Latest / CEOs and ABCs / Kyle Lacy (Lessonly, Seismic, Docebo) Sobriety, Fatherhood, Burnout and the Power of Owning a Revenue Number in Marketing #008

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Kyle Lacy (Lessonly, Seismic, Docebo) Sobriety, Fatherhood, Burnout and the Power of Owning a Revenue Number in Marketing #008 · CEOs and ABCs

• 0:00
  Speaker A: The first decade of my career, 90% of every waking moment was spent on more egotistical thinking like, how do I further my brand? How do I further what I'm doing? And then when you have your first kid and your family grows, you get married, you start realizing that you're not the center of the world and you start adjusting accordingly.
• 0:21
  Speaker B: Being a good parent is reflecting and looking at ways to do it better. Not necessarily beating yourself up, but looking at how you behaved, how you showed up, and how you can show up better. And we're just always growing, we're always learning.
• 0:33
  Speaker A: I wish that I would have cut alcohol out of my routine earlier. Head Trash is the third person dialogue. That's the pessimist that lives in your head. That's head trash in my. You make the decision to grab a water or a Sun alcohol seltzer, then that moment is gone.
• 0:54
  Speaker B: Welcome to CEOs and ABCs. Real stories from execs who lead at work and show up at home. Career moves, parenting wins and fails and everything in between. I'm your host, Kevin Rice. Here's today's episode. Welcome back to CEOs and ABCs. My guest today is Kyle Lacy, who's currently the CMO at Docebo. He's built an Incredible career in B2B marketing, leading teams through hypergrowth, acquisitions, and global scale. Before that, Kyle helped scale lessonly into a powerhouse that was eventually acquired by Seismic, where he went on to serve as the SVP of marketing. What I appreciate most about Kyle is his willingness to share the personal side of leadership, the burnout, the battles, self worth, the head trash, as he calls it, and how the pressures collide with being a present husband and dad of two boys. In our conversation, Kyle opens up about the collision between career success, new fatherhood, the role sobriety and exercise has played in reshaping his life, and how he's learned to repair when stress leaks from work and home, and the legacy he hopes his kids will take from watching him love what he does for his career. This episode isn't about balance because, as you'll hear, Kyle doesn't really believe in it. It's about presence. It's about the rhythms, the boundaries, and the small rituals that help ambitious leaders not just when at work, but also show up at home where it matters most. My guest today is Kyle Lacy. Kyle, thank you so much for being here.
• 2:22
  Speaker A: My pleasure. My pleasure to be here.
• 2:24
  Speaker B: Kyle, you've had a fantastic career in B2B marketing. And when you look back on your career about the time when you became a dad in those kind of first, like 30, 60, 90 days. How did your executive pace at work collide or intersect with being a new father at home?
• 2:45
  Speaker A: I was at a venture capital firm called Open View, which we, my wife and I had moved to Boston from Indianapolis, and it was the first time I had lived somewhere else. And we had been. I had been at the firm for a year and we had our. Our first son in Boston. And I was very, very lucky that OpenView had an awesome fraternity policy and I could take as much time as I want. And we kind of embraced remote work before. Remote work was a thing like all that stuff. And I was also very lucky and still to this day to have a partner, my wife, that was extremely supportive in taking care of Kaden, our oldest, and making sure that I had the bandwidth to support the business. I think one thing that it taught me pretty quickly was if you have the right people around you, then you can, you can take the time needed to support family, mental health, whatever.
• 3:55
  Speaker B: That's amazing. With my first son, I took maybe two weeks off. I wish I would have taken more time off to just be like really present in those first few moments when he was born, but it was hard for me. When I was out of the office and I was there with my newborn son, my brain was still going, thinking about what was happening at work. I mean, we were more of a startup, right? We were a consultancy, self funded, so every quarter we had to be profitable. And it was just really hard to turn it off. Even today, you know, I still struggle with it as I'm doing the podcast and doing a little bit of like, advisory work and investing. When I'm with my kids, those thoughts of career keep coming in. Is there anything you do to help kind of quiet that noise when you need to be present with your family?
