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From Entrepreneurial Wins to Failures: Insights with John Walker · MaxValue Podcast

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Max Value, a show for business owners and their professional advisors pursuing maximum value.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: We talk about business valuation, exit planning, global staffing, and all sorts of fun stuff.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Ben Town.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Today I have the honor of sharing time with my friend, coach, and mentor, John Walker.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Among many things, John's been a 40-year leader in Vistage International, an executive coaching organization, as well as a many times successful business owner, as a world traveler, family man, and a person I learned something from literally every time I talk to him.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: John, thank you for coming on and talking with me today.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Can you start us off with a little bit of history?
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: How did you get here?
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because here's the thing.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: So give us a little bit more of your business history.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um sure, happy to, Ben.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um so the business history began really.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um the the the part I think that you'd be referring to would be uh after I graduated from undergraduate school engineering, a couple of years in the service and a year working, um, I came to business.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: That was the Marines, right?
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: Army.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: That was the Army.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I'm so sorry.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Army, yeah.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I uh I came out here to uh Sanford for business school with full intention of going back to Georgia, where I was raised in the Atlanta area, uh, to help build the New South.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: But one thing led to another.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: First, it was interesting job opportunities here, then it was um an interesting woman here who I ultimately married.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so I never really left California, which has been terrific.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Terrific here.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so my early career was working for a large uh Fortune 500 uh Forest products company, which gave me some great opportunities in core businesses.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Then I began kind of an entrepreneurial streak, um, which uh had some ups and downs, as it often does.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, then I found my way into an organization which is now called Vistage, which is peer advisory groups primarily for CEOs.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I invested uh 30 plus years in that, uh, leading groups in the local area, plus uh helping form groups and be part of the leadership team uh nationally for the organization, which is based in San Diego.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that kind of leads me to here.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: I retired a few years ago, uh mostly.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: I still have my finger in here and there.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and you were the chair of Vistage at one point, right?
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I was the uh from the corporate standpoint, it's an international company.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I was uh VP of marketing, the first one that took the company nationally.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Ridgly was basically a Southern California organization, and we went national about 35 years ago.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I've been a chair locally and and helped grow the regions and just a number of different roles.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh a nice flexible organization that fits a good lifestyle.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, great.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: So in you know, in your long career, are what are some of the business successes that you're particularly proud of?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I would go back to um kind of take each one, each segment.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: So early in my career, I think I was 27, uh working for a large forest project company.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: I was put in charge of one of the large manufacturing plants in the New York metro area.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was actually in what's called the Meadowlands now.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it was a plant that was beset with a lot of labor strife.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: It had been recently organized by the Newark Teamsters Union, which uh I think that says everything you need to know about that.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: Tough people.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and within a few months, um I took a number of decisions which led to a wildcat strike, which led to conflict with the union, which led to all kinds of threats.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: However, within three or four weeks after that, um the employees decided they didn't want to deal with all that kind of stuff and just wanted to be great employees.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: And and the company started hitting record production.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: So that was encouraging uh for somebody newly minted and much younger than all the people I was leading.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that you know, you learned I learned there that um it's really about winning, uh respecting the people who work for you regardless of what they do, uh, giving them an opportunity to succeed, and they will repay that generally with um the opportunity to be as good as they can be.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: That was a good experience for me.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um in an entrepreneurial role, at one point I was able to secure the exclusive distribution rights for a product called the Britta Water Filter for the Western United States.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and in fact, it turned out I was basically the only person selling it.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I did that for a couple of years.