Latest / Quarterback DadCast | Intentional Fatherhood & Leadership at Home / Michael Clark - Why Authenticity and Accountability Matter More at Home Than at Work -

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Michael Clark - Why Authenticity and Accountability Matter More at Home Than at Work - · Quarterback DadCast | Intentional Fatherhood & Leadership at Home

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, I'm Riley.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm Ryder.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_04: And this is my dad's job.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_04: Hey everybody, it's KCJ Cox with the Quarterback Dadcast.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_04: Welcome to season seven.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_04: Can't wait for this season as there's a lot of great guests ahead.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_04: If you're new to this podcast, really it's simple.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_04: It's a podcast where we interview dads, we learn about how they were raised, we learn about the life lessons that were important to them, we learn about the values that are important to them, and really we learn about how we can work hard to become a better quarterback or leader of our home.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_04: So let's sit back, relax, and listen to today's episode of the Quarterback Dakast.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_04: Hey everybody, it is Casey J.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_04: Cox with the Quarterback Dakast.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_04: We are in season seven, and our guests continue uh to get to get great and bigger.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_04: If that was any sort of break grammar, I don't think it was, but we're gonna roll with it.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I met this gentleman through uh a customer of mine and through a former co-worker of mine, a guy named Greg Simmons, and uh gentleman by the name of Brandon Metcalfta, the elite leadership team over at an amazing company called Assemble.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_04: And our guest is a Nitney Lion.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_04: He might be a Redbird, he might be a catamount.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not sure we're gonna find out.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_04: Uh he is a TEDx speaker, he's a chief revenue officer at Assemble.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_04: Uh he's a former Salesforce executive.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but with all that said, that's not neither of those reasons why we're having him on.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_04: We're gonna have uh Michael Clark on to learn about Michael the dad and how he's working hard or continues to work hard to become that ultimate quarterback or leader of his household.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_04: So without further ado, Mr.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_04: Clark, welcome to the quarterback deadcast.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: Casey, I am so excited for today.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh man, you you're spot on end.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like this is this is what makes my heart beat is being a dad.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: This is my first calling and what you're doing, the messages that you're sharing, the influence that you are are spreading.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for that.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think it helps dads to feel we're not in this alone.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: And some of the challenges that we have, the wisdom that we can share, all of this stuff is something that's it's part of a bigger collective.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you for everything that you do.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_04: Better dads.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_04: Uh well, selfishly, I get free therapy out of all these episodes.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: I love it, man.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_04: 340 dads later.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_04: I'm I'm still getting therapy.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_04: My first question out of the gate I I have this weird sarcastic sense of humor with uh mascots.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_04: I see we went to McGill, Vermont, Penn State.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_04: Which did I have my mascots correct?
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh kind of, kind of.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: So McGill's kind of weird.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: McGill, I don't know if you know the story behind this.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: They were they were the red men back in the day.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea, the the reason that they were the red men is they actually had red sweaters.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Whole reason.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: So people started calling them the red men and uh eventually became the stylized Native American or indigenous person in Canada uh logo on the side of the helmet.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: And um eventually that was seen as not correct, and they shifted to nothing for a little while, and then they eventually became the Redbirds.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: So if you ask anybody who was at McGill prior to like 99, 2000, they still consider themselves to be Red Men.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_04: Kind of like the Redskins and the commanders, something like that.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_04: I've actually funny, I have a friend who's like deep into like tribal affairs.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not gonna say who or where, but he's like, they should be called the Redskins.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_04: I'm like, I feel like we all like as a society, we can go back to, I don't know, maybe it's I wouldn't make this too political or offend anybody, but I I understand what you're saying.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Our one of our offensive linemen, my freshman year, Miguel, he was he was First Nations.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: So he his entire family was an indigenous, was an indigenous family.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I remember him being interviewed about changing the red men logo and changing the the name.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, My family and I are honored because I think like the way that we're actually the way that we're shown and the courage that we're seeing it, like it's it actually brings us a lot of satisfaction and a lot of joy.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_04: Totally, totally.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_04: Well, okay, let's talk.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_04: We always start out each episode gratitude.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_04: Um Michael, so tell me what are you most grateful for as a dad today?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: Ooh.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there's so many things, man.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: So many things.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: What I'm gonna have to lead with, though, is being able to be in deep relationship with each of my kids independently, where there's openness and there's trust and there's conversation.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like we're just they're they're cool kids, and being able to have these conversations about things that they love and they love uniquely is so, so, so impactful, man.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like volleyball.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't play volleyball.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: My wife didn't play volleyball.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Cassidy went out and she found volleyball.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Lacrosse, it's the same thing.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: Emerson went out and found lacrosse.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: Avery, the nine-year-old, she loves musical theater, and that wasn't me or Shannon.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: So for them to have these things and us for us to be able to connect with them about the things that they went out and found and love.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: What about you?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_04: Um, what I'm most grateful for today is um, and I apologize, everybody, you've if you've followed previous episodes, you've heard me talk about um my daughter Riley, and obviously you've probably heard me talk a lot about Ryder, who's um so proud of them both.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_04: But I what I'm grateful for is just our foundation of the relationship of that's been built, and we're continuing to build it.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_04: It's like you know, you're you're building a sandcastle and you're still forming it, you're still forming it, you're still forming it, and strengthen it, strengthen, strengthen it.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_04: And we're, as you know, but you've listened to previous episodes, we're going through some adversity in our house right now with my daughter.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_04: And by the time this episode comes out, um, we're recording now in January.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_04: This will come out in February, and so hopefully by then we'll know a lot more about her knee injury and uh surgery hopefully will have happened by then.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_04: But I'm just grateful for the support and the communication and how we're tackling this thing as an opportunity, not a setback.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and all the stuff I work with my job with like sales teams and leadership teams on mindset.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_04: Like, I I gotta put I gotta walk the walk right now and put put what I say to the test.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_04: And um, you know, I say a prayer every night.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_04: Um I don't I don't go to church, but I'm a very spiritual guy and um big I you know like a couple days ago I was awake from four to five just praying, just trying to like get clarity on this and and ask for strength and just you know, and um but I'm just I'm grateful for that I'm talking about this stuff and I'm not like leaving it all in, and because if I left it all in, my family would not get the best of me.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's beautiful, man.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: And you're also setting that example for Riley, and you you're showing her what surrender looks like, right?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: And what love that word, by the way, and what what growth looks like.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: So kudos to you, dad.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I appreciate it, man.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_04: Have you read the surrender experiment?
