbacks,

are there any with this new venture that you'd be willing to share with us for you going, hey, I really, I struggled with this. Here's how we overcame that. Or here's what I'm dealing with. right now? Well, I'll tell you, every company has a bunch of little tiny failures inside of it. I mean, if you think every day, there's something that we're failing on and we're assessing and working on getting better at. Landing happens to be an extremely operationally complex business. There's a lot of technology. There's people in the field that are taking care of these apartments. We actually have our own distribution centers where we bring furniture in and deliver and install in all these places. So there's a lot of opportunity for failure. But I view

every one of these as opportunities to improve. And over time, you get this compounding effect. And this is in any business. The better you get at performing all of the basic little pieces, the harder it is for the next person that comes along that wants to compete with you to figure all those things out. They have to relearn all these lessons. And so I get excited thinking about the compelling effect of if we get 1% better every single day, how much of an advantage we gain over time. And so we're constantly learning from those lessons here. And we train people inside of landing that it's okay to make a mistake. We actually encourage people to shine a light on it, is what we say. Shine a light on the failures so that we can all learn and not make the same mistakes

again as a company. Yeah, that's an awesome principle to run your business by. So as you've been a part of all kinds of business ventures. If I'm an entrepreneur, we're getting lunch together, and I'm sitting there, I'm frustrated with my own setbacks. What encouragement would you give to me based on all of your learnings and your years in entrepreneurship? Well, the first thing is you're miles ahead of most other people if you've already taken the first step to be an entrepreneur. It's not easy. You have to be a little bit crazy as I tell people to take that step. The rewards are huge, but the risks are also huge. So keeping that in mind, you know, the next piece is you're going to figure it out. You know, that's the, have the confidence that you will solve it. Any problem

that is thrown at me, I will figure it out. And entrepreneurs will find a way. And if they can't find a way, they'll make a way. And so that's what I'd use to stay confident and focus on the future. You know, never forget that today might be tough, but in a year or two, I don't even remember the crazy things I was dealing with last year. You know, I've moved. moved on. I'm on to the next set of problems. It's so funny how over time, what was a big deal in the moment later on is really not a big deal, and you forget about it. Yeah, I mean, as you've just shared your story, there's so many pieces of just resilience and perseverance, and, you know, I'm just going to go figure it out, we're going to find a way, we're going to make a way,

I'm going to get amazing people around me who are smarter than me, who can figure out all of the technology pieces and all the complexities. And you seem to be drawn to complex businesses. Am I wrong? No, I am. You might say I'm a glutton for punishment on that, but, you know, I am drawn to complex businesses because I see, when I see hard things, I see the opportunity to create value. You know, most people don't want to do the hard things. They want the easy thing. They want to start a simple, easy business and something that's cool. And what I focus on is going and solving really hard problems where it creates a lot of value for my customer. And I know if I get it right, and I will get it right, that there's a lot of value to be created for my team, my customers,

my investors, and that's what played out with shipped, and certainly I hope the same thing plays out with landing. Well, a lot of the leaders listening, they're running businesses, they're leading their teams, and I'm just inspired by people like you who are out there solving incredibly complex problems that impact so many people, even if it's just right there in your own community. to start. And the stuff that you guys are doing that all of our leaders listening are doing really is the backbone of the economy. And so I'm just inspired for you to share some of this encouragement with them. So I want to wrap with this. One piece of advice that you found yourself

replaying in your mind anytime you've faced setbacks. That's a good one. Is there a mantra that you go, all right, here we are again. Here's how we're going to, or do you just go, I'm going to Google it. All right, I'm going to Google my way out of this. You know, the thing that I think about a lot is the whole of the game is staying in the game. I read a great book called The Infinite Game, and I think that really, really resonated with me a lot, which is, everything's hard, but if you can just stay in the game, you're winning, right? And you just keep playing until it turns your way. And a lot of times it will. There's been so many businesses out there and ideas that maybe when they started it wasn't the right time or wasn't the right market, but people stick with it and they saw that incremental progress.

and then one day, boom, you have this huge success on your hands. So I think about staying in the game and playing the infinite game. Yeah, we're big Simon Seneca fans over here. And Dave Ramsey always says that he's a 30-year overnight success because people go, Dave, this is amazing, everything you've just, overnight, you've just become so successful. And he looks back over the 30 years starting on a card table in his living room, and every entrepreneur can go back there

and remember those early days and how hard it was and the grind. And then, like you said, you don't even remember what, oh yeah, I forgot that that was even a problem. That's adorable. That was my problem back then. Now we've got different problems. And so the entrepreneurial journey is something that's, you can't help but be inspired by people like you and like our leaders listening who just persevere because they care about their team. They care about the customers. And they just love business at the end of the day. It is the best game there is. I love business. I was never into sports. I think the most fun game you could ever play is business.