• 4:49
  Speaker A: No, this is actually. It's a really interesting topic in general because the first decade of my career, I had an agency, I worked for an agency, and then I joined local tech company here called Exact Target. That was a scale up, which is a whole nother story.
• 5:06
  Speaker B: Acquired by Salesforce.
• 5:07
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And that I. The first decade of my career, 90% of every waking moment was spent on more egotistical thinking, like, how do I further my brand, how do I further what I'm doing? Like, and then when you have your first kid and your family grows, you get married, all that stuff that happens, you start realizing that you're not the center of the world and you start adjusting accordingly. But I'm not Gonna lie. I am still egotistical and I still work too much. But I love what I do and I'm very lucky that my family has figured out how to balance that with me. Right. Appropriately. But I think it's important for everybody to note that it's okay to feel that way. It's okay to wake up in the middle of the night like I did last night, thinking about something at work and get up and start working on it because if that's what you enjoy doing, it's okay. And I don't know how you feel about work life balance, but I don't have it at all. And I do believe there's importance between separating that. But the reality is that I want to teach my kids that it's okay to love what you do and work hard doing it. And I will be present when they're there. But yeah, like, do I think about work constantly? Yes. I don't think that's ever going to change.
• 6:29
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if it's really about work life balance, but more about being present in the moments where you are with your family or present in the moments where you're at work. When inspiration strikes and you get those moments of light bulb goes off, you got to capitalize on it. Otherwise, like, you know, you get immediately into flow state. And in, in flow state I can get, you know, 10 hours of work done in 30 minutes. And so yeah, if the inspiration strikes, sometimes I've just gotta like write it down on my phone, get it outta my head and then I can get kind of back to what I was doing or if I need to go off and actually pursue that. I was reading your blog and you were writing about balancing high growth leadership with parenthood and you mentioned the phrase head trash. What does that mean to you? Can you describe it? Does that show up for you in your internal dialogue at home? How does the head trash kind of spill over? There you go.
• 7:29
  Speaker A: Head trash is the third person dialogue. That's the pessimist that lives in your head. That's head trash. In my. There's tons of different, like I think somebody calls some philosophy, calls it the shadow person and there's tons of psychology behind it. But for me it has to do with a lot of things and I do. And it happens constantly. And it's, I shouldn't have talked to my kids that way or I should have done something different last night or, you know, I woke up this morning thinking about how I shouldn't have been upset with my kid when they Crashed their bike that I just bought them, or, you know, a situation where one of my kids was picked on at school and I should have approached it differently or at work. Why didn't I send that email at 5pm what happens if the CEO's gonna call me and ask about a project? Like, it is a constant thing for me always. And it's always been that way. And a lot of times you can use head trash as a competitive advantage because it fuels you appropriately, but there's other times where it will. It will grind you down and you will burn out because you haven't figured out a way to channel it appropriately. And it has taken. And I still don't fully know how to do that. You know, it's taken quite a bit of therapy and exercising constantly to kind of quiet it a little bit. But that's how I view head trash. And it's. I don't think it's as much imposter syndrome as it is just you fighting with yourself.
• 9:05
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, I feel that parental guilt. The other day, my son was climbing a tree. Tree branch broke. He fell. He was fine, but he landed pretty hard. And my first reaction was like, you shouldn't be doing that. Like, one, you're breaking a tree, and two, you just shouldn't be doing that. Instead of immediately going to him and consoling him, because, like, that's what I actually feel in the moment is like, oh, no, is he okay? And I had to go back because parental guilt set in really fast and I started feeling it. And maybe an hour later, I had to sit down with him and kind of do a repair and apologize for not communicating how I was actually feeling, which was like, I was worried about him. And I've had the same thing happen in. In my career where, you know, something was happening at home. My personal life was a little chaotic compared to my professional career was very structured and going the way I wanted it to. And I remember I gave some pretty harsh feedback to one of our client partners, and I wasn't very nice about it. And it was kind of, you know, I was dwelling on it. And the next day I called her and I told her I wanted to apologize for the way that I showed up in that conversation. She's, like, been in this space for, you know, a long time. She's seasoned, she's tough. She's like. I didn't even think about it. But for me, I felt like I needed to revisit it and apologize. Do you ever run into that where, you know, you need to Do a repair with kids or at work.