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't, but I'm gonna write it down right now.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_04: It's by Michael Singer.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_04: Um, it's a little, I would say it's a little, no offense, Michael, if you're listening, it's a little out there from a spiritual perspective.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_04: If you've like first, because just like there's no way this happened.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_04: But I had a guy when I started my entrepreneurial journey, he just said, you should read this, man.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_04: It's and it's like surrendering to kind of like life's flow a little bit.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_04: And I what I did, I surrendered to like my core values that drive me, which are humility, vulnerability, and curiosity.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_04: And it's this guy's story is insane about like he's had multiple careers, multiple industries, done literally outlandish things, and it's around surrender, just surrendering.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_04: That's cool.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, you bet.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_04: Well, you briefly talked about Cassidy, Emerson, and Avery.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you touched on uh each one of them a little bit, but um go into a little bit deeper detail on them and talk about also how you and your wife met.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so obviously none of the kids are gonna be here if it isn't for my wife.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: And right out of grad school, I got a job working for Eli Lilly for the pharmaceutical company.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: I get out of sales school and I go to my first like team meeting.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's like basically day one for me, Casey.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I walk into this room, and there's a dude that I went to grad school with standing next to me, and I look at him, I look across the room, and there's this really beautiful girl right there.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like, take your breath away, beautiful.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: I look at him and jokingly I said, Hey, I think I'm gonna marry that girl.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_04: No way.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, pretty crazy, right?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: So uh later that night, as was the what people did back then, the entire team went out and we drank for a while.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I found myself in the hotel lobby with Shannon until seven o'clock in the morning, just talking about life and connecting.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the problem was I had a girlfriend at the time, and we connected, and there there was there was something there, but uh it just the timing wasn't right.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: Fast forward six months later, basically the same thing happens.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: We go to another meeting, we sit, we spend the entire evening in the hotel lobby again, just talking and connecting and learning about each other.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: And on the elevator up to her room and to my room, because we figured we should probably you know go take a shower before the meeting in a half an hour.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um as she's stepping out, she says, Hey, if we have this much fun uh at work, we should probably do something outside of work together.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: She will never let me live down, Casey, the fact that she's the one who asked me out.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: So after that, uh we started dating a week later.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: Five months after that, I popped the question.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Seven months after that, we were married.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it took us uh a few years to have kids.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: Cassidy and Emerson were born 16 years ago.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: They're twins, identical twins, but they're very different people.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it's pretty awesome.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like a science experiment almost watching them grow uniquely into who they were created to be, who they were meant to be.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um Nature versus nurture, I I mean, I don't know, man, because they have the same genetic code, they have the same environment, but they're very different people.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: And for us being able to identify the different love languages that they have, the way that they communicate, all these different things, I think it's helped us to cultivate what uniquely makes them them.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: We split them up in kindergarten, we let them do their own thing, let them build their own friend group.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't want them to be the Clark twins, we wanted them to be Cassidy and Emerson.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: So Cassidy is older by about six minutes.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Emerson is taller by about an inch, even though they're identical.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: And Cassidy is the volleyball player.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: She she rocks it, but they're both like ridiculously intelligent and they're just cool kids.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um Emerson plays lacrosse.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: She was a freshman and started every game and just crushed it.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like I said, it's just it's fun watching them do the things that they love that they found themselves.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Avery came along a while later.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's kind of funny, Casey.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: You forget what it's like to have kids after a while, what it's like to have babies after a while.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: So it took us seven years.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: We joke that it took us seven years to forget what it was like to not have sleep.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: So seven years after the twins were born, Avery was born.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Avery's nine right now, and she is she's very different than her sisters.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: She's very outgoing, she's very full of, I don't know, all the kids have different types of courage, but the courage that Avery has is ridiculous.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like she'll go up to anybody and say anything at any point in time, and I absolutely love that.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: She loves the attention, she loves being on stage, so for her musical theater, it's kind of where she wants to be right now.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, or she's gonna come work for you at Assemble and be probably your best elector.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: There we go.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Emerson's actually hit me up for a job right now.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_04: So that's great.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_04: Now, do twins run in the family?
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: They do now.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_04: But before?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: No, no.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: So we we actually did all these this research on on twins.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um apparently identical twins have the same instance or same the same amount of of instances across all mammalian species.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: So it's I think three out of a hundred natural births who are are twins.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but there's no uh no genetic predisposition in my family to to fraternal twins at all.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_04: Now, dad, be honest, how often have you accidentally called uh Cassie Emerson or Emerson Cassidy?