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: We built that up and later Clorox bought it, bought my portion out, and bought the U.S.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: operation.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: That was a great entrepreneurial success.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Worked out well.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, still have a some pictures I'm very proud of with me and my teenage boys at various trade shows displaying the Britta water filter, getting uh business.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that was that was one.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And my years with Vistage, uh, it's hard to know any particular highlights.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it was just wonderful to be able to help uh business leaders like you and other people who start companies and run companies um to become better at what they do, become better humans, have better lives, and lead better companies and get better results because that's what we're all about.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: And hundreds of stories here, of course.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hundreds, exactly.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: I and I I really appreciate uh the oh I appreciate the fact that you shared three stories.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they're not just not not just you know what one thing that you know it was was uh something great that you did.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: I I really appreciate that first story where you were you were a strike breaker, but through respect rather than you know strong arming or you know any other method that that you could have taken.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: You were um you know uh probably relatively fresh out of uh out of the army at that point.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, through yeah, through a respectful uh uh understanding of the other people, you were able to uh you know come to uh a way of working together that that seemed to work.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's pretty cool.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: So looking at the other side of the of the equation, obviously in a long career, everybody's gonna run into some failures.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: So, what were some failures in your long career that were particularly instructive to you?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the the um during my entrepreneurial period, I did start a company which was called Framentec.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: And the basic this was in um about around 1980, uh, when we had gone through oil embargoes of 79, the price of oil had shot up.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um Carter was president when we began uh before Reagan got elected.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a number of initiatives set out by the government to uh deal with the energy crisis and this and the cutoff of supply from OPAC.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, the environmental movement was was taking hold.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I and some colleagues started a business which converted certain select industrial food processing waste streams into energy, into ethanol to be blended with gasoline, which it now is common throughout the United States, in California.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of corn ethanol, yeah.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's corn ethanol.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: So what we were doing, we said, well, if we take something that people have to pay to get rid of, and we can make something that people will pay to have, that should be a winning proposition.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: So we had two approaches.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: One approach was to take the waste from soft drink bottling plants, convert that to ethanol, because they were paying large fees to dispose of the quote, wasted sugar water, spilled sugar water.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we, in fact, built several small facilities that were at bottling plants in Florida and Oklahoma and Wisconsin.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And they powered their part of their fuel for their trucks at signs, it's good PR for them as well as offsetting some of the cost for waste disposal.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: But our largest facility was a demo plant in the valley where we took cheese whey and fermented the lactose and produced a protein byproduct, whey protein, and ethanol.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: And we were doing quite a bit.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, uh the business didn't succeed.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: The business uh failed for uh one major reason is the market didn't sustain itself.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, whatever the when the government puts incentives in place, if one depends on it, one takes a big risk, and those incentives went away.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then I found out that the VCs that backed me, which at deep pockets had at that time they developed very short arms.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we didn't get additional funding, and we eventually closed those plants down.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: The ones we sold to the bottlers can succeed.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that was um that was very painful.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: It was it was in hindsight, obviously a right decision.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: It was probably a ill-timed venture.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um technically it worked, but uh financially it didn't.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and certainly the the right idea, wrong time kind of uh kind of issue, because I mean it it might have it certainly might have worked now.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh well, or at least it you can think of it now and it's it'd be different now, right?
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: It'd be different, yeah, for sure.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Very interesting.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: And from from uh well, from that failure, I mean uh financially anyway.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, look, we all have those that inform our our experiences and uh our later successes.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I don't heck, you know, I'll I'll share, you know, that uh, you know, me and my wife started a restaurant, and that was a very ill-conceived uh idea uh that I learned a lot from.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: But we've also learned those lessons, right?
