The Nick Bare Podcast - 064: The Lessons I Learned in Nashville | A Founder’s Journey

Episode Date: April 29, 2024

Today's episode marks the end of my filming in Nashville. As my family and I move back to Texas, I am looking back at the last eight months and how valuable they have been as a season for me to sharpen my ax. There are hundreds of lessons I've learned in this season, but in this episode, I'm picking the six that have impacted me the most. I am so grateful for my time in Nashville because, with it, I am now returning to Texas more energized and full of vision and inspiration, ready to build the next chapter of BPN. Save 10% at BPN Supps: https://bit.ly/nickbare10audio Follow for more:  IG: https://www.instagram.com/nickbarefitness/ YT: https://www.youtube.com/@nickbarefitness Topics: 0:00 Intro 1:05 Welcome 2:33 Looking back at the past 8 months 7:03 What’s brought me back to Texas 11:11 Lessons from Nashville 13:53 Professional ambition and personal presence 22:37 The loudest criticism 24:30 Entrepreneurship is 80% vision 33:34 Decentralized organizational structures 44:17 Change breaks the brittle 52:52 Necessary endings 1:01:49 You’ll never know if you don’t try

In this episode of the podcast, I am sharing six lessons that I learned while living here in Nashville, Tennessee. Many of you know that about eight months ago, I moved myself, my family, and a small team out here to Nashville after stepping down from the CEO role in the business. And I have learned more in this past year of being a business owner and an entrepreneur. and a leader than I have learned in the previous 12 years. A huge learning year for myself personally and professionally. And what I want to do is to share some of these lessons, not all of them because there are potentially hundreds that I've learned in these last eight years

while I've been sharpening my axe here in Tennessee. But I want to share a few with you about what I've learned in this last season. Well, guys, this is the end of a chapter. This is the end of the Nashville, Tennessee chapter. So I thought it was fitting to do an episode discussing the lessons that I learned in Nashville. We've been here for about eight months, total. And there are so many lessons that I learned while being here since moving from Texas.

And if you want all the context, all the information, the backstory about why we moved to Nashville in the first place, the goal, the intent, the plan, and then why we're leaving Nashville and going back to Texas, I recorded an entire episode breaking that down. That is episode 054 of the Nick Bear podcast talking about me moving back into the CEO role of Bear Performance Nutrition and my family moving back to Texas, closing down our Nashville office. But if you're not going to listen to that whole episode or if you haven't listened that whole episode, I will provide some high-level context and overview right here. but I really would encourage you to go listen to episode 054 of the podcast. Now, we moved here to Tennessee in late August of 2023. And right now, as we're recording this episode,

my house is being packed up by movers. There's boxes everywhere in our home. and we are leaving Nashville and heading back to Texas tomorrow afternoon. So this is literally my last full day as I'm sitting here recording this episode here in Tennessee, here in the Nashville chapter. And when we originally moved here the end of August, I moved down of the CEO role of the business months before. and I was trying to plan for my next step and stage as the founder and where I was going to focus my time and energy.

And to be honest, stepping out of the CEO role, while it felt like the right decision at a time, now looking back, wasn't necessarily the right decision in the long term, but I did need that time to process and plan for. this next stage. And I'm a big fan of Irwin and McManus and his books and his podcast and his sermons. And one of the things that Irwin talks about is sharpening your acts. And sometimes you're in between seasons. This could be periods of your life. This could be transitions. It could be jobs. It could be a whole lot of different things. But when you're in between seasons, there's

often this downtime, this lull, this period where you're in between one goal and the next. And a lot of people will freak out in this season. They want to jump into the next. Or they feel like they're wasting time. But the reality is when you're in between seasons sometimes, what you're actually doing and can be doing is sharpening your axe. I see the Nashville chapter as an eight-month period where I sharpened my axe. I needed this eight months to learn from the previous 12 years of building the business and then what I was going to do next and where I wanted to be, where I needed to be what I wanted to be doing, what I needed to be doing. Eight months of sharpening my axe. This was a lot of deep work. There was a lot of intentional

thinking, a lot of reading. I talked to a lot of mentors. And I learned a lot about myself and the business and what I wanted to be working on in those eight months. Nashville in itself was a period where I sharpened my axe to go back to where I'm heading tomorrow, Texas, to go back to war, to go back to battle, to build where I need to be building for this next step. And when we got here to Tennessee in late August, like I said, I was out of the CEO where all the business. business. I was trying to navigate being a new father and a dad and being a more committed and present husband. I was trying to find my role in the business and where that played and or I truly contributed my greatest value to the team, to the business, the organization. I felt lost. You know, when we came out here, I felt confused. I felt lost. Things didn't really

feel right. But I wanted to try something different. I wanted to try something new. And after being in Texas from 2014 to 2023, I thought a move was going to facilitate different strategies and thought processes and just a different way of thinking that I could add to the business to help the business go to the next level.