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Not very often, actually.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of the things I I don't I try not to be proud about things, but it's one of the things that I'm actually proud about is that if you look at pictures of them, I can look at pictures of them when they're two years old or three months old, and I can pick out which one is which.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: They can't do that.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: You show them like baby picks and we're like, which one is you?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: And they pick the wrong one all the time.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of cool.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_04: What is it something sp I'm always curious about when when dad dads or moms can do this?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_04: Is it like like parents say like, oh, that's that's her.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_04: But like is there anything specific like you really pixelate it down?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's the for me, it's the eyes and the way that they smile.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: The the eyes angle like a little bit differently, and Emerson's smile kind of curls up a little bit differently than Cassidy's.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_04: It's like an artist, like thinking what a like Michelangelo would look at that and like, oh what a piece of shit.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_04: And like the random, but like the random person's like, oh my god, that's the best thing you've ever seen.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: Melanie just absolutely it's it's it's funny though, a little quick side note.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I had this dream when I was like 10 years old, and it was a recurring dream that I was gonna have twins.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: And in this dream, I'm not kidding, in this dream, uh I got the two mixed up in the bathtub, and one ended up being at Harvard, and one was in prison, and we had to figure out this thing.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was like a lifetime movie or something.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I had this fear that I was gonna mix up the twins.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: So we showed up at the hospital with a sharpie to write on their feet, pink and purple sharpies.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: We had bracelets, we had nail polish, we had all these things and all these mechanisms.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And one of them had Cassidy has a little tiny birthmark right above her belly button.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it was kind of like God telling me, Hey, uh, I'm gonna give you twins.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna give you, I'm not gonna give you more than you can handle.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I know it's gonna terrify you, but I'm gonna put a special mark on one of them so you don't get up confused.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_04: So cool.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_04: Um, okay, I want to I want to switch the conversation more towards you, and I want to learn what was life like growing up for you, and um, talk about the impact mom and dad had on you now that you're dad.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um my mom and dad are amazing.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: I man, they lived, they moved uh two miles away from us probably six years ago, seven years ago, and now I can't imagine life without them.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: My mom's picking up one of the kids from school today, and just that relationship is tight, and it's always been that way.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: So growing up, love, faith, hard work, sacrifice, those were kind of the pillars of our relationship.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: My dad was in the dairy industry, and there wasn't the level of earnings wasn't what it needed to be for where our family was growing.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: So he stepped into a sales career.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: He still sold dairy, adjacent products, grain, feed, uh inoculants, all kinds of stuff like that.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it meant that he had to be away from home a decent amount.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: It meant that a lot of the things that he would have liked to have done and the things that he would have liked to have had, he had to sacrifice, man, for us.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: He had to he had to demonstrate what that sacrificial love looked like.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Now, one thing that's important to know about my dad is he came from depression-era parents, where the love language was acts of service.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was, you know that I love you because there's food on your plate.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know that I love you because you got a shirt to wear.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: So for my dad to be able to take that and shift it a little bit, where he was also there, he was present, he he showed us love.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: He it wasn't just a shirt on our back, it was spending time building Legos together and building G.I.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: Joe sets out of plywood, battle sets and all these cool things, and taking us to battlefields and stuff like that.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: So my dad also was really engaged in the experiential side of things.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's something that I take with my kids as well.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: He'd take us to battlefields in New England.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: He would take us camping all the time at Boy Scout camps and all of these things.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: It was cool, Casey, because it allowed me to build a better relationship with him.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh my mom, on the other hand, she she was all about love and faith.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: We moved around a decent amount growing up.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: And the first thing we would do when we got to a new community is she'd spend three weeks or four weeks going from church to church to church.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it didn't matter the denomination.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: What mattered was the people.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: She wanted us to be in a group of people where I don't know, the the community was strong, the community was tight, the right messages were being were being sent out, and we were able to kind of absorb the right bits and pieces.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: I've never had a question that my parents love me.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: I've never had a question about where their faith was.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: I've never had a question about the level of sacrifice that they made for us.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: And seeing that, it was pretty cool.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: My dad stepped out of his comfort zone to move into sales so that he could provide a better life for us.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: It was kind of tough because I just saw him a lot less while he was doing that, but I understood why he was doing it.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: It also, for me, turned me away from sales and told me that I didn't want to be a sales guy.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: So we'll get to that in a little bit.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: But uh yeah, for a while I told myself that I hated sales.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_04: What did what did um what did mom do for work?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: She was a dental hygienist.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: So she worked, man, four days a week.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: Most of the dentist offices she worked at were closed on Fridays, but she worked from 7 a.m., 8 a.m.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: until 5 o'clock in the evening.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: She'd come back and it was cool because I remember so many times her taking the groceries out of the back of the car, leaving them on the counter, the ice cream is melting on the counter, stuff is starting to melt, and she'd sit us down.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: The first thing she'd do is read us Bible stories, and she'd spend time with us engaging in conversation and showing us that we were more important than the ice cream that was melting.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: It also for me makes me love ice cream soup that much more.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when the ice cream starts to get a little bit soupy.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's how I like my ice cream now.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think probably as a result.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so was it hard for when you guys moved around?
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_04: Was it hard for her to get new dental hygienist jobs, or did she eventually kind of hang at the cleats and no, she it was it was pretty easy for her.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: She was really good at what she did.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: She had a lot of experience.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: So uh yeah, she never had a problem.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_04: Are mom and dad still with us?