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: So what what do you think was the the lesson uh from that uh experience?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think there were a couple of things.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh one is to not let my um well, one is to base a business which depended at at an important level on government subsidies, government roles.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh because whatever the government can put in place, it can and will take away.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at what's happening with solar credits today.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: They were there a long time, but it if you depend the business on government things.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: So that was one.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Another one was uh being, I think I was emotionally connected to the what I perceived as the good of dealing with a waste product and helping to solve an energy problem.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I think that impacted my judgment about whether it was a good long-term sustainable business venture.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: That makes sense.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: My investors invested for that reason as well.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, that was uh call it a selling point for investment, but it was a if we're going to invest in something, let's try to do good by it.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, not to say that good isn't worth doing, but it's not enough to sustain a business.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Good intentions is not enough.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think that would be my two major learnings from that.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now, flipping over to not just your own personal experience, but I mean, you spent something like 40 years in Vistage uh and saw, as you said, hundreds of businesses and helped many of them become successful or more successful.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Were there commonalities in those businesses that either kept them from being successful and helped and they broke through those uh issues uh or things that got them to be successful?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure I asked that question very well, but I think you got to be able to do that.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let me let's take a stab at it and see what's let's go.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um the first thing I I I've come to believe is that the success of a business lies within the heads of a leader, right here.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so the leader's vision is small, the business is small.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: If the leader has a vision that's large, the business will be larger.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: If the leader has um a service-oriented mindset and belief that says I'm here to make a product or service to serve customers better than other people do, so we can we can do that.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think that is helpful to be to success.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um also the leader's uh basic assumptions and beliefs and worldview come into it.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh limiting beliefs.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we can't do this, so we don't try to do this, whatever this is.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um those are some of the same things.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: So it really begins with how the leader thinks about it, what the leader's core beliefs are, the leader's vision.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Let me give you a great example.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: I had uh for a while um the CEO of Pete's Coffee.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think I can talk about that.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I learned that the history of Pete's is quite interesting.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um at one point, the owners of Pete's and the owners of Starbucks were the same three people.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um three people from Berkeley went to Pete's while they were Berkeley, decided to go to Seattle, want to start a coffee company, ask Pete's to brew their coffee, to roast their coffee.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: Roast their coffee.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: So they were selling Pete's beans in Seattle, branded as Starbucks.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: As Starbucks grew, they grew to about six stores.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: Alfred Pete said it was time to retire.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: So he said who should buy a sell it to.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: So he sold Pete to the three, his customer in Starbucks.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: So at that time there were about an equal number of stores.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Three owners, um, usually that's a tough one to manage.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard for three people to always be on the same page when they all are seeing themselves as equal.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: So after a short period of time, the business split.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the owners turned in his Starbucks shares and took over the Pete stores.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: That owner had a vision of Pete's as being making perfect coffee.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Perfect coffee means it's always fresh.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: We're not going to put flavors in it, we're not going to do a lot of things.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the people of Starbucks said, no, we want to create a different kind of company.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: So they created a you know, a brand identity and a market that said this is a place to come.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: Over the years, obviously, Starbucks grew into a huge coffee company.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Pete's was pretty much limited to the Bay Area for a long time.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the belief of the owner, for example, on fresh coffee says that it has to be roasted within a day of its use.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's hard to do that if you want to ship across the country.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: How do you do that with and you have to have volume?
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, the story was that because the leadership had very different views, they started with exactly the same product, and the companies went in very different directions because the vision of the two leaders were dramatically different.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Since then, Pete's uh the board changed the out the leadership at Peats.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Pete's went public.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Pete's now has become uh a very different kind of company.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: It still is very different from Starbucks in some core ways it operates.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's an example.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the best examples I know of companies we're familiar with here in the Bay Area, uh, of how the CEO's vision makes such a dramatic difference in how a company grows.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: That is that's fascinating because in in business, I mean in in life in in general, but in in business specifically, it's really hard to find instances where you can have kind of an experiment where you have two things that start out basically identically, and then there's kind of a control experiment, if you will, you know, an A-B test uh and to see where it goes.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because in a certain sense, I mean, just philosophically, there's nothing wrong with having a vision of your company wanting to, you know, brew perfect coffee, and that's that's a that's a valid choice.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's just not in the end, it didn't end up being the uh economically uh most popular choice uh for the for the marketplace.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so if if you're optimizing for more more money, that's not the one you should choose, uh as it's as it's turned out to be.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: So that's very interesting.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that Max Valley Podcast talks about in particular is is growing value and exiting.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so when we're talking about succession and maybe between generations, have have there been experiences that you've seen, been part of that have been instructive in your career?