And it did that. It did. but in a completely different way than I ever could have imagined or really ever wanted in the beginning. So what happened when we were here in Nashville is, you know, we moved here and I thought this is this was what I wanted. This is what me and my family needed. This is what the business needs for this next phase when in reality it wasn't.

And I decided to move back into the CEO role, take control of the business again, build the way that I wanted to build with a team that I wanted to build with. And that shook things up a lot. And it forced a lot of change. It moved a lot of people. And I learned a tremendous amount throughout that time. Good and bad.

Good and bad. But we moved here for growth opportunities and to try something different. realized after a few months it wasn't the right decision. And I had to have some hard conversations with my family and the team, friends, employees. And we made the decision to move back to Texas. And that's what we're doing as of right now. So the team that moved down here with me, Jordan and Ian, they're already back in Texas. They're already settled.

And me and my family now are packing up today and we're moving back tomorrow. but I needed this eight-month chapter to sharpen my axe. And I'm going back to HQ this week with a new mindset, a new approach, a different perspective, a lot of growth, another level of, in my personal opinion, personal and professional maturity. I think I matured a lot in these last eight months, personally and professional. professionally. And I'm going back to Texas with this energy that I haven't had in years. Years. I mean, when I decided to jump back in the CEO role, I told the team, I said, I haven't had this level of energy since 2019. Energy to build, to attack, to develop, to lead. I love leading. And I haven't had this, I haven't had this energy since 2019.

and I can feel it again, and it feels so good, it feels so right. So that's in the context of why we moved originally, why we're moving back. I've been back in the CEO seat now since January, and at the time of this recording, it is April 24th, 2024, so it's been a few months now, and we've made a bunch of changes within BPN, structurally, organizationally, working on a,

series of new projects. We've eliminated some projects. And we've just become very hyper-focused on a few key initiatives in the business that we know are going to move us towards where we want to be in the next one, three, five, ten years. I'm excited. I'm really excited to get back to Texas and lead the team in person. I'm very grateful for the opportunity to be back in the CEO seat. I really am. and I know this next chapter, although it's going to bring a lot of challenges, we're going to do things differently.

We're going to maintain that same BPN grit and culture and energy and vibe and value system, but we're going to do something different this time. And that's what I'm excited for. So if you haven't listened again to episode 054 of, of the podcast. That provides a whole bunch of context into what I briefly just mentioned here. And again, I could list 100 plus topics of things that I've learned in these last eight months. But I have five things that I've listed out. Five things that, well, let's say, I have one, two, three, four, five.

I have six things. I have six things that I have listed out that I believe are things that I haven't talked too much on before. Because as I've been recording these episodes the last couple months, I mean, really since I got to Nashville, I've been sharing things that I've been learning in real time. That's what I love about the way that I personally use social media and the podcast and YouTube videos. is I'm just sharing what I'm learning as I go along the way with building a business and leading a team and being a husband and now a father, almost a father of two in August.

Steph is due with our baby boy here in August. And the way that I like to use my social media platforms is just sharing what I'm learning as I go because I'm just figuring it out the same way that everyone else is figuring it out. And I make some right choices and I make some wrong choices

and I succeed sometimes but I also fail more times than I succeed. And I wouldn't say that Nashville in itself is a failure. Was it the right choice? Man, it's hard to say. Maybe. Maybe not.

If we didn't move here to Nashville, I don't think I would have had the opportunity to sharpen my axe for eight months anywhere else. And I think if I would have stayed in Texas, and this is being very honest, if I would have stayed in Texas and not moved to Nashville, I think I would have gotten pretty burnout and defeated and just beat down. So I do believe that God has a plan for everyone. and I believe that part of God's plan for me was for me to come here to Nashville and make some choices that I'm now correcting and fixing but learning from those choices.

And I sharpened my axe here. And getting back to Texas, I'm coming back with a brand new, freshly sharp, like I said, ready to attack. ready for battle. So the first lesson that I learned is that professional ambition and personal presence can live simultaneously. I used to think that it was this or that, not this and that.

This being your professional ambition and that being personal presence. So the way that I view these two things differently, or professional ambition, for example, is your career. It's the business you start, the organization you work for, what you do to fulfill your passions, your ambitions, but also to make money and support yourself and your family. that's professional ambition building a career building a business building your resume and then personal presence the way that I view it is being with your family building a family spending quality time

with your friends and family and it's separate and distinct from your professional ambitions You know, it's when you're with your spouse and you're with your kids. You're actually there. You are where your feet are at. You're engaged in conversations. You're not thinking about the emails or the text messages or the projects that you're working for in your career while you're with them. You're present.

And for a long time, I mean, I still do. I've struggled with that. having a separation between professional ambition and personal presence. And my world got rocked when Charlie was born. Because for the longest period of time, I could spend a lot of my time building the business, focused on work. And if I'm being honest, I neglected Steph and my relationship and my marriage early on because I was so hyper-focused on the business.