Hey, you turned out okay and your body is better for it. All your joints are working well, so that's good. Well, Bill, it's been a pleasure talking with you, super pumped about your new venture landing, inspired by all of your success and thankful for your encouragement to our listeners today. Well, thank you so much for having me on, and I hope you have an awesome afternoon. Thanks so much. Thank you so much, Bill, and congrats on your new venture. So Bill shared how he dealt with setbacks and roadblocks that he faced with shipped.

But how do you deal with stress when you step into a whole? hard situation. We'll have a conversation about that right after this. All right, coming up, I talk with Brian Williams, one of our board members and senior executive vice president of Ramsey Plus. Now, through several leadership positions, Brian's been known to tackle some of the most challenging problems we face as a business. So he's going to share some ways to help you manage the stress that inevitably comes with those challenges. Here's our conversation. Brian, it's so great to have you back on the podcast. Man, it's glad to be back. Thanks so much. So we were talking about how to deal with stress as you step into hard things, and I immediately thought of you. I don't know if that's

good or bad. Personal brands, you know, sometimes you can't define it. It just happens. Well, we've worked together for a long time. You've been in lots of leadership roles, stepping seemingly into the new and broken things. Is that a fair? Yeah. It kind of has become the thing that I've done. But you have trust from our leaders to go, we need to get Brian on this. Yeah. And thankfully, I've kind of been in the same spot for a little while now, so hopefully I've found my groove. That's good. How many years have you been here now? 16. Wow. So what are some of those examples of the new and broken things you maybe have stepped into? Well, with the new thing, and this is how we started working together. It was Christie Wright and Business Boutique. And so we kind of took that

from an idea and one live event one time into a whole business model. And so kind of formed the team from scratch and the business model from scratch and had a ton of fun creating stuff out of just concept. And then from there, took over the every dollar business and got that back on the rails from a digital subscription budgeting app. And then we kind of spent some time and put that together with Financial Peace University. And that was almost like an internal disruption, kind of taking a legacy analog business, making it into a more of a digital subscription business and kind of taking a legacy product into the next generation. Wow. And here you are, Senior Executive Vice President of Ramsey Plus, which houses Financial Peace University and every dollar and so much in there. And on top of leading that whole team, you had a lot going on personally at home as well. What was going on?

Well, this year's been a bit of a challenge. Earlier this year, I was diagnosed with stage one cancer and wasn't sure kind of how intense it was or what was going on. And so it had impacts, as you can imagine, both here. at the office and at home. So you've got everything going on professionally. You've got this diagnosis going on personally. How did you manage all of that? And what was that like on the team side? Well, part of it out of the gate was just a lot of communication. Like as soon as I got word of what was going on, I emailed Dave and some of the people

that I'm closest with on the operating board and just started the path of communication. to let everybody know that that's closest to me, that's most directly involved. Not even what's going on, but what could be. Because there's a considerable amount of time where there were more questions than answers. But having the people closest to you walk through a really stressful time was it's just part of what we do here. And so in that, the thing that I love most about Dave is got an email fired back right away. And within the hour, like, he's standing in my front door and he's like, I'm just here to pray with you. I'm here to be with you, give you a hug, and just let you know that you're not alone in this.

And it's that kind of leadership is what makes this place really special. Yeah, and you have some incredible relationships with other leaders here. And a lot of people looking in go, well, that's weird. You don't need to be friends with these. These are just coworkers. What do you say to people like that? Well, I mean, we talk a lot about, like, our leadership construct here. And I know other leaders in the past on Entree leadership have come in and we talk about vision, results.

The relationship side of this is truly how we lead. Both our teams and our peers and our coworkers is from a very relational standpoint. We talk about 2 a.m. friends. Like when the rubber meets the road and bad things happen, it's somebody you can pick up the phone and call it 2 a.m. Or when you get a potential cancer diagnosis, you can fire off text messages and emails to the people that you're closest to. And they're going to be right there by your side. That is truly how we lead here from a relational standpoint. Well, it reminds me of the John Deloney quote, friendships are your emergency fund for life.

The relationships are the emergency fund for life. And you clearly had that in this time of need. And not only on the personal side, but on the team side, what was it like handling the stress of trying to lead this entire business with, you know, over 100 team members? So we spent a lot of time and I've said often, like, we kind of plan for the worst and pray for the best and hope that we're shooting somewhere in the middle. And so we spent a considerable amount of time with the operating board and with my leadership team kind of making sure that the holes were filled because I had just lost two leaders on my leadership team. And we knew we had some things that I was trying to fill the holes in the void of my team in. And so we knew we needed to take care of our team.