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: Not only are they with us, but like we hang out with them all the time and they are ingrained in our lives.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty cool.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_04: That's awesome.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_04: That's awesome.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you mentioned love, faith, hard work, sacrifice, obviously, some great life lessons, some values.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_04: Um, tell me, is there anything, any other values that that you were really cemented to you um that you think about often now as a dad?
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I think for me, I've got like I have a why statement, and I maybe have shared this with you before, Casey.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: I've got a why statement, and then I've got three pillars, three values that all start with A, which makes them really easy, um, that really helped orient my life and the decisions that I make, both as a father, as a husband, as a member of the community, even as a as a leader in my organization.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, my why statement is to help those within my sphere of influence to remember and to recognize what they were uniquely created for and what they love, and to empower them to take meaningful and measurable steps in that direction.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: So the TLDR on that, as my kids would say, is it helped to maximize the gifts that everybody has by helping them to become better leaders.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_04: That's awesome.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_04: How long did it take you to create that?
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: Years, probably.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: It kept refining, and every once in a while I'll go back and I'll tweak a word and I'll tweak little bits of it because uh life, our mission, the reason that we're here in any given season, I believe, shifts.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: And if we're not looking back and refining that, then we're missing the opportunity to create greater impact.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I've got that, and then I've got my three A's.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: The three A's are authenticity, accountability, and action.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: So authenticity is critical because I can't pretend to be somebody that I'm not.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's you know very similar to vulnerability for you, right?
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's the opportunity for me to be authentic with my kids is so so so critical when I tell them how I'm feeling in a given situation.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: If I'm telling them like, hey guys, I'm struggling with this right now, it creates an environment where my kids want to share that stuff with me.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: It also gives them the opportunity to speak into me too.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like this is so freaking cool.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: I love this.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, as I'm trying to decide actually if I'm gonna take the assemble job, I'm driving back from Cassidy with Cassidy from volleyball practice, which by the way is one of my favorite 20-minute periods during the week.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: I get 20 minutes locked in a car with her, and usually she's really excited because she had a great practice.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: She's sharing, we're listening.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's just there's the level of presence there is awesome.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I look at Cassidy as we're driving and I say, Hey, like this job is gonna be tough.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna be a lot of changes for me.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna have to learn a lot of new things, I'm gonna have to step out of my comfort zone.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm kind of scared right now.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: Cassidy, who's 15 at the time, looks at me and says, You know, dad, that's where the growth happens.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: All the good stuff happens.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we're we're in that tough spot.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, oh man, did you just do that to me?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like that for that, that is cool.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that doesn't happen without us being authentic and vulnerable with our kids.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: We're creating that experience and that shared reality, right?
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_04: Well, it's um one of my favorite, like, call it leadership mantras I learned at age 41, which is years ago, that um shout out to John Kaplan.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_04: If you're listening, he said it's okay not to know everything, it's just not okay not to do anything about it.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_04: And I think the power of like vulnerability, what you just showed, the power of like sometimes we feel like we have to be this perfect person.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_04: I'm like, I don't like, yeah, and even like dealing with what we talked about, Riley and her injury, it's um I she's seen dad cry more often than the last.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_04: Three days, and I've said, Hey, honey, I'm sad for you.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm also this is bringing back memories for me.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_04: And I think my kids used to always like sometimes, you know, I'm I'm the dad in the you know, good episode of Golden Girls or Punky Brewster.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_04: I might tear up.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_04: And I don't, I don't give.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_04: I I could care less.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_04: I'm like, because I'm being me.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_04: And they know that like that's I because I don't want to be the dad that's like, oh, I've never seen my dad cry.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_04: Well, okay.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, and I'm not saying that my way's right or someone else's way is wrong, but I'd rather just be to your A, B, me.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_04: It's a lot easier to know which if I'm being if I'm Casey at work, am I Casey home?
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_04: No, I mean just Casey.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_04: This is why I'm just Casey.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: I love it, man.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I gotta ask, like, what did that mean for Riley to see you cry and to see you be vulnerable and to see you face okay?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_04: I would think, I mean, but I would be guessing.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_04: So I'd I'm gonna ask her.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_04: That's my homework.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna ask her.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and and hopefully that hey, I've been through this before.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_04: And hey, it's if my dad's crying, you know, I'm it wasn't like bawling out of control, but like, you know, but like I hope that it's be like it's okay.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_04: And I did I keep encouraging her.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_04: Hey, like if you're gonna have tough days, and this and this is just one blip of the radar of your life, it'll be tough.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_04: And there's gonna be other tough times in your life.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_04: And yeah, the worst thing you can do is hold it in.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_04: You know, get it out, get it out.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna ask her.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_04: I'll I'll let you know what she said.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, please, please let me know.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love to I'd love to hear, man.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's fantastic.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_04: Tell me about the other two A's.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: So um accountability is number one.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: And accountability, the other thing about accountability, besides just the familial relationships, is it builds trust and trust builds relationships, and relationships are so critical.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: So, so so critical in everything that we do.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mentioned that I hated sales until I realized that everything is sales.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: And whether you're a dentist or a doctor or you're an accountant, everything you're doing that anybody is doing is is really sales, right?