I was not personally present. And then when Charlie was born, I was scared that I was going to keep living my life the way that I was living it and neglecting my responsibilities and my family and being present and just being this deadbeat dad that was just focused on building a business and building a career. And you look back 30 years later and you missed out on your kids' lives

and they don't want to speak to you or talk to you ever again. I was afraid of that once Charlie was born. It was this very real moment where I thought, holy crap, like these days are ticking by. I need to maximize every day that I have. And for a period of time,

I thought that it's either this or that. And they can't live simultaneously. and then we moved down here to Nashville, part of the reason we moved is that I thought I needed physical separation from the business to force myself to not be a workaholic, to force myself to allow me to be personally present

with my family. I thought I needed to actually create physical space. And that did help. in the beginning. I mean, in the beginning, being physically separated from the business and the day-to-day of the operations and just a lot of the noise that was going on, that physical distance and space did allow me to spend more time, more quality time, more focus time, with and on my family.

But as that time went on, it actually created more negative consequences as opposed to positive benefits. Being away from the business that I spent over a decade building, being away from the team that I loved leading, being away from the brand and the products and the storytelling

and everything back in Texas was really hard. And I missed it a lot. And I had extreme feelings of guilt. Like I abandoned my baby. I abandoned this, I abandoned this thing that I built and the people that were building it with me because I didn't know how to be professionally ambitious and personally present at the same time.

So it was like this shift where we got to Nashville and when we got here, that physical distance allowed me to spend more time on it with my family, which felt great. I thought I was making steps in the right direction. And the longer I was away from the business, the more unhappy I became. Because I wasn't actually working on things that fulfilled me any longer. I wasn't working on projects with people that I was truly passionate about. And that part of me started dying and it ate me up inside. Truly, it was destroying me.

Steph saw it, friends saw it, family saw it. I missed building this thing that I loved so much with the people that I loved so much because I personally didn't know how to juggle both things simultaneously. So the longer we were in Nashville, the more lonely I felt, the more unhappy and unfulfilled I became. So when I made the decision to move back into CEO role and have the conversation with the team and my, my wife to move back to Texas,

as hard as that conversation was, we knew it was the right one. Because I was missing this part of me that I wanted and needed so badly. And when I'm working on things that I'm passionate about and driven by, and things that fulfill me, bring me joy, I'm a much better person to be around.

So I now know that you can be professionally ambitious and personally present simultaneously, if done correctly. And I'm still trying to manage and understand how to do that correctly. so I don't have any actionable steps right now. But what I will say is, if it were easy, like my dad told me when I first started the business in 2012, when I told my dad we were going to make a million dollars that first year,

he said, Nick, if it were easy, everyone would do it. We ended up doing $20,000 in revenue that first year. If it were easy to be professionally ambitious and personally present simultaneously. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. And it's not easy. Simple, possibly easy, no. Not even close.

But if it matters to you, you will make time for both. If your work matters, if your business matters, if your career matters, the work. work that you're doing, not the money that you're making, but the work that you're doing, the impact that you're creating, the legacy that you were leaving. If that matters to you, you're going to make time for it. And if your family also matters to you, you're going to make time for them. There's a way to do both. It's not necessarily easy, but it's doable. Both can live simultaneously. You know, one of my favorite quotes comes from the legend, Babe Ruth. And Babe Ruth once said,

the loudest booze come from the cheapest seats. And the reason I bring that up is because, as I shared this journey in the last year, with everyone who has watched and listened, there's been a lot of criticism. A lot of criticism. Moving a small team and their families and my family to Nashville, moving on to the CEO role, moving back into the CEO role, moving back to Texas, changes in the organization, in the business. I've shared all of this. Like I said in the beginning of episode, I've shared every step of my journey because I'm learning as I go and I'm making mistakes and I own that. I've made a lot of mistakes. And if you are afraid to make a choice or make a change because you're intimidated or afraid of the criticism that might come with it,

you're never going to get to where you want to be. The loudest booze, the loudest criticism comes from the cheapest seats. And you're never going to hear. those loud booze or the criticism to the people who are in the arena with you. It always comes from the bleachers. So I want to share that with you because if you're afraid to make a choice or a change because if there's a fear of criticism, just remember that. Babe Ruth said it best. The loudest booze come from the cheapest seats.

So the second thing that I want to share that I learned in Nashville is that entrepreneurship, in my opinion, is 80% vision and 20% execution. Now, I shared this on my Instagram story a few days ago, and there was a lot of pushback, which I love to see. I'd love to feel, experience, and learn from dialogue and a conversation between two people. Just because I say something doesn't mean that I'm always right. Just because someone else says something doesn't mean that they are always right. And I always respect and appreciate people who admit that they said or did something that was wrong. and they've changed their views or opinions based off of new information or research or things that they have personally experienced.