• 10:37
  Speaker A: Yeah, but, but I think what's important to know for those listening, you either you either let the head trash control you or you try to control it. And a way to control it is admitting you made a mistake and talking to people about it. Yeah, like the people that don't like you have low eq yet you're, you're. The, you're. You are talking constantly. You're head trash and listening to it. They don't apologize, they don't think about the ramifications. They just keep moving forward because they don't know how to handle it. What you're doing differently, which I try to do is, hey, I made a mistake. I go back to my 9 year old, sit him down, even though he just, most of the time he doesn't care, but. And talk to him about the mistake I made the day before, why I reacted that way, and how I want to try to fix it in the future. Usually it's like go straight over his head and he's just worried about a Pokemon card or Fortnite or something. But it's important because you, it registers a little bit at least. And you know that the kids are learning your communication style and how you think about emotional intelligence. And I've done the same thing at work. I had a situation where I completely undercut an executive at a past company I was at without fully understanding the ramifications of it. And I had to go back to them and say, I'm sorry, this is why I did it. I could have learned, learned, I will learn from this and fix it moving forward. But you had to have a hard conversation. Most of the time people don't want to have the hard conversation, so they just ignore it. And the head trash is going to grow, grow broader and deeper and more all encompassing. Right?
• 12:17
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. What worst. Like what was a moment where you got to. I got to a point where I was burnt out and, and I had to take over two years off to recover and do a lot of internal work. Not everybody needs to take two years off, but that's where I was at. What was a moment where you did feel burnout? What was happening for you?
• 12:38
  Speaker A: So we, we scaled. Leslie was the company I joined when we moved back from Boston. We scaled that company and had a great exit to a company called Seismic. And I was very lucky that the CEO of Seismic, great human being, just a brilliant person, he asked me if I wanted to join the executive team as SVP of marketing. And this company is considerably Larger. And my ego and my head, my ego was much larger than my head trashed on that day. And I said, yeah, I'll do it. This is great. I was already to the point of burning out after spending four and a half years billing lessonly, the scope of my job spread from just east coast to Australia all the way to Germany. Like my team went from 2025 to like 90 and I was on one on ones at 6am in Australia or 6am in Europe to 6pm in Australia for the next day. And I was drinking and I didn't know how to handle some of the internal conflict because I never experienced it before. And no matter what I did, I tried to exercise, but I was drinking more. And it just one day I looked at my wife and I just knew I was like, I have to figure out how to take a break because I'm going to look back a year from now and I'm going to be in a worse spot than I am in today. And I was lucky, so lucky, and I'll say it again, that I had had a successful exit to be able to support my family for a con for three months while I was like building it up again and then going and looking for another role. But I just did, I just wasn't taking care of myself and I was working too much and it hit me right in the face. And the same thing happened recently too. So I, I think that like anything in life there's ebbs and flows. Right. And you just gotta make sure you're trying to balance it as appropriately as you can.
• 14:39
  Speaker B: Yeah. If you kind of take me back to when you first became a father, your career was already accelerating. How did your life change? Like, did your rituals change, did your routines change? And do you have any advice looking back for other people that are earlier in their career navigating the same sort of life changes?
• 14:59
  Speaker A: Mine, my change, which I wish I had done sooner, was more personal than it was related to my kids or fatherhood or my wife. My, I wish that I would have cut alcohol out of my routine earlier. I've been, you know, I haven't had a drink for over a year and I wish that I had spent more time regularly exercising early on. Like I now I do it five, six days a week. Like health and exercise and understanding what triggers you have and what you lean on that might be detrimental to your mental and physical well being is extremely important to figure out earlier on. And I'm lucky that I didn't have any like major catastrophe that like was like, ah, you gotta do this. It's just I. I wish that I had done it sooner.
• 15:54
  Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. I think a lot of people wait until they hit a pretty big bottom to make a decision like that. Was it a series of small things that led up to you making a decision or what was it that series of small things?