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like we're trying to convince someone or share information with someone that helps them to see things differently and to create a change.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes it's buying a widget, sometimes it's driving towards an outcome, sometimes it's getting a tooth pulled.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: But like all of those things are sales, and that's built on relationship and that's built on trust.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: But the other thing a trust is built on is accountability, which is my second A.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: I like to have a high say you ratio with my kids and with my family.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: And my wife may have a different perspective on my honeydew list and my say due ratio.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: But uh with my kids, I try to deliver what I say that I'm gonna, what I'm saying I'm gonna do because it it creates that environment for them of joining with me in that accountability.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I also know that if something isn't happening, it's my fault.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I take responsibility for that.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: If the kids' room isn't clean, it's because I haven't given them enough time to be able to do that.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm putting too much, too many other things on them to do that.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: If studying isn't done, it's because I'm requesting too much, or I'm not I'm not creating the space for them to actually do the studying to get an A on the test.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm not encouraging them enough.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not spending enough time going through their homework with them to make sure that they understand if I have accountability in what's happening because this is my home and I'm the leader of this this home.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I expect them to take ownership too, and I expect them to take accountability for their part, but they can't do that if they don't see me do that.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: So authenticity leads to accountability, and then accountability leads to the third A, which is action.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: The other two don't matter unless we actually take action on things.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: And for us, it's leaning into leaning into the unknown, right?
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's kind of like the the statement that you made from Kaplan, right?
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's okay if you don't know, you just gotta do sometimes.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I gotta do something about it.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Cassidy came to me when she was five years old, and she said, Dad, will you teach me karate?
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Yeah, freaking like let's go.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: But why do you want to know karate?
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like, tell me more about this.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm curious, like, what what's making you want to do this?
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: You see something on TV or like what your friends are talking about, and she's like, No, I want to be able to be brave.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: In our house, being brave doesn't mean that you're not afraid because we all get afraid.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: Being brave means you take action when you are afraid.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: And Cassidy wanted to be brave.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: She wanted to be able to, should she need to, protect herself and protect others.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: And like those are the moment span that I live for.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_04: I thought you said I thought you were like gonna drop a karate kid reference, but it was like a much better answer.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'll save that, I'll save the karate kid reference for next time, man.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: Sweep the leg.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_04: Put them in a body bag, Johnny.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_04: Put him in a body bag.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_04: Um, okay.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_04: So you got your Y statement, you got your three A's.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_04: Um back to like when mom and dad were teaching you and showing you love, faith, hard work, uh, uh other, I would imagine, other, other things.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_04: Is there a story that you can think of that might maybe you haven't thought about in a while that would really cement some of those key learnings or key values that has made you the dad you are today?
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think in my freshman year in college and in my sophomore year in college, uh, that one just jumped out when you asked that question.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um freshman year was at McGill.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: McGill was in Montreal.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: At the time, the drinking age was 18 in Montreal.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I lived in Molson Hall, played football on Molson in Molson Stadium.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a beer, they called him the beer guy.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: The beer guide lived in the the bottom floor of every dorm, and there was a walk-in fridge, and you could knock on the door and buy beer from him at any point in time.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: It was just like it was crazy, man.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: So coming from Vermont, like where everything was kind of locked down, it created a lot of opportunities for me to make decisions that probably weren't beneficial short term.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so so I learned very quickly.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember getting a letter in August, like two weeks before summer camp in preseason, uh, that I was no longer welcome at McGill University, which is why you see me bounce around as much as I did.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: And uh at that moment, it it kind of hit me that I wasn't being authentic to myself.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I had to have a lot of tough conversations with my parents because I needed to move back.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: And they held me accountable to paying for college myself, my my second year.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: I had to bootstrap everything and figure out how I was gonna pay for a small community college nearby to get my grades back up.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, started a lot of tough conversations about who I thought I was and who I actually was and living an authentic life.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that there were a lot of other stories that I could tell from earlier, but that one really jumped out at me at that moment and really helped to cement that as well as grit.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like for me to my case, it's crazy.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: My freshman year had a 0.91 GPA.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: It takes effort, it takes effort, man, to get a 0.91 GPA.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: Jokingly, it's like the squares gap, right?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is L1.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's like like you you you square your GPA and it gets smaller.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: Think about that one, okay?
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: But but I fought back and you know, I graduated with honors from from the University of Vermont, and it it set the tone for for grit, for tenacity, and also understanding what good decisions in a moment look like and what they didn't.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, authenticity, accountability, and action all came to fruition in that moment.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_04: You made me feel like an honor student because my freshman year, Michael, I had a 1.7.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man, you're a genius.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_04: I already knew that, but like you've got the paperwork to prove it now.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_04: 1.7.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_04: I and we had this back in the day, 1994.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_04: There was a system at the Harvard of the West Coast called Central Washington University.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_04: It was called Reggie, and you would literally dial 963 Reggie R-E-G-I.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_04: And it was like an automated phone system, but your grades, and I was like, I had like football, got A in football at a theater class.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_04: I did like a monologue of Caddyshack.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_04: I knew I was good there.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: Only because Will Farrell wasn't born yet.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_04: Right, exactly.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I did uh some environmental science class I took, and I was like, ugh, environmental science, GPA, like one.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_04: It was like it's low, and the overall grades was like 1.7.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_04: I was like, oh boy.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_04: I remember I had to go tell mom and dad, and they were like, they were not happy.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_04: But I don't know.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_04: For me though, I've learned, I know this will be this might definitely not agree, people might agree with this, but for me, I'm an EQ over an IQ guy.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_04: And I if if my son or daughter can look me in the face and say, I tried my best, and if your best was a C, I'm okay with that.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_04: Because if if Ryder or Allie decide to get into biz dev or coaching or sports or whatever, like what they know about cloud systems in environmental science, who cares?