But I'm standing pretty firm on this one as of right now where I'm at my life and what I've experienced in this past year. Entrepreneurship, which life as a whole could be entrepreneurship. Your life, our lives are 80% big. and 20% execution. And here's why I feel so strongly about this against popular belief. Because a lot of people are going to say,

and I used to say it too, action is everything. And when I say that entrepreneurship is 80% vision and 20% execution, this doesn't mean I'm saying that execution matters any less. I want to make that very clear. I'm not saying that execution matters any less.

I'm just saying that vision is that important. Because if you don't have vision and you don't know what you're working on or why you're working on it, then that execution doesn't really matter. Because if you're executing or you're working or you're taking action on something that lacks focus, it lacks intentionality, it lacks discipline, you're going to be wasting so much time. you're never going to get to where you want to be or you're never going to reach your full potential. That's why I put so much weight and so much merit on vision.

Because when you have such clear vision, you know what you're working on, why you're working on it, how you're going to do it, and where that's going to take you, then when you put forward this massive effort on that vision, holy shit, that's going to take you places. You know, a few years ago, we implemented what is called EOS into the business.

And it stands for the entrepreneurial operating system. If you want to learn more about the EOS system, entrepreneurial operating system, read the book traction by Gina Wickman. And then you can also read a follow up to that, which is called rocket fuel. And then another one, which I believe is called What the HECM. heck is EOS. All about EOS. We implemented EOS into our business a few years ago. And since we implemented it into, we still maintain a lot of the core principles, but we've modified it to better fit our organization in the way we want to build the business. But essentially, EOS is a system that you apply to your business that puts people in certain roles based off of what the

business needs. It assigns functions and responsibilities per that rule, not to the individual, but per the role. It ensures you have the right people in the right seats based off of values and what's called GWC. Does that person get it, want it, have the capacity? It restructures the way you host meetings, the cadence of meetings, the structure meetings, and then the vision and goal planning for the business for the next 12 months, three years, five years, 10 years.

It's a very vision-focused model that you implement in your business. So like I said, we implemented EOS into our business a few years ago. I guess it was almost two years ago now. And when you build out your organizational structure,

at the very top is what is considered a visionary. and then you have the integrator below that. So the visionary is someone who comes up with dreams of, speaks of shares the vision. Like what is our core focus as a business? What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How are we doing it?

What are we doing right now? What are we doing next year? What are we doing in three years, five years, ten years? where are we going to be in 30 years? Some of the best entrepreneurs in the world are the greatest visionaries. Steve Jobs, Phil Knight, Jeff Bezos, true visionaries. They saw what they wanted to build decades before they actually did it. And they took action on that vision or hired people to help them take action.

action on that vision. And oftentimes, the visionary is separate and distinct from the integrator. They're two separate people. There are two different roles. The integrator takes the visionary's vision and makes it happen, executes, puts action and a plan in place to make that vision come true. I learned a lot through implementing EOS into our business. And one of the greatest things that I learned is that you can't outsource vision. And this is one of the mistakes that I made in this past year. Moving on to the CEO role was not a mistake necessarily, but I started outsourcing my vision when I did that.

And then when I moved my family, myself, a small team here in Nashville, I really started outsourcing vision. And I allowed other people's vision of where the business should go and how it should get there, play a greater role in some of the decisions we started making. And that was a mistake. It was not anyone's mistake other than my own because me, as the visionary of the business, I started outsourcing that. I started letting and allowing other people's vision.

vision and interpretation of where the business should go guides in the decisions we were making, which was not where we were supposed to go or how we were supposed to get there. But that's no one's fault except my own. I need to own that because I'm the one who made the decision and I outsourced the vision because I thought I couldn't be, again, going back to, I thought I couldn't be professionally ambitious and personally present at the same time. So I moved myself into a role that created and casted and shared less vision than I had previously. And man, that's really where things fell off.

So whether you're an entrepreneur, business owner, manager, director, employee, leader, of a team, leader of your family, leader of a business, leader of anything, 80% of your job is vision. You got to cast vision. Because if you don't cast vision and if you don't share that vision and if you don't cast it and share it frequently and often, no one's going to know it exist. And then no one knows what to work on, why they're working on it, and how that contributes to the greater goals of the organization, the team, the family. Entrepreneurship is 80% vision, 20% execution. But again, I want to share this. This doesn't mean that execution matters any less. The next lesson that I learned that I want to share with you is that

is that a decentralized organizational structure can, it can be dangerous. Now, when I say it can be dangerous, doesn't mean that it is dangerous. A centralized versus decentralized organizational structure. I'm going to break down the two and the differences. Now, I pulled this chart from Indeed, but I first heard about centralized and decentralized organizational structures when I was in the military.