• 16:07
  Speaker A: And man, I'll tell you what, I don't know if people watch these things, but Kevin is very timeless. So I have no idea how old he is, but I am, you know, when I turned 40 and I'm 41 now, like it. Your body definitely, like, you can't do the things you were doing in 20s and 30s. Like, it just, it's just like that. I don't know if it's. It's probably a lot of mental for me, but part of it was, I was just tired. I was burning out faster. I could not handle the responsibilities that I was given in family and in work. And after Leslie was acquired and I spent a year as an executive at Seismic, I burned out there because I wasn't taking care of myself. And I just wish I had done it sooner. But it was like small things that kind of led to me waking up one morning after I had been sick from being at a revenue kickoff and just, just cutting it completely. Being like, you know, what I don't need doesn't make it. I need to deal with why I'm doing it to begin with. And let's figure that out first. And you know, I. It's. It's one of the better decisions I've made in my life for sure. Especially cutting alcohol.
• 17:14
  Speaker B: Yeah. What, what was it that you think you were using alcohol to cope with or help with that?
• 17:21
  Speaker A: All the head trash. Quieting of the head trash. When you. I wrote about this recently, but it's when. If you are using something to quiet feedback in your head or what you think might be a problem and you're just avoiding. If you're using it for avoiding something. And exercise can be this way too. Like, I know people that won't deal with something and go run. You know, they don't. It's like running away from it. Right. When you're using it that way, it will bite you in the ass pretty quickly.
• 17:54
  Speaker B: Yeah, you mentioned exercise.
• 17:55
  Speaker A: For me, it was a lot of things. Right.
• 17:57
  Speaker B: But you mentioned exercise is one way to cope. Now. Are there other things that you do to help work? Work?
• 18:05
  Speaker A: I was recently, I was recently asked, like, what hobbies I like, and I sat there for like 10 minutes. I'm like actually I, I don't think I have a hobby. I have, I work, I work out sometimes. I do Legos and I have a family and that's basically it. Like that's, that's 80 hours a week.
• 18:23
  Speaker B: Yeah, I probably do at least five hours a week of Legos with both my kids.
• 18:29
  Speaker A: I love them. I love, like I'll, I'll do them by myself. I love them.
• 18:32
  Speaker B: Yeah. I had a coach recently, so I work with like a personal development coach and he recently asked me what do I do for fun. And so I listed things like, oh, I go mountaineering or I go rock climbing or we like to travel. You know, we just got back from a trip to Europe. He's like, Kevin, those are all like peak moments. Like what do you do for fun in your day to day life? And I had the same response. I don't know, you know, because it was like, well, I play with my kids, we go to the beach. He's like, no, what do you do for yourself to have fun? And so I have been since trying to rediscover the art of like play and having fun. And it's something that I really, really struggle with and I don't know where that comes from.
• 19:15
  Speaker A: I'll read, like, I'll read. I have a tendency to really like, to like Stephen King. Like I'll read books like from Stephen King and more fiction, rhyme, like stuff that probably 90% of suburban dads do in North America, like Clive Cluster. But outside of that there's nothing like it's I, I, but I love what I do. So it, there's kind of a balance there for sure. Listeners are probably thinking, I, I really want a framework. I don't know what this is. Guy's not giving me anything. And so what I actually do is make sure I try as much as possible not to work past 6pm I try as much as I can. That's not reality really. And I'm still putting in 10 to 12 hour days. And then I, as much as I possibly can. There's no working on the weekends. That's kind of how I framed it. But you know, it's early morning is, is a gift for me because I get up early and I will work out and work and then the kids will get up and then I'll be present because I've gotten everything out before.
• 20:19
  Speaker B: 7Am Yep, I do the same thing. 30 workouts, kids are up at like 6:15. Spend a couple hours with them before the workday starts. You know, we get our Connection time in the morning. I know a lot of families are great about dinner time. We're not, we have, everybody's eating at different.
• 20:37
  Speaker A: We're not bad. We're not bad. We usually eat together, but it's not like a, it's not like a ceremony. Right. Like, like, I, I grew up that way. I grew up where everybody was eating dinner. But, and I, and look, it's okay if you don't want to get up early. And I'm not, I'm not saying you need to get up early, work out, have a nice bath and then a sauna and then go tech bro on everybody. Like, I'm just saying do what makes you happy. If you like, I'm working out at 4:15 today. I'm not working out at 4:15 in the morning this morning. So there you go. Do what you think's right. Right. As long as you're, as long as you are. Are aligning to the values and how you want to live life. I, I don't. It's up to you on how you want to do it. Yeah.
