The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Tom Fox, The Compliance Evangelist & Compliance Podcast Network

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

Tom Fox, The Compliance Evangelist & Compliance Podcast Network Compliancepodcastnetwork.net Biography Thomas R. Fox-the Compliance Evangelist® Tom is literally the guy who wrote the book on compliance with the international compliance best seller “The Compliance Handbook, 3rd edition” which was released by LexisNexis in May 2022. Tom has authored 25 other books on business leadership, compliance and ethics and corporate governance, including the international best-sellers “Lessons Learned on Compliance and Ethics” and “Best Practices Under the FCPA and Bribery Act” as well as his award-winning series Fox on Compliance. Tom leads the social media discussion on compliance with his award-winning blog, and is the Voice of Compliance, having founded the award-winning Compliance Podcast Network and hosting or producing multiple award-winning podcasts. He is an Executive leader at the C-Suite Network, the world’s most trusted network of C-Suite leaders. He can be reached at [e-mail].

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Not everyone can have a Chris Voss glow. It's a special glow, and those who listen are the only ones who can experienceoss glow. Not everyone can have a Chris Voss glow. It's a special glow. And those who listen are the only ones who can experience the glow. Tom Fox is a compliance evangelist, and he joins us today on the show. He's going to be talking to us about compliance, business, regulatory stuff, all that sort of thing you need to know to keep yourself out of trouble, you know, because you don't want to get into the trouble. We've all seen that movie.

Thomas R. Fox is the compliance evangelist. He is literally the guy who wrote the book on compliance with the international compliance bestseller, The Compliance Handbook, third edition, which was released by LexisNexis in May 2022. He's authored 25 other books on business leadership, compliance and ethics, and corporate governance, including the international bestsellers, let's see, Lessons Learned from Compliance and Ethics and Best Practices under the FCPA and Bribery Act, as well as his award-winning series, Fox on Compliance. He leads the social media discussion on compliance as his award-winning series, Fox on Compliance. He leads the social media discussion on compliance with his award-winning blog and his voice of compliance, having founded the award-winning compliance podcast network and hosting or

producing multiple award-winning podcasts. He's an executive leader at the C-Suite Network and the world's most trusted network of C-Suite leaders. And he joins us on the show now to make sure that we're in compliance. Welcome to the show, Tom. How are you? Great, Chris. Thrilled to be here with you today.

Thrilled to have you as well. Give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs and stalk you? The Compliance Podcast Network dot net. I'm on LinkedIn at Thomas R. Fox, and I have a second podcast network, thetexashillcountrypodcastnetwork.com. Where do you get time for all these podcasts, Tom?

Time, Tom, for all these podcasts? I work 12 to 15 hours a day, six days a week. Holy crap, and I thought I was doing a lot of four shows a day. That's pretty freaking amazing. And how many podcasts do you have on the Compliance Podcast Network? So there's 65 total, 50 of which are mine. Wow. That is a lot of work going on.

I'm tired already. I might have to go take a nap. So, Tom, give us a 30,000 overview, in your words, of everything you do and how you do it. I mean, not exactly down to detail of how you do it, just a summary, if you will. So from the compliance angle, I've been in this space. I'm a lawyer by professional training for about 15 years. I've been a chief compliance officer. I've been a general counsel.

In 2010, I went out on my own, and I wanted to be the nuts and bolts guy to help companies build compliance programs. I started blogging. That led to podcasting, and it led to finding a compliance podcast network. It blew up during the pandemic, and since that time, I've been pretty much full-time podcasting. There you go. Now, you have a whole array of what looks like, I think, coffee mugs on the shelves behind you. Is that correct? That's correct. Every time I start a new podcast, I commemorate it with a coffee mug. Ah, so these are all your coffee mugs. There you go.

So interesting. And you may need to buy some more walls and shelf space there the way you're going if you keep it up at this pace. So tell us about what your journey is. How did you become a lawyer? How did you get into compliance? And let's also set a foundation for what we mean by compliance. What does compliance mean exactly in the terms of business that you use it for? Compliance is generally recognized as legal or regulatory compliance with a law or set of regulations. I started off in anti-bribery, anti-corruption. There's one U.S. law that prevents U.S. companies from engaging in bribery outside the United States called the Foreign

Corrupt Practices Act. So I'm helping companies put compliance programs in place to comply with that law. That expanded out into anti-money laundering and export control and trade sanctions, but I'm primarily known as an anti-corruption specialist. Ah, anti-corruption. So do you work with large, you know, Fortune 500 companies or just everybody down and in between? Does everybody need to be worried about being in compliance these days? Anyone who does business internationally has to comply with this law. So if you're a $50 million or $10 million company, but you sell something overseas, you have to comply with the law.