And it looked at the way that you command and control an organization or a unit. Specifically, me coming from the infantry and the army, these units, whether that's a squad, a platoon, a company, a battalion, a brigade, these units survive or, or die based off of the leadership. The vision, the plan, the execution of the leadership. And when I say they survive or die, it's quite literal in the military. If a leader makes a wrong decision, there are life and death consequences associated with those decisions.

So the differences at a glance from Indeed, from a centralized versus decentralized organizational structure. Now, as I'm reading this, you can think of maybe the business that you operate and own and run or the workplace that you work for, whether you work for a startup, a small company, medium-sized company, or a large Fortune 500 company, there is either centralized or decentralized organizational structure, maybe a combination of the two. But as I'm talking about this, just think about how it applies to where you work, what you do, and what you experience on a daily basis in terms of management.

So centralized organizational structure, there's one body of management that decides procedures and develops strategies. Information comes from the top down and the employees follow executive orders. and the overall responsibility belongs to a small group of executives, and they execute the company's vision with little input. Now, this may be best for small organizations with fewer employees. Let's talk about decentralized. So centralize, think of top, down.

Executive team makes the decisions, and then everyone below them executes on those decisions. Decentralized. There's management at every level making decisions for their departments and teams. Departments communicate with each other more freely. Managers and employees share responsibility. This allows for feedback and opinions from employees. And it often works for large organizations with many levels.

So decentralized isn't necessarily top down. But it empowers everyone in the organization to, one, have responsibility and ownership, but make decisions that impact the health of the organization or the business. Now, decentralized can work for a smaller organization based off the people that you have on the team. I believe centralized organizational structures can work for nearly all levels of business. It obviously gets more complicated and bottleneck and you get that slinky effect when the organization gets really large and there's a centralized organizational structure. Think of it this way. If you want to pivot or move and adapt to anything and if you're a really large,

company or organization. We have to send it up. So it goes to your boss. It goes to your boss's boss's boss's boss. Your boss's boss's boss's boss. It goes to all these levels, which could take, man, weeks, months for something to get approved. And then finally, when you get an answer, weeks later, you find out I didn't get

approved. So there's this slinky effect. It's horrible communication. It's very ineffective or can be very ineffective for larger organizations. But if you're a small or medium-sized business, it can be super efficient. Like, hey, this idea, I'm going to push it up to my manager. My manager is going to go to the CEO and see what's going on. Approved 20 minutes later.

Could it be that easy. Decentralized, though. Decentralized works for larger organizations because it allows you to have multiple echelons. of leadership, management, and decision-making. So it doesn't slow things down tremendously, but you have to ensure that at each level you have very knowledgeable, competent, trustworthy, experienced directors, managers, employees

because of the decisions that they are making can positively or negatively impact the organization. So what I said is that decentralized organizational structures can be dangerous. Here's why. And here's one of the mistakes that I made trying to build out a business and organization, a culture that embraces decentralized organizational structure

because it gives everyone the ability to make decisions that impact the business, which is great. if you have the right people in the right seats that have the context, they have the knowledge, the experience, they understand the power in the way in which their decisions hold or can't impact the business. So what I ended up kind of doing as I stepped out of more of an operational role and I stopped providing all the vision that was previously

providing as I was sharpening my axe in the background, this decentralized organizational structure allowed for a lot of people to make decisions and the decisions were being made with lack of vision or context or understanding and we started moving in a bunch of different directions. And none of them were synchronized or communicated

in or collaboration, there's lack of collaboration in the decision that we were making. So we lost focus and we're working on a bunch of different things. Again, why? Because I stopped providing the vision and the guidance.

And I empowered a lot of people, which I do not regret. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I empowered a lot of people to make decisions on their own in the role that they were in, but I empower them to make decisions with lack of context and vision.

And that was a failure on my part. So decentralized organizational structures can be dangerous. They can, but they can also work very well if there is very clear vision and expectations and communication

and guardrails and two-way feedback. Constantly happening. So it can be great. It can be dangerous. As the founder, as a visionary, as an owner of a business, what you have to always be doing, and I'm saying this,

what you have to always be doing is because this is what I stopped doing. You have to always keep your finger on the pulse of the business. You have to know what people are working on, And this is not to say you have to control and micromanage. No, you have to know what people are working on, ask the questions why they're working on it to help guide them, teach them, mentor them, work on these things with these guide rails. Don't keep those guide rails too tight, but here's your left limit.

Here's your right limit. Go operate here. Because what happens if you go outside of this left limit is X, Y, and Z. and it's not aligned with our vision. And what happens if you go outside of this right limit is A, B, and C. And if we move in that direction, it strays away from the vision that we're all working towards and rowing the boat in the same direction towards.