• 21:20
  Speaker B: So when you're traveling now you've decided to be sober, is that a struggle at all? Or how do you maintain your like, personal boundaries when you're out at these like, work events? Because I, I remember what they're like.
• 21:33
  Speaker A: Good question. I was actually, I was at a cool event last week that um, I think what's important for everybody to note is that it's really, for me, it hasn't been that difficult. There are, there are moments where I'll go into an event and have slight social anxiety, which I had used alcohol to help, you know, curb of course, being at all these events. And the reality is that if you feel that and you make the decision to grab a water or a seltzer, not a, not a alcoholic seltzer, non alcohol seltzer, then that moment is gone. Like, it, it, it is fascinating how fleeting it can be if you understand triggers and how to. So, you know, I was at an event, walked in, there was beer there and people were drinking, which is great. I'm all for it. And I, I had the split second, hey, this would be fun. And then I grabbed a Lacroix and it was over. I didn't think about it again the rest of the night. So for me, I never really, I never really had a situation over the past year where it's been like, excruciating because I, I just, I, I think back to what you're going to feel like and I felt like crap after. Like, no matter what, I would have one beer and feel like crap. Right. It just doesn't. It's not worth it. It's just not worth it.
• 23:01
  Speaker B: Yeah. What did you do during that time off to kind of re. Recover, recharge yourself?
• 23:07
  Speaker A: Well, no, the first week. First week after I left. Seismic. I remember my wife saying, you are not taking a break. You're doing like seven calls a day. And so I had. It took me. It took me a month to, like, get to the point where I was not thinking about this stuff. And arguably I should have taken more time. I jumped into the job search pretty quickly, and I was reading more. I was working out, but doing some house stuff, but I was still working. Like, in my head, I was still working, but I was at least not being inundated with stress every minute of every day, 12 hours a day.
• 23:50
  Speaker B: Yeah. When I took time off, obviously it was a kind of extended period of time off. It took me a little while to get into it. Once I did, I found myself doing a lot of inner work. So it was still a lot of work, but just different kind of work. You know, therapy, coaching. I started going to, like, Tony Robbins events, a lot of journaling. And so now, all of a sudden, I'm still doing work hours, but I'm doing it on myself. And I think that's where I eventually dug pretty deep and found some of the areas where I was struggling as a human, as a parent, and even saw how those translated into my career and, you know, taking that time off, like, but actually using it productively to build myself up as a new version of myself, a better version of myself.
• 24:46
  Speaker A: And I think that's what's important to note. It's like, you can. You are not learning from challenges unless you're trying to evolve from them. And I think a lot of times when people. Alcohol is a great example. If you cut alcohol for a variety of reasons and you don't deal with the original reason why you were overusing it, you have a problem, you're going to go back to it because you haven't dealt with the core issues that led to working too much or drinking too much or exercising too much or going to 50 Tony Robbins seminars or what? Right. Like, you just can't, or you're walking on fire and burning your feet or whatever. But my dad took me to a Tony Robbins event when I was in high school.
• 25:29
  Speaker B: Amazing.
• 25:30
  Speaker A: That's a whole different experience. That's a whole different world.
• 25:35
  Speaker B: I've been flirting with the idea of bringing my 9 year old to a Tony Robbins event. But I feel like I should probably wait a few years.
• 25:41
  Speaker A: You can, you can, you can wait a few. I wouldn't drag my 9 year old to one right now. He'd be, he'd be pissed.
• 25:47
  Speaker B: Yeah, my, my 9 year old's, you know, he's a little early, but following in my footsteps with a lemonade stand, orange juice stand. He's, you know, trying to figure out how to sell his Pokemon cards. And so he's my 9 year old entrepreneur in making.
• 26:03
  Speaker A: We'll buy your Pokemon cards.
• 26:05
  Speaker B: So there we go.
• 26:06
  Speaker A: We can make a business connection after this call.
• 26:10
  Speaker B: Have there been any moments in your career where you're work life and your personal life collided? I mean, you mentioned the one, but are there, are there other moments where you had to make decisions about how to allocate your time?