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: You're spot on.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_04: You know, and I I know and I'm like, but I'm always like really clear with them.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_04: I'm like, don't doesn't mean I don't want you to try your best.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not giving you a pass to be really, really crappy at that.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_04: But I'm but I'm saying make you know, it's so it's not gonna define you.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: I agree, man.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: Why do you think that the educational system is not great at teaching relational skills?
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: We learn all this stuff that you know, I remember taking calculus and thinking I'm never gonna use this again in my life, and here we are many years later, and I haven't.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: But the relational skills, the stuff that you're talking about, the the EQ, those are the things that actually matter.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: Those those relational skills, those soft skills, I don't know what drives success.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: What like I don't know.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: Any thoughts on that?
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I when I wrote the book I wrote, one of the reasons I wrote it was four colleges in hopes that it would teach like six common sense things that seem common sense, yet most people in life suck at them.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_04: And like being nice, bringing energy to room, setting expectations, being a good listener, doc remembering when people's birthdays are, like documenting, checking your ego, practicing whatever you do choose to do, whether it's ceramics or a violin or basketball, and then have patience for people.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_04: And for some reason, we we we put more pressure on what'd you get in your SAT.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_04: Man, I can barely spell SAT.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I just did it.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_04: I spelled it right.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_04: Good.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you know, but like I don't know.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_04: I think I think it's a great question.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_04: I think I I I I wish that I I think about when as you asked that question, it made me think about homeek.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know if you took homec when you were in high school.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_04: But like homecek taught me like how to cook, how to sew, how to how to bounce a checkbook.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_04: Bounce a checkbook, right?
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, things that like are a lot more important than you know the square root of 56.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_04: If I don't even know if that's that's a thing anymore.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_04: But um, I don't even know what square root, I can't remember what square root is.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_04: But I don't know.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_04: To me, I think these are these are it's you know, another thing that it I was just gonna get off a call right before we started recording.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_04: I I told someone I'm I'm still betting on EQ over AI.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_04: So I mean, I think if we can teach our kids to do these things, they'll definitely will.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_04: I hope, my hope is that they will um separate themselves from people.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_04: You know, whether you can speak in front of people, have what questions you ask.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's uh and that's what I love about like some of the courage stuff.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um I know Brad Owens was on what two years ago, back in season five, right?
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: And he was talking about his kids uh ask making his kids order food.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's something we always do as well.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: We we we do big speak ups.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like if uh somebody we used to pay the kids for big speak ups and give them a piece of candy or give them a quarter to do something that was uncomfortable, uncomfortable to push them out of their comfort zone so that they would go speak to a grown-up about something that was was challenging.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: And now they do big speakups all the time, and they still joke and they call them big speak ups.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: But similar to to Brad and and his kids ordered food, like those those little things, they they pay off, man.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: They pay off.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I I go ahead.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: What are we gonna say?
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_04: I was gonna say that's that that's such a small gift that you can give your kids.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_04: And I remember we we did the same thing in our house.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_04: I was like, Austin, I I know I'm eating that you either can order for yourself or you're not gonna eat.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_04: And I think you when you enable people and don't give them the tools, kind of like I love the your whole how you you you know live and teach accountability, it's like, well, what what could I have done differently to be to help my kids be in a better place of success?
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_04: Well, if I never help them order food, well then how am I they're not just gonna miraculously learn how to do it.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe we should practice before we go to the restaurant.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_04: You know, again, that's that would be like uncommon, that would create an uncommon outcome.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_04: The common thing to do is just wing it, which, as we know in sales, is never a good idea.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um Hey everyone, my name is Blaise Basel, and I hope you're enjoying today's episode of the Quarterback Dadcast.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: In case you're wondering, I'm a fellow dad and also the president of Kelly Mitchell.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: Kelly Mitchell is an employee-owned technology solutions firm, and we help organizations solve complex business challenges.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think at the end of the day, we're we're focused on our team doing work that matters for our clients.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because the way you show up matters, the way you treat people, clients, teammates, really everyone.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: That shapes the experience and the results that follow.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think similarly, Casey has had a real impact on our team internally at Kelly Mitchell.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: He spent time with us most recently in St.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: Louis with our sales team.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: And while he was there, he asked a question that really stuck with me.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that was do you believe that what you do matters?
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: That question stayed with us.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's changed how we approach our day-to-day, how we prepare, how we communicate, and ultimately how we follow through.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's why the experience Casey brings to his customers has made such an impact.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because whether when people believe their work matters, everything works better across the team, with our clients, and definitely in results.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: So we appreciate you, Casey.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: And now back to the podcast.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_04: Back to you, real quick.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_04: So you, your, your pops is selling.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_04: He's a dairy guy, he's traveling probably a little bit.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, you said in the beginning that you never wanted to get into sales, but then you did.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_04: What tell me what triggered that tipping point?