That's going to get us to where we want to be in the next 12 months, 24 months, 36 months, 48 months, so on and so forth. So this is not a question of should you micromanage and over control your employees or your team. No. There's just two different styles of management and leadership. Centralized first decentralized. But none of them are effective or efficient without vision,

without constant feedback going both ways, creating guardrails for people to operate in. And it depends on the people that you have on the team. team. The experience level, the knowledge, the context, the background, the skills, all of those things truly do matter. I learned while being here in Nashville that change breaks the brittle. I heard that quote on a podcast a few weeks ago. When I'm running now, I listen to a podcast. I used to not listen to anything, but as life has become busier,

mainly because I've become a dad, I have just found that when I listen to podcasts on my run, I can kill two birds with one stone, and I just absorb content so well when I'm running. It is my most effective way of consuming content while I'm running. So I listen to podcasts while I'm running or audiobooks.

And one of my favorite podcasts right now, which I've mentioned already, is it's called Founders. And the host named David, he reads biographies, autobiographies, and then uses these founders episodes to share what he learned about these athletes, entrepreneurs, very successful world leaders. authors, and it's been super insightful. Like one of my favorite podcasts, I'm obsessed with it right now. I've been listening to episodes on every run. And one of the episodes, I can't remember which one, I'll top of my head. But he quoted someone and said, change breaks the brittle.

And I related to that so well. I also pulled this Nick Saban quote. And he said, if you're an average player, you want to be left alone because you want to slide by. If you're a good player, you want to be coached. If you're a great player, you want the coach to tell you the truth every day. The greatest players, the most successful teams and individuals, they want to be told what they're doing wrong and what they're doing right. because what they're doing wrong, they realize they have to change.

And if they change and they improve and they get better, they improve. They get better. The team improves. The team gets better. There's more wins. There's more success. But to make those changes,

while as uncomfortable as it may be, and while harder as it may be to hear some of that sometimes, that feedback, that criticism, that change is what facilitates growth. That change leads you to improvement. For some people, that change, that feedback, that criticism, which is constructive criticism, is so hard to hear that it breaks them. Change breaks people who are brittle. brittle being weak-minded, soft, afraid.

Why? Why does change scare so many people? Maybe because pride, ego, doubt, insecurity, emotions. If you want to be the best, if you want to be the greatest at what you do, you want to reach your full potential, there's something that's, it's going to have to change along the way. And if you're afraid of making that change or you don't want to confront that change

or you don't want other people to confront that change to or in front of you, you'll never get better. And that weakness will break you. Truly will break you. Now, the opposite of that is embracing change, asking for constructive criticism and feedback, inviting it in,

embracing the change you have to make, to get better. There's been a lot of people who have worked with me and worked for me, who have broke throughout a lot of the changes in the business. And our business has seen a lot of change in the last two years, just being very obvious and honest. In the last two years, you know, we've grown a lot. People's roles have changed. We've restructured departments. We've changed the way that we operate the business in terms of standard operating procedures.

And, I mean, you name it. We have changed it. I've been in like six different desks since we started operating in our current. footprint or HQ that we work on of. Actually, when I get back to Texas, the office that I'm moving back into is the office that I worked in in 2019 when I had all that crazy entrepreneurial vision and energy. So it almost feels like it's full circle. BPN is still a startup.

I think a lot of people think that when you start a business, that startup phase only last 12 to 36 months. Now, it can last decades. Decades while you're still a certain size. To be honest, I love the startup size. The size we're at right now, we are still considered a startup, even though I've been at it for 12 years. And the thing about a startup is that it's extremely challenging.

It's very hard. You don't come in at nine and leave it four. There aren't necessarily standard working hours. You do what you got to do to keep the business growing and developing and thriving. And you got to think differently. You got to think creatively. You got to embrace change. Startups are filled with change.

Startups are not for everyone. And I believe that too many people want to work for an entrepreneurial startup, but they don't want the work that comes with it. And that's broken a lot of people who have worked at and for not just BPN in the past, but other startups. So if you want to experience growth, you want to be submerged in it and you want to be challenged in a way that you've never been challenged before. and it's not just doing tasks and marking them off the list,

but it's truly problem-solving. Entrepreneurship, working for a startup is problem-solving. You're exploring and navigating uncharted territories for employees, for teams, for the organization as a whole. And if you're not ready for that, if you're not ready to be adaptable and pivot and adjust, and get your teeth kicked in and then stand back up and learn from what you did wrong and embrace what you did right, the startup world, that type of business will break you.

And that's not just applicable to building a business, but it's applicable to your life as a whole. In order to grow, in order to get better, you have to embrace change. I think we all know that at this point. and if you're resistant to change at any point, just to be resistant to change because you're afraid of what's on the other side of that change, it will break you because change breaks the brittle.

So the next lesson that I learned while in Nashville is that you have to know when you need necessary endings. And I think I shared this story on the podcast. So if I have, I'm resharing it. If I haven't, it's a new story. A few months ago, the BPN team, media team was here in Nashville and we were working on some projects. And we were at dinner, we were at So House at the end of the week where the team was in town. We were getting dinner.