• 26:24
  Speaker A: You know what I mean? There's like life decisions where. When I left the venture capital firm and joined Lessonly for my first like true VP of marketing role, we moved back to Indianapolis from Boston. That was a big life decision for us because at the time we were living in Newburyport. And if you've ever been to Newburyport, Massachusetts, it's like a Norman Rockwell painting. Like it's the most beautiful place. Like it's just a, a brilliant North Shore little town right, right on the Massachusetts border with New Hampshire. Moving back to Indianapolis was definitely a call that we made based off of work. We had some family in Indy and it was good to be back because we, you know, it was important for our oldest to grow up around my parents and, and my wife's. But it was definitely a work decision as well. Like I wanted to be in the office, I wanted to be there, I wanted to help grow the company in Indy. Outside of that, man, there's not a lot. I think I do a decent job now balancing the two and I'm very lucky that my wife has, she's a personal trainer and she has a pretty flexible schedule. So when I'm traveling a lot, like it just makes it easier and it doesn't make it easier on her. And we have those conversations, of course, but we, we made the agreement like it was an agreement between the two of us that you know, if I was going to pursue this type of work, she was going to pursue stuff she really wanted to do. But ultimately when I'm on a plane, like I'm doing it because, you know, that's, that's the job and it's a job I like doing And I enjoy doing so. There's definitely agreements that have to be made with your partner to help support that for sure.
• 28:08
  Speaker B: And that's how you provide for your family. So, you know, I always looked at it as my career. In the beginning, like you kind of mentioned career was for me, I was somewhat. There was some ego involved. And then eventually when I became a father, it shifted to my purpose about I'm, I'm here to provide for my family. And with that underlying meaning, work became more fulfilling because it wasn't a surface level. There was something much, you know, a much stronger why underneath it all. And I did all the travel. I was probably traveling, you know, 40, 50% of the month at least, minimum every other week, most of the time, like every week, a couple nights a week.
• 28:51
  Speaker A: One thing, that one thing I do think is important to note. You know, I think you and I both, we've said, like, we love what we do, and I love. I love where I work and I love my job. I think it is also important for everybody to realize that I don't love it all the time and sometimes it's really hard. And the way I approach it with like an 80, 20 rule, if you love what you do 80% of the day, but then you get the 20% that's very difficult that you hate because guess what? That's part of working and having a job, that's okay. If you get to a point where it's like 50, 50 or 60%, you're disliking everything you're doing. And 40% you're loving it, you need to figure out a different, different path. And that's how I frame it. For me personally, I think if you're.
• 29:42
  Speaker B: At 80, 20, you're pretty fortunate. I'm sure there's a lot of people not at 80, I'm very fortunate.
• 29:49
  Speaker A: But I do think it's important for everybody, too. And there have been times where I was like the flip. I like 20% of it and hated 80, and I burned out. And I had to take time off to get my head right. And I was very lucky that I could do that financially. But I just think it's important that you're not going to love, especially people early on in your career. If you're listening, you're not going to love it all the time. And if you're looking for a job you're going to love all the time, you're going to be sorely let down because that's not reality.
• 30:25
  Speaker B: So you've had an incredible career Working at companies that I'm very familiar with. At one point I tried to get seismic for Hathaway, but we just couldn't afford the bill. It was a little bit too pricey for us. And then you went on to Jellyfish and now you're at Dcebo. Tell us what, what was that journey like? How did you move up? Cause there's a lot of aspiring executives who listen to this podcast and maybe they're senior manager, they're a director. Ultimately they want to get to the C suite. What did you do in your career to help you progress? If there was any advice you could share with them?