We needed to continue the business performance and we needed to fill the holes. And so I sat with Dave, the operating board, my leadership team, and we kind of shuffled the deck of like how do we cover? this to ensure that if I'm going to be out for a considerable amount of time, that we're going to be okay. And the level of trust across the board was extremely high because we ended up taking the same leaders and just kind of shifting their roles so that everything was covered. And we pulled in Daniel Ramsey to kind of sit as my proxy in my seat. And we moved forward. Thankfully, I was only out for a short amount of time, but we had plans in place to cover six months plus for me being out. Well, for those who are wondering where you're at right now, health-wise,

can you give us an update? Absolutely. I've got a clean bill of health, completely cancer-free. I went through surgery, and thankfully it was contained there. And so I was out for a short amount of time to recover from surgery. And then slowly kind of walked back into my seat. And I think now I can confidently say I'm back to as close to 100% as possible for this being a short amount. of time, but there's still a lot of good communication and grace to continue through scans and treatments. Yeah. Praise God.

I had a good time hugging you when I found out the news. Absolutely. So to kind of wrap this up here, recapping, you would say the key to managing stress when you're stepping into hard things as a leader, communication, trust, and amazing relationships in place. Yes, absolutely. The relationships are key. Finding a happy balance between vulnerability and good.

boundaries, especially in a professional setting. Like, you can take this overboard. And that's why, like, we've got the no gossip core value because you don't want to completely, you know, because some people, it's not going to be a medical condition. It's just going to be the added pressure of what's going on in your business. And you don't want to take things too far and overshare or, or betray somebody's trust. And so, like, finding good boundaries, but yet being at a place where you can be a real human and be vulnerable and really say like I'm struggling here and this is some things I need. And so being able to on a text thread or in person just jump in and have a good, deep relationship with somebody is vital, especially in a leadership level. Yeah. So for the leader that wants to take steps towards

this, they want to have great communication, trust, relationships, you know, in their business, how can they take the right steps towards that if they're not there right now? Well, it's something that doesn't happen overnight. It is by degrees, but really kind of finding somebody that that you can relate to. We say, you know, quite often on our level, it's, it's the people that we're in the foxhole with and we're doing battle side by side. And so, like, starting to take steps towards how do we, like, start to open the door from a trust standpoint? And usually you have to take the first step. And like, are we good? Cool. Okay, let's keep going. And just being able to share, like, where you're struggling, what are the things that you want to be called out on? Can you really

step up and say, like, hey, I've got some blind spots and I know what those are. And I'm, but like when you see me do something stupid, will you be the one to call me out because I'll trust you? And by degrees over time, like that grows and you get to a point where you don't even have to ask and they'll just bring it to you. But they do it from a place of like, I want you to be better and you want you to be better. So here, I'm going to push into this. So it sounds like you have to show up first. Absolutely. And it's not as it's not a reciprocation thing of like, well, if I do this, other people would do it for me.

It's just from a point of this is what leadership looks like. Yeah, and good open communication along the way of like, hey, what I'm looking for is this. And if you can be that person to walk alongside me and like let me kind of bounce ideas off you and have a like open, trusted working relationship, then I think we're good. And sometimes it's awkward to have that initial conversation of like, will you be my friend? But it is, you know, eighth graders on the playground going like, hey, can we do this? Well, most leaders just want to muscle through and not admit that they don't have it all together. but being open and going to another leader and saying,

hey, I need help in this area. I'm not okay over here. Can you help? That takes a level of vulnerability, but I think that also creates such an amazing bond. That willingness to just like muscle through and do it in a place of isolation, that's where burnout happens. And that's where leaders fall off the rails.

Well, Brian, I love your story. I love knowing you for now for almost a decade and appreciate amazing people like you in place leading the charge here at Ramsey. Thanks, brother. Proud of you. Thanks so much, Brian. truly one of my favorite relational leaders in this building. Like Brian mentioned, having other leaders in your corner is crucial for getting through hard situations.

So if you want to get connected with like-minded business owners who can help you navigate your challenges, check out Entree Leadership Elite, where you can join what we call advisory groups. To learn more about Elite, just use the link in the show notes. Hope you enjoyed today's episode of the show. If you did, give us a five-star rating and write us a review. We appreciate your feedback. And the simplest way to help us grow this show is to send this episode to a friend. Be sure to follow us at Entree Leadership wherever you hang out on social media.

This episode was produced by Tim Hull, edited by Jacob Harrison, and mixed and mastered by Will Rutter. I'm your host, George Camel, and on behalf of the entire Entree leadership team, thanks for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading. If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like The Dr. John Deloney Show. Mental health challenges and hurting relationships happen to everyone, but they don't have to define you. I'm Dr. John Deloney and I help people navigate through the messy things in their lives on the Dr. John Deloney show. I'll walk alongside you as you face parenting, marriage, and other relationship challenges,

and I'll walk alongside you as you try to connect with people as you face depression, overcome anxiety, and learn how to change your life. Listen, I want you to be well. Listen to the Dr. John Deloney show wherever you listen to podcasts.