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: This is an issue, particularly with family businesses that I've seen.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I've had a number of family businesses that I've been privileged to work with.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um again, it comes back to the way the CEO slash owner uh sees both the business and the family.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um the ones that I've seen that have been successful um spend a lot of energy thinking about what's good for the business separate from what's good for the family.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: And where there's commonality, you put those two together, and where there's not commonality, if they if one gets confused, um they confuse those two objectives, uh sometimes the results don't turn out well.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: An example of when it doesn't turn out well, um, there was one company I worked with, the CEO had seven children and had the vision that each one of them should wind up with one-seventh of the business of his share of the business.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, just think about your siblings or any other people you know that have siblings.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's rare that all would have the same of a younger brother and a si younger sister and uh love them dearly, and they I know no possible business arrangement could actually ever work in that situation.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: So they are in this case, the the the challenge for this the the the child who was running the business was how to um gain the support necessary to move the business around uh and yet uh try to satisfy the needs of everybody.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, some just wanted cash out of the business, right?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: But the right thing for the business is to reinvest it.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: And an opposite one, um I worked with a company that had three CEO had three sons, he was getting ready to retire.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: And One son was in the business, the other two were not, yet they were owners, equal owners.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: So he um decided and worked with the family for a few years so that he transferred all the ownership of the company to the son who was in the business.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: So he was an accessor, and then transferred other assets outside the business to the other sons so that they had essentially equal asset value, but yet didn't screw up the business.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: And he had gotten that experience because his it was a third-generation business, and his father had not done that, and he had an estranged relationship with his brother for 30 years.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't speak, he didn't want that to happen to his children.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: Thanksgiving's important.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, right?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: You want you want everybody to to sh to show up and actually talk to each other.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: I knew uh the CFO uh of uh this uh the Spirits company uh uh a while back, um Nolette Spirits, that uh they make Kettle One and uh Nolette Gin.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: And uh they've been around their private company has been around since 1691.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: I looked it up.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason why they're still around after all that time is they basically do the same thing.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: Every generation, when they hand over the reins, they always make the a family member be in charge and basically buy out everybody else so that they can have that you know single point of leadership and continuity.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's you know, it's really I think that's really interesting.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's somebody had figured that out a long time ago, and it's still often the way to go.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: John, you told me something the other day that I really found to be profound, and it really something that you know I thought could be you know carved on a tablet, stone tablet somewhere.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: He said, the the ultimate wealth is human creativity, and I just really, really like that.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: Can you can you tell me what that means?
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: Gentlemen, let me ask you to think about the world 30,000 years ago and the world today.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: So materially, what the world is composed of, is it significantly different?
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: The amount of oxygen, nitrogen, zinc, iron, gold, silver, is it do you think it's different?
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yet when if you look at the world today, it looks very different.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: What's different what we've created?
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: What's different is the is that human beings, Homo sapiens, have come along and their creative activity has changed the natural world into useful products that improves the standard of living for humans around the globe.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: The only difference is humans.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the difference between humans and other animals, the significant one of the significant differences is creativity, the mind.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now we're physically built in a certain way we can do things that other animals can't do as well, but it's significantly the mind.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: So it's the cre that's the starting point for me.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's it's the human creativity.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um in the history of this country, what we see is many people who've come to this country with nothing.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps they had something somewhere else, they come here and given the freedom to pursue their own ambitions with what they have in their head, and the drive that they have in their hearts uh to create, to create and create wealth, create well-being, create great works of uh of art, create works of thought.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so human creativity.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there's many stories also of people who are successful in one country.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um they have to leave that, they leave, they bring nothing to the new country and they recreate the wealth again.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: Our own country, we we have stories of people who are very wealthy and creative, and they go through cycles of making a lot of money, losing a lot of money, making a lot of money, losing a lot of money.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, to me, those are examples that it's the it's the creativity of the human combined with uh passion and desire that creates wealth.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: So whenever we have situations where that creativity is stifled, um we create adverse conditions for making wealth and increasing the prosperity and well-being of people.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's the way I would think about it.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: Makes sense.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, creativity drives value, absolutely.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so in in in that regard, you have to try something new.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, otherwise you're gonna be stuck with the same old thing.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: And whether that's you know, hunting with a spear uh versus you know creating the the bow and arrow or you know, creating the next new product uh out there or next new service out there, absolutely create some new value.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um while you were while you were talking about especially the kind of the well, the the immigration story, for example, um it was making me think of uh a book uh I've been reading, um uh The Worlds I See by uh Dr.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: Fei Fei Li, uh where she's coming from China and um becomes a you know a leading physicist here in uh in America um after you know having to learn English and you know come up the come up the ladder that way.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh very, very, very interesting uh to see you know see from somebody who's now so you know so renowned and so uh so eloquent, much more eloquent than I am.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: I've been grilling you this whole time on on just you know your your business acumen and all the things that you've seen.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: But um, you know, I've I always ask people about you know things about themselves uh as well.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, in this getting to know you segment, I'm I'm gonna ask you just a few a few things about that.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, there's there's nothing on your darn LinkedIn anyway.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you know what's what's one personal thing that you would like people to know about you?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um it doesn't have to be your deepest, darkest secret or anything.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, no.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um well I was thinking about uh this this interview coming up and thinking about business, and I was thinking about where where where did I start?