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man, so I uh original career path.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the original, original career path was to go into the NFL uh to get my to become a pastor in the offseason and a lawyer in the offseason, and then uh, oh man, I was gonna become president at some point in time and then go to the Supreme Court.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh all of those plans changed pretty quickly.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then it shifted from the league to the Bureau, and I wanted to be in the FBI.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I went down to Virginia.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: I was at uh illegally studying at William and Mary.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: So sorry, William and Mary, if you're listening right now.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh walking in and audit quote unquote auditing classes while I was trying to get my residency.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I talked to a bunch of FBI agents, and they said that uh it wasn't all kicking indoors and shooting bad guys and X-files.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's a lot of background checks, working in Albuquerque, the stuff that uh, you know, they don't make TV shows about.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I started to reevaluate what I wanted to do, Casey.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: I ended up at Penn State for grad school.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: And while I was there getting my MBA, I learned more about the pharmaceutical industry.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: I learned about the opportunity to advise doctors and to not necessarily quote unquote sell because in that industry and in that sales cycle, you don't walk away with a with a signed order form.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: You share clinical information with a provider and help them to understand when the right patient walks in the door, what the benefits of using your medication is.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: So for me, it felt like a non-sales sales thing.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: I had a friend that was doing it who's making great money, and it just seemed like a good move.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I stepped in intending to be in a sales world for two to four years and then move into marketing, and it just stuck.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: And there was an opportunity to have flexibility in my lifestyle.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: There was an opportunity to get to meet a lot of really cool people.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: And even though I'm actually an introvert, the opportunity to bounce around and kind of use my introvert powers as a superpower was was pretty cool.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: I felt like I was making a difference as well.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like selling medicine wasn't selling chocolate bars.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I think one of the CEOs of of Lily said that at one point in time.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: And feeling like I was making an impact, feeling like I had that flexibility, feeling like the earnings were there kept me around.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've kind of told myself ever since that I'm not actually in sales, I'm in consulting.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not here to sell a widget, I'm not here to sell a medicine, I'm not here to sell software.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: What I'm here to do is to help to drive outcomes.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's to help the customers that we're helping to align on what the outcomes that they're chasing are, to identify the whys behind it and to partner with them to solve those outcomes, whatever they are.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_04: Did you ever think of like, because I think like selling to me is all about asking great questions and then telling stories.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_04: And then I think when you are able to do that, it's you're not selling, you're not even selling a thing.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_04: And I think selling also I would be willing to bet your parents probably instilled a belief in you and your belief in yourself.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that's I don't know if you ever think I thought about that, like if you believe, like you believed in what you like the the pharmaceutical was doing.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_04: So you're like, oh, I can get behind this.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah, 100%, man.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: 100%.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like I was selling drugs for for bipolar disorder.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I had a friend named Josh who committed suicide from having but bipolar.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: And what resonated with me is every time I talked to a doctor about this, I was talking to them about Josh.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: I could connect very deeply because the patient that I was talking about was my best friend.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: And if I could help save somebody else's Josh, that resonated.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that was different.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was it was impact-based and it was personal to me.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's like where I am right now.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's that same thing.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: The what I'm doing aligns so closely to the why that I shared before.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: It allows me to stay passionate about what I'm doing.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it allows, I think, the I don't know, the conviction that I have in the outcomes and in the impact to shine through when I'm talking to customers and the prospects.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_04: So how does um well I want to I wanna I want to get back to some dad stuff, but I'm curious.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_04: So how do how does one go from FBI, pharmaceutical, and then you find yourself in the CRM software world?
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of weird, right?
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so I did the the entrepreneurship thing for about two years.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh a couple of friends and I decided to to spin up a healthcare tech company where we designed an advanced director where we're living well that's completely digital.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome idea.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's the timing wasn't right.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it it we thought we'd make millions of dollars, but instead we had millions of learnings, which were probably more valuable.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: After uh after that wasn't going the way that we wanted, I reached out to a friend of mine who had been at Salesforce for about three years and I said, Hey, uh you approached me when you joined Salesforce and you said that I'd love it there.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: You guys are still hiring.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: And kind of on a whim, I started doing some research and learning about once again, helping businesses to grow.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Casey, you brought it up.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's something that resonated with me because it wasn't selling software.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: And that perspective, I think, is what helped me to get the job and help me to be successful.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't selling, hey, we're gonna sell the CRM.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, it was, I'm going to help this small business move to a mid-sized business, or I'm gonna help this mid-sized business double the number of employees that it has, the impact that it has in a community.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: And think of what that'll actually do for that community and for those families.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like I still think back to uh, man, there's a guy named John who was in SalesOps, one of my customers when I was at Salesforce.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, John had just had a brand new baby.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: Her name was Madison.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: And John was in sales ops, which been every month he was up until three o'clock in the morning the last three or four days in the month and the first couple of days in the month, trying to reconcile all this stuff because the processes were broken.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I got to know John pretty well.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: So when I went in to talk to the customer about like how our technology and this advisory service can help to shift that, it was all about John, man.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: It was all about how do I get John back to Madison and to Sarah, his wife?
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: How can I help them to connect?
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: Because if I can give John back those evenings, five nights a month, six nights a month, how much more impactful can he be as a dad?
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: And like that sticks with me.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: I still text with John.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: That was seven years ago, man.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I still text with John now.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's pretty cool.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_04: What has sales taught you about being a dad?
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: Ooh, that's a great question.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: Be curious, I think is the first.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: That was the answer I wanted.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean, I I'm not just I'm not picking, I'm not picking from your list, but that, but that's that's it, man.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's like there's so many different ways that conversations can go.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: And unless I have a better understanding of the why behind things and the motivations behind things or what's going on behind the scenes, I can't really help.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: If I'm with Cassidy in the car after volleyball practice and she's talking about team dynamics and how there's a challenge there, if I just go into standard mic mode and I start making recommendations, she shuts down pretty stinking quick.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: But if I start asking her why and I start to be curious about what's happening and how she's feeling about things, it it opens up and it allows me to.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Better understand what the situation is and then hopefully add some value.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the same thing, I think, in a in a quote unquote sales environment.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, you got to meet people where they are.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_04: Um I I didn't, I just thought of this, and and sorry everybody if I'm talking about Riley too much here.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_04: But like last night I had a good epiphany growth moment, I would say, because I, as my daughter's coming downstairs on crutches, I'm like, hey, hey, do you need help?