• 31:04
  Speaker A: Yeah, so I can, I can speak to marketing in particular. Of course there are, there are two main things that I, that I've done. One is figure out how to translate what you do to board level semantics. So words, the words that you use. And I, I, I had the CEO of Jellyfish, Andrew, he, he was a great teacher for me on how you, how you like define what you say, how you present yourself to a board, because it's a very different thing. But also this applies to the executive team. So how are you translating marketing speak to what they care about? Okay. Because marketers are terrible at it. But guess what? You have great robots now that can help you do it. Mainly GPT anthropic, like go use them. And then the second thing that I think kind of applies or is directionally the same is own a number, a revenue number. I move pretty quickly at lessonly to own pipeline, to report on pipeline, to be one that was producing pipeline. And I've done that in every role after because ultimately the only thing the board really cares about is bookings and revenue. You can wax poetic all. You know, I think marketers in general, you do not become a CMO by celebrating a brand campaign that you launched when sales was at 50% quota capacity. You don't. And so for me, reporting on pipeline, reporting on revenue, reporting on attribution, reporting on how marketing was driving tangible value to the business gave me a seat at the table and allowed me to become a CMO and then further become CMO larger companies, smaller. But you have to own something the board cares about. A lot of marketing leaders don't think that way for some reason. And that I think we're, I could talk about this for an hour, but I think we're shifting as marketing to be more brand oriented now. I think the pendulum is swinging back to storytelling as robots get better at reporting and, and all this stuff. But I think it's those two things. Learn how to speak at a board level appropriately. They don't need to know about whatever you think is important with your color palette and the brochure design or whatever the hell you're talking about. They care about revenue growing. That's why they're on the board. And then making sure you own a revenue number and you're reporting on.
• 33:43
  Speaker B: Sure. When you think about Those kind of KPIs, do you translate anything like that to your home life? Meaning what kind of leading indicators KPIs do you use to think about your home life?
• 33:59
  Speaker A: No, no. I. You and I talked about this before we started, right. It was. I've been thinking about it recently because I've been in the role at docebo for five months and all of the things we're putting in place and how we're monitoring and vision and values and messaging and budgeting and all this stuff are frameworks that you can apply to your family. And I wouldn't go as so far as to say, like, I need to apply business logic to my family because it's a business. But, you know, profit and loss statements, like all this stuff that you. That come. That is part of my role that I do 12 hours a day should be transferable. You're probably, you are like light years ahead of where I'm at. But yeah, I think, I think it applies. I just don't do it yet.
• 34:52
  Speaker B: Yeah, I'm not quite at the point where I'm doing quarterly business reviews of my kids or anything like that. But I certainly do think about things like our family mission, our family vision, our family values, and, you know, communicating those with kids. And then from a life operating system perspective. Yeah, I've got KPIs for my personal life, my relationship.
• 35:16
  Speaker A: I'm not quite there. I'm not quite there.
• 35:19
  Speaker B: I've got criteria. I've got monthly, like, review worksheets that I do for myself. Yeah, it just translated well for me because I got to a point where I was really succeeding in my career, but I was just struggling at home. I couldn't figure out how to give myself some structure. I recognized that if I had time with my kids on the weekend, but it wasn't planned and it wasn't rooted in something that was a value for our family. We just kind of waste the weekend.
• 35:47
  Speaker A: Away and it wasn't.
• 35:49
  Speaker B: We weren't getting anywhere. And so then I started getting more thoughtful and conscious and planning how we were going to spend our activities, you know, so maybe it's we're going to go for a hike, and I know that it's going to push the kids. And today is going to be a lesson about grit and resilience, about how we can do hard things, and that's one of our family values. So just being a little bit more purposeful with how we spend our time together helps me kind of buy back some time, too, because two hours of solid connection time is worth 10 hours of kind of going through the motions. So now all of a sudden, I've got a little bit more time to buy back for myself or to put towards my career.
• 36:29
  Speaker A: Yep. I. And look, we are very lucky that we're living in a time where we, we are experiencing a once, once in a generation change on how we work. Like we're going through another industrial revolution. And I will take that to my grave. I will take it to my grave. Look, if you don't know, Kevin's talking about frameworks and applying it to family, and if you have questions on how to do that, get a GPT license and talk to it, and it will help you build a framework. There's small steps you can make to try to do this. And I'm not to the point where I have a life operating system, but I know that there are certain things that I know for a fact are important to my family and how we live and values. And there's a great, great cmo. He's. He's. Now, I don't know if he'd say he's retired. He's semi retired. His name's Joe Staples, CMO and interactive intelligence. Great guy, like, brilliant human being. He was the first one that really talked to me about life values and how you apply them. And he is the, he is the, the best example I have of somebody who managed an extremely successful career and had a value system around his family and still. And still do. So I'm going to throw that out there for people to go check him out, but maybe you should hit him up for, for this podcast.