If you're Walmart, the world's largest commercial retailer, you have to comply with this law. So it's a wide variety of companies, generally those doing business outside the United States as well as inside the U.S. So compliance with federal laws, regulations, trade, I suppose, the FTC, things along those lines. And the Department of Justice. Ah, the Department of Justice. We've had some people from them on. And some attorneys at work and stuff like that. justice? Ah, the department of justice. We've had some people from them on, uh, and some, some, uh, they used to be attorneys at work and stuff like that. Uh, so yeah, we've, we've met those people

and they're pretty cool. I see. We had some FBI people on things like that. Uh, so tell us your journey. What, what made you interested in compliance? What got you interested in becoming an attorney and kind of specializing in this field? So I became an attorney a very long time ago. I went to law school, came out. I was a trial lawyer for 25 years. So I'm a recovering trial lawyer. I left that, went into the in-house world and started off with a large energy company in Houston where I lived for 40 years. Then I became a general counsel at another energy company.

They violated that law i referenced the foreign corrupt practices act at that point i learned about compliance so this was 2007 the company got sold and i uh my job went away so uh i was uh at that point 50 uh and i decided what i really wanted to do with my life was race bicycles. So I went on this great adventure of bicycle racing, 20 and 40 Ks, until one Saturday after Thanksgiving in 2009, I got taken out by a Hummer on a train ride. Oh, no. That ended my cycling career.

And when I got enough energy to get on my walker and toddle into my office at home after a few months of rehabilitation. I decided I really enjoyed building compliance programs inside corporations. So I decided to be the nuts and bolts guy. And at that point, I knew nothing about social media. So I had my daughter set up a Facebook account, LinkedIn account, started with Twitter. I had no work. I had no clients. And the only thing I had on my hands was time.

So I started exploring social media, started blogging. I'd written, always written a lot as a lawyer. So that led to developing clients internationally, literally out of my house way before work from home. And I couldn't leave the house. I couldn't go to a meeting. I couldn't go have a dinner. I couldn't go to a conference. So I learned how to do all of that literally out of your house. And that's how it all started.

And I grew from there. There you go. Yeah, the podcasting just naturally came out of blogging. I started podcasting in 2012. There you go. It's an interesting business. It's a lot of fun. And a lot of people came out of COVID realigning their interests and finding what their flavor is and stuff like that.

Now, you've recruited a whole mess of people to your podcast network. How does that work? So I founded the network in 2017. In 2019, I decided I had to either get serious about it or move it to hobby status. So I quit practicing law, quit practicing compliance, bought all the cool toys, built this huge network. And at the end of the year, I'd made about $10,000. And I thought, well, that was an interesting experiment. I guess I have to go back to practicing law. So I started doing that again in 2019 or 2020. And then that worked till they shut the country down in March. And then what

happened was literally on May 15th of that year, every product provider in my space called me with the same question, which was how long to get access to your network? Because almost all marketing in the compliance world was done in person, trade shows, conferences, breakfast roundtables, in-person events, et cetera. And no one could do that. And by that time, I had the largest social media presence in compliance. And because of the work I'd done in 2019, where I made all of that $10,000, my answer was 24 hours. It was just simply a plug and play. Give me your stuff. I'll put it up. And that my little world blew up. And since that time I've focused almost exclusively on podcasting, trying to consolidate the explosion of growth I had in 2020 and see where I can take my network.

All right. So you talk about compliance as a business generator. What does that mean? And evidently, compliance can help make your business more efficient and more profitable. So if I'm an owner of a company out there and I really haven't delved much into compliance, tell me how this whole thing becomes a better business generator and more efficient, more profitable place. Sure. Unfortunately, compliance is seen as generally Dr. No inhabiting the land land of no the business of or the department of non-business that view is incorrect in my opinion properly seen compliance is a business process

and if it's a business process it can be managed it can be studied it can be monitored and it can be improved so i advocate that effective compliance equates to more efficient business processes. That leads to greater ROI and greater profitability. The controls every company has in place, literally every company, are financial controls, largely. How do you manage your money? How do you manage your income? How do you manage your outgo? How do you manage every expense? Well, compliance is basically financial controls.

And if you put robust financial controls in place, you're always going to have a better run company. And that means you're going to be more efficient. Compliance is not there. The best analogy I can give you is you don't have brakes on a car to go slow. You have brakes on a car so you can go fast. Well, the same with compliance. Compliance allows you to take on more risk because it manages that risk. And if you manage the risk, you can pivot, you can turn, you can accelerate in ways your competitors cannot do so.

There you go.