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I was fortunate, I think, to grow up like many did in my generation, uh without much in the way of wealth.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: Family was very modest.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so I learned uh probably at about age six that if I wanted things in life, I had to go make it happen.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I started picking wild blackberries and wild plums and selling them and then making small things and selling them.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: My first sale, in fact, was to a village blacksmith, if you can believe it.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: There actually was one in this little wide spot in the road in Georgia that I lived.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um so the self, I suppose a self-reliance that we develop by depending, learning that we can solve problems, learning we can uh find ways to get what we need and what we want by using our own energy and creativity and drive.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think I started as an entrepreneur when I was six, and that continued through high school, college, after college, you know, so it it it continued.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm an only child, which has pluses and minuses.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: So the plus is uh there's nobody else to blame when something gets broken around the house.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um the um but the plus is that one does become used to uh relying on oneself.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: That then there is a also a negative that I have to guard against is being too self-reliant and not reaching out to others.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um my vista experience has demonstrated to me in spades the power of having a group of peers to talk to openly, honestly, without uh bias or complexity, and to listen to others.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um there weren't others in my life, there weren't very many others in my life when I was growing up.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: So this was a learning for me.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I would say that's one.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: But I I will say, be uh being the oldest, in my case, being the oldest of three siblings, you get that a little bit as well.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you're the one looking out for the other two, and it's not like I'm a lot of times taking advice.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: These days I'm a little bit better about it, but you know, always trying to be responsible for the other two and not really listening to what they have to say.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh now's better.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: But uh interestingly, yeah, your your uh your response earlier was was interesting.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um just uh just the fact that there was a blacksmith when you were growing up.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm I'm assuming that he was shooing horses and was more of a farrier than than you know making farm implements, but maybe maybe he was both, actually both.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, it was really more um there were probably more mules in the area than horses.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um but he was he was he would repair instruments, it was a rural area.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: Oh boy, yeah, all kinds of stuff.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's awesome.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: He was not under a spreading chestnut tree, but he was under a big kind of a willow tree.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: It just that's cool, that's really cool.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh maybe the answer to this question is is right back home in Georgia, but where you've been all around the world, tra uh world traveler.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: Where is the most interesting place that you visited?
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's a hard question to answer because there's so many interest interesting things um everywhere, if one looks and is curious, I think.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um one thing comes to mind is I went to China a year and a half ago.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: I spent a few days in Hong Kong and a few days in Sichuan area.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the contrast between the two, in terms of the energy of the people, um their outlook, and so forth, but it was just interesting how they um one felt, I felt um relatively at home in uh Hong Kong.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh could could be like being in any other large western city, but uh mainland China was a different experience.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um I also uh had a trip to Argentina and and um Chile some years back and was fascinated at how those two countries had similar experiences up through the 70s.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: Both had military juntas take over and run the countries, they they created uh certain levels of atrocity.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh one of them, uh Argentina moved to uh socialist Peron and went down that path for development.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: The other one, uh actually, the junta adopted uh free market economics in Chile.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: Pinochet did that.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: And he allowed a constitution to be written and he stepped down from power.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh I as I remember the story, and I haven't fact-checked it, but I think that it they hired Milton Friedman to help set up their economic system, their monetary system.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so in going to those two countries, um, in Chile there was vibrancy, Santiago was a you know, huge new buildings, a lot of construction going on.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: Buenos Aires, on the other hand, a beautiful city, wonderful people, but broken sidewalks, um high inflation, which has gotten you know worse, but um, and just just the difference between the two.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: And they're both naturally rich countries.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: They have abundant farmland, they have great climates, they have uh natural resources.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that's not the difference.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: The difference was the way they the the two countries and the people there uh developed um their governments and their system of uh their economy afterwards.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: I I found that very interesting.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's an interesting place from other ways, yeah, you know, somewhat.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful, both of them are beautiful countries.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: Love to go back.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: You're just such a student of of of human history.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's very cool.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: John, so you you're mostly retired, which is which is awesome.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: I I I want to be you, uh for real.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: You will be.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: One day, one day.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that's that's the that's the goal.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um but you you do still do do some coaching and mentoring, and I which which I personally very much appreciate.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um so but why is what you do rewarding to you?