• 37:55
  Speaker B: There we go. Appreciate that you mentioned earlier how your kids are. You know, you're kind of modeling how to show that you can do something that you love. What do you, what do you hope your kids see when they look back on your career?
• 38:13
  Speaker A: Oh, I, I hope that they, that they see the, the good and the bad of how hard I work. Um, there are times when I'll come home and I will be. Something happened at work or I missed something or whatever. I just wasn't where I was supposed to be. And I will take like, it will come out at home and like we talked about earlier, I will have the conversation with my kids on why that happened. But I hope that they understand that there's a reason why I work and the reason why I'm gone sometimes. And there's a reason why I get up at 5 o' clock in the morning to go write a newsletter that I send out every Sunday because there's reasons why I do it. And it's important that they understand that life isn't about just fun and games all the time. You also need to work and you need to work hard to. To be able to realize the life that you want. And ultimately, that's what, you know, I might not be around all the time, and I don't believe in work, life, balance, but I hope they see the positives of that. As long as I'm communicating constantly with them, whether they want to talk about Fortnite or they care about my conference call, I don't think they do. But, you know, that's, that's what I hope. That's what I hope they, they take away from this. And it's the same. It's the same thing I took away from my father. My, my dad's 77 and still working. And I'm going to be the same way. You know, I'm not playing. Like, I don't have a, oh, you do this and you retire at 65. Good job. Like, I like what I do. I'm not planning on changing that. Like, I might slow down at some point, but it will be because I have to, not because I want to.
• 40:04
  Speaker B: I had a unique circumstance where when I, after we sold halfway, I took time off, focused on myself, and I started thinking. And this is fairly unique. I don't expect a lot of people to relate to it, but I was kind of in retirement mode and I was thinking, well, I'm going to just kind of be done working. And I started to think about, what's that going to teach my kids? You know, I got my work ethic from watching my father work very hard in his career. What would that teach them if they grow up watching a dad who doesn't pursue some sort of passion and build something? Because they don't remember the early, like their early years of me working long hours. They would then just remember, you know, dad going golfing and enjoying life, and they wouldn't understand the value of hard work and building something for themselves. I was like, I don't want to raise entitled children. That's probably My biggest fear as a father. And so I, I, I took them flying first class once and I'll never do it again. Never do it again. But that was part of the reason.
• 41:13
  Speaker A: Yeah, I, I don't, I think the biggest for me, it's. You talk about working through as they're younger. I think people experiencing regret or regretting that they did that when they were younger actually has detrimental consequences as they're older because the head trash will be too much and you'll take it out on them in ways that you didn't want to. So, you know, I, I'm very much a bias towards action and learn, Learn from things and just move forward and. Yeah. Do I wake up in the middle of the night three nights a week thinking about I should have had a different conversation with my son? Yes. But, you know, I think that's part of it. I think that's part of it. And I, A friend of mine once told me, the fact that you're waking up in the middle of the night thinking about it and how you would do it differently means that you, that you, you're doing what you should be doing as a parent. And that's all you can do.
• 42:08
  Speaker B: Absolutely.
• 42:09
  Speaker A: Is care.
• 42:10
  Speaker B: Absolutely. You care. And that is, that is being a good parent is reflecting and looking at ways to do it better. Not necessarily beating yourself up, but looking at how you behaved, how you showed up and how you can show up better. And we're just always growing and we're always learning. Because if you didn't care, then, yeah, you'd not be a great parent.
• 42:30
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.
• 42:34
  Speaker B: Well, Kyle, this has been a great conversation. I sincerely appreciate you showing up today. Like I said, I've seen the work that you've done. You've built some amazing brands, some amazing businesses in the B2B space. And I applaud you for all of the life changes and who you are as a human. So thank you so much for being here today.
• 42:55
  Speaker A: Thank you for having me.
• 42:56
  Speaker B: If you're enjoying this conversation, make sure to hit subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. CEOs and ABCs is all about helping you grow in your career and show up at home. We've got many more amazing guests coming up, so tap, follow, and stay tuned.