And at that time, we already decided that me and my family and the team were going to move back to Texas. and we were at dinner. I saw Pastor Lyle Phillips, and I just finished reading the book called Trust by Henry Cloud. And as I went over to say hi to Pastor Lyle Phillips, I noticed that he was having dinner with Dr. Henry Cloud. And I loved trust. I was starstruck.

I was like, Dr. Henry Cloud, I just finished reading trust. That book came into my life at the perfect time. I needed that so much. So he started talking and I just started spewing all this. It was like me and my family moved out here a few months ago. I moved down to the CEO role of my business. I recently put myself back into the CEO role of my business. I'm moving my family back to Texas.

And he said, you got to read my other book called Necessary Endings. It's perfect for you right now. So I went home that night. I downloaded it on Audible and then I started listening to it, my run the next morning. And to this day, it's one of my favorite books I've ever read. Necessary Endings by Dr. Henry Cloud. A few quotes from there. You can't prune towards anything if you don't know what you want.

You have to figure out what you're trying to be or build and then to find. find what the pruning standards are going to be. That definition and those standards will bring you to the pruning moments, wherein you either own the vision or you don't. So in this book, he talks about pruning, and pruning parts of your life. It can be things that you're doing, people, relationships, jobs, projects.

There comes a time where we have to end certain things that we're doing or relationships we have or jobs that we're just doing to do, we have to prune part of our lives to allow the rest of our lives to flourish. And he uses the example. I know I've shared this example before, but a rose bush. If you've ever had a rose bush, you know that you have to prune a rose bush. You cut away the dead roses, some of the thorns, the stems, and when you do that, it looks empty, it looks bare for a period of time,

but you prune it so they can grow back bigger and stronger and truly flourish. You have to do the same things with your life. Necessary endings. Another one of his quotes, Getting to the next level always requires ending something, leaving it behind and moving on. Growth itself demands that we move on. without the ability to end things,

people stay stuck, never becoming who they are meant to be, never accomplishing all that their talents and abilities should afford them. Necessary endings. My point with all this is, don't wait to make a decision. It's not like a fine wine.

It doesn't get better with time. It doesn't get better with the age. If there's something you know you have to do, There's a decision you have to make. There's something you have to end. You got to do your due diligence. You have to make the most educated and responsible decision you possibly can. But sometimes you're never going to know what's the right or wrong answer.

You got to follow your gut with all the information you have. But you have to make a decision and you have to push forward with that decision. Sometimes you have to end a chapter. That's how Nashville has felt. I would say deciding to leave Nashville and go back to Texas was one of the hardest decisions of my entire life. And here's why. A few months prior, I moved my family, my daughter, Jordan, his wife, Michaela, Ian. we moved to Nashville.

I didn't just move myself. I moved my family. I moved other families out here to start this new chapter. I disrupted the business because I thought it was the right thing to do at that period of time. And if I'm being honest myself, it didn't feel right from the beginning. I knew it wasn't the best decision I could have made. and part of it, again, if you go back and listen to that previous episode of the podcast where I talk all about this, I share some insight. But I was definitely running from some things when we left Texas and came to Nashville.

And when I started thinking about what was next and the decision that I had to make, you know, I was sitting on this decision for a while. Like, do we stay in Nashville, or do we go back to Texas? And I thought for a period of time, do we move the entire brand team out here? You know, maybe we start moving some of the brand team, media, creatives, marketing out to Nashville. And maybe we have an even split between Nashville and Austin. Maybe that's what we do. I was like, that doesn't, I don't know if that'll work. I don't think that'll work.

The other option was stay status quo, is keep doing what we're doing. which definitely didn't feel right and would not have been effective for anyone or anything. And a third option was necessary endings. Ending the Nashville chapter, having the conversation with my wife telling her we have to move back to Texas as she is newly pregnant, having the conversation with Jordan and Michaela, asking them if they want to move back. to Texas with us, talking to Ian about it, talking to the entire BPN team about it. Some of the hardest conversations ever had because I knew those decisions weren't just affecting me and my family, but other people and other people's families and lives and where they

thought they were going to be and what they were going to be doing years and years down the road. It shifted the trajectory of lots of different people and lots of different families and their plans. And I didn't take that decision lightly at all. But when I made the decision of, okay, we have to go back to Texas, that is the right choice. I didn't sit on it for months. I made the decision, had the conversations, and we pushed forward. As hard as some of those conversations were. Because I knew it affected more people other than just myself.

but there's going to be times when you reach a point where you know you have to make a decision and there's not a very clear right or wrong and it has benefits and it has consequences for more people other than just yourself but you have to make the decision you have to move on that decision and if you don't make the decision and end things that require a necessary ending you're holding yourself back. You are holding other people back and you will never get to where you want to be in the course of your life.