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I believe that we all have uh talents and gifts, and um happiness comes from being able to employ those to help other people.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: So to the extent I do that, it gives me a lot of satisfaction.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's how I do it.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: You do.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, even though you have so much uh talent and gift, uh, we always try to improve ourselves.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: So are you reading something at this point that uh uh that you find interesting?
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I usually have several books going at the same time and pick up one or the other depending.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, sometimes I use audiobooks.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now we use audiobooks because we can travel or walk or exercise and listen to things.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, so one book I'm reading is a book called Superabundance, which um essentially talks about the concept of time prices, the price of everything in terms of the time it takes to acquire it.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: That how many minutes of my life do I have to spend to get a new car, for example.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: The gist of the book is that the world has become immensely wealthier uh in the last 40 years because of, not in spite of, but because of the increase in population.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um every person is a consumer, but also every person is a creator and a builder, potentially, potentially.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we create, and the price of everything, pretty much everything, has gone down in real terms.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the real term then being the time.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: So if we were 150 years ago and you wanted to light your house at night, how would you do that?
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: Probably candles 150.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, before electricity, you'd probably use candles.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, how much time would it take you to get candles to make candles?
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, how much of and so if you converted that to how many dollars would you need to earn to buy the candles that somebody else had to spend their time making?
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's immensely more expensive than turning on a switch on the wall.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: Not to mention higher quality of the product.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um so, and light, of course, created uh eliminates darkness.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: So we can be more productive, more hours of the day, we can socialize, we can read, we can do all kinds of things, more days of the so immensely productive, that sort of thing.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, that's for superabundance.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm reading that, I'm reading a book um by Brad Taylor, which is an adventure book, you know, super spy thing.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm reading a Clancy book, uh, and I'm actually reading a book on uh uh uh the book of Ephesians, a study book on Ephesians, written by John MacArthur, who just died this week.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he's a pastor from Southern California.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um okay, cool.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's I that's very cool.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: Depending on mood and time and so forth, I pick one of those up.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: I I usually have a couple of uh uh uh of different kinds of j of genres going at the same time myself, uh like like you said, different, you know, based on your well, your mental capacity at any given time for one thing, uh your appetite for you know something a little harder to uh get through and something a little easier and a little fluffier, but that's that's great.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't I haven't heard of super abundance.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna look into that.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, you kind of what was uh uh popping into mind when you were talking about you know how easy it is to you know flip on a light switch and uh compared to you know rendering tallow and creating a candle and and all that stuff and and you know going back even further in time and you know uh hunting uh hunting a sperm whale for its oil and you know that kind of thing.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know if you know if if you have to if you if you have to go try to kill a Moby Dick every single time you're you know you you want to you know uh stay up past eight o'clock, uh you're probably not doing it that that often, which is would be hard for uh a night owl like me.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: So um yeah, absolutely.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: That that's that's really interesting.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: So John, um I I don't think you want to be found, but if you did want to be found, uh where would where would do you want to be found these days?
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know I haven't even looked at my LinkedIn page in a while, so maybe I should look at that again.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: You probably should perhaps updated or embellish it a little bit.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm mostly yeah, I'm I'm doing a fair amount of traveling, and my wife and I are uh uh just involved in community activity, so we're we're we're doing well.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: Probably about enough business that I'd like to do, but occasionally something interesting comes along.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: You're easy to find, and people and you are you are known around here, especially in the South Bay.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um John, thank you.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: I re I I could talk with you forever, but I I think I have to spare you uh any any more more of your time here.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for joining me on this.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh thank you, Dan.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: Great questions.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_02: Be well.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_02: You too.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_02: Take care.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_02: Listeners, thank you for tuning in.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_02: This has been an episode of Max Value.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_02: Find us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and other streaming services.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_02: Please like, subscribe, and follow, and we'll see you for the next show.