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_04: Dad, I got it.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_04: And my wife is like the crazy independent, crazy strong.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_04: And my star daughter, Riley.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_04: And um, I'm like helping her out to the car.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_04: I'm, you know, I'm I'm making her lunch for her, which I haven't done that for years.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I'm doing these things, and uh like she figured out last night she got up the stairs by herself, she got in the shower by herself with one leg.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm like, like, you know, my first thought is, you know, worry ward worry, worry wart dad's room.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_04: How you know you can be okay?
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_04: And she's like, my wife's like, hey, don't steal her independence from her.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, wow.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm like, God, that one stung.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_04: But I'm like, but she didn't say it in like a like a heartless winch more.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_04: It was more it was more of like uh loving coaching, yeah.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_04: It was like, hey, like I'm independent, she's independent.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_04: Like, if you if we want to do everything for her when she's going through this, like what a gift she can give herself if she can be independent.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_04: I'm like, that's cool.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_04: That's really freaking good advice, you know.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_04: And so um, I think I don't know, back to I love your answer about curiosity.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_04: And that's so for me, like if I wasn't curious, then if my ego's in the way, I would have shut down and said, screw you, what are you talking about?
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_04: But I'm like, because I talk about curiosity so often, it's like deep in me that I want to figure out ways to be a better version of me.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_04: And there's days I'm gonna be a really shitty version of myself.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_04: Well, okay, then we can fix it tomorrow by either apologizing or owning it or you know.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_01: Then you get to humility as well, right?
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's uh that's a beautiful thing, man.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_04: If you were to think of your like, and you got your you got your A's, you got your Y statement, but if you had to think about like the values that are most important for you and your wife that you're gonna be teaching, are there any anything else besides the three A's that you would you would think about?
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_01: If the camera's on, I take you up to our bathroom or powder room on our first floor.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: So we we have a family mission statement.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: We need we're actually planning on revising it this year, because we did it probably two years ago, and we have our family values.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: My wife had them, she went to Etsy or something and had them printed out and put them as stickers in in the powder room.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_01: Last year we pulled those down and we've got now a framed picture there, and it's got we're revising them went from like 12 values down to five right now.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: But for us, um you know, love, faith, uh oh man, I shouldn't know these, Casey.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's all right.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: I let me run to the bathroom real quick and I'll I'll be back.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um the uh worship is one of them for our family.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really, really important one.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um perseverance is is on that list as well.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's faith, it's family, it's communication.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: If I was gonna distill them down to three, yeah, communication is a powerful one.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_04: Faith and family obviously are super, super.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it's interesting.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_04: I've interviewed um well, a couple things I want to say that you said what you said in the beginning, how you talked about meeting, kind of having your own special relationship with each kid and your gratitude.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_04: I think that's so freaking important.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, it's I've met a lot of I have buddies that sometimes don't always connect with their kids.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_04: I've talked to other people who can't always connect their kids because maybe like I'm a golfer and my daughter's in golf.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_04: Well, maybe have her drive the golf cart, see if she wants to strive the golf crypto, make it fun.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_04: Or I interviewed a guy recently and his he's like big into sports.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_04: Well, his son could give two you know what's about that, but he loves art and he loves music.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_04: And so the guy went to go like see like a pretty much like a heavy metal.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_04: So, you know, I think like that's to me about communication and doing those types of things.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_04: And um, it's our just like in sales, it's our job to connect with people and build relationships and learn what's important to them.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_04: And if you can help them, you will.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_04: If you can't, you can't.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but you know, I I love I I think those are a couple stories that that came to mind as you were saying those um foundations because I think what values, just like in a company, are words on a wall if you don't live them out.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: What about you, Casey?
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: What are what are some of the the key besides the uh besides H V and C, like what are the key values at the J.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: Cox house?
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_04: I think those are the ones.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_04: I mean those are the those are the ones I do for the podcast, those are the ones I do for my that are like really clear and I I came I got throws through actually a value exercise that I went through in like I would say year one of the entrepreneurial journey where there was like just tons of values I picked from and I just like those are the ones that really just pick out of me, and I think I'd yet to see an environment where if people check their ego, if people are comfortable asking for help and we're just being sober-minded and asking questions, like what finding an environment where those aren't gonna work.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, right.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_04: It's gonna work every time, you know.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_04: It's like it's like Sex Panther by Odeon.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: I was literally thinking that.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_01: I just didn't know if I wanted to go there.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: 60% of the time it works every time.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_04: It stings the nostrils in a good way.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_04: We just quoted Anchorman, everybody.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_04: Smells like a Indian food wrapped up in a baby's diaper.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_04: Um we just quoted Anchorman.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna get the wheels back on track here.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_04: How about Michael?
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_04: An air your dad game that might not be where you want it, that sometimes could could speak to another dad at home to to realize that, hey, I'm struggling with that too.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's uh there's a lot, man.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: The two biggest ones that kind of jump out to me right now.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: There are times, so I I I try to be as present as possible when I leave this office and I go upstairs and uh try to turn off all the work stuff.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: But what end up ends up happening is usually after everybody goes to bed or