And the last lesson that I want to share that I learned here in Nashville is that it's better to play your chips than to hold them. The truth is, you'll never know unless you try. I would have never known that Nashville wasn't the right place

for myself, my family, the business, if we haven't or hadn't come to Nashville. I probably wanted to have known that I was meant to and wanted to be back in the CEO seat if we wouldn't have had come to Nashville and I didn't sharpen my axe over these last eight months. You don't know what you don't know. And you'll never know unless you try and do it. And when you try and do it or do something or do anything and it doesn't work out the way that you thought it would or expected, that's okay. It is. But you have to be responsible enough and own that and then course correct and readjust and end things that need ended and then own that mistake or failure. Have the hard conversation.

and push forward and grow from it. That's the only thing you can do. One of my favorite books that I'm rereading is called No Rules Rule. The first time I ever read this book was a few years ago, and it's by Reed Hasting, who is the CEO or was the CEO. I'm not sure if he's still the CEO, Netflix. And Aaron Meyer, amazing book, talking about the innovations and differences that Netflix has applied to their human resources

and the culture they've built, the team that they have. And the book focuses on three key levers that build the culture of freedom and responsibility. The first is talent density. This is building a team of just high talent. people who want to be there, people who are passionate about what they're doing, who are optimistic, who are positive,

who are highly skilled, experienced, and just want to work to build something and win. You need talent density because the reality is just a few bad apples. A few people who are negative and pessimistic, low performers who just try to skate by, They will bring down the productivity and effectiveness of your entire organization. So if you have cancers in your organization or your team, you have to remove them.

Even if you have less people on the team, but you have a higher crew of talent, that is having a talent-dense organization. You want and need that. The second key lever is candor. this is constructive feedback or criticism that goes two ways where employees can provide feedback to executive leadership, CEO, founder, and then vice versa. But constructive criticism and feedback that follows a certain guide that Netflix has built. It's not just, hey, you're annoying me.

here's why it's here's some actionable steps of of why I believe you should try these things differently and the feedback loop that effectively promotes a high functioning team and organization. And then the third key lever is removing controls, but you can only remove controls in the business if you have talent density and you promote candor. and you can slowly remove more controls and Netflix has removed a lot of their controls. For example, they don't have an expense policy

at least at the time this book was written, they didn't. They don't have a vacation policy. You can take as much vacation as you want. And employees at Netflix performance is not judged on a single bet that succeeds or fails, but on their overall ability to move the business forward. So they encourage their employees

to place bets in what they believe in. So what I'm saying is, it's better to place your chips than to hold them. If you have, you know, if you are playing blackjack or you're at a casino and you get $1,000 worth of chips and you go to the table and you just sit there. You don't play any of your chips

because you're afraid to lose the chips. You're kind of just wasting time. I won't consider that strategic or strategic, smart, I would consider that scared. You're scared to lose your chips, but also you're scared to try to win some more chips. It's better to place the bet. Place the bet. And if you lose or you fail with the bet you placed, I guarantee you won't make that

that wrong bet again. I guarantee you will learn from that bet. So moving myself, my family, my team did now. Nashville, I had a plan and I placed that bet. And that bet ended up not being the right one. And that's okay. But I learned from it. So tomorrow I'm moving my family back to Texas.

And I'm now back in the CEO role. And I learned a lot from this chapter here in Nashville. I learned a lot. I learned a lot. And I don't regret the move. but I realized it wasn't the right move for my family and the team, the business. And once we got here and we learned that, we made the quick decision to move back and keep building. And people were going to say, oh my gosh, the money you wasted on that move and the distractions it caused.

and just the burden you put on the business through that. Yeah. There was a lot of that. I lost and wasted a lot of money moving to Nashville and then back to Texas. We had a beautiful dream house in Texas that we sold, that we can't get back. That's okay. Because if I would have never placed the bet, I wouldn't have known. I wouldn't have learned.

I wouldn't have been able to sharpen my axe. And maybe this was a chapter and a season that I needed to experience to put me in a place that I need to be in a few years. But do you want to get 10, 20, 30, 40 years down the road and ask yourself, what if? What if I would have placed that bet? I wonder what would have happened? Well, you can.

You can place the bet. And you can learn if it's the right one or the wrong one. And if it's the wrong one, you then have to make the decision. Do I course correct and readjust? Or do I just embrace that this is now my life and this is what I have to do and I have to live with this forever? Because you always have the choice. You're always in control. You really are.

You just need to allow yourself to embrace that and understand that. So this is my last podcast episode here in Nashville. The next episode we record and release will be back at BPNHQ in Round Rock, Texas, about 25 minutes north of the city. I appreciate you guys following along this journey, the season, this chapter. But it's time to get back to where we're meant to be and where we belong. Back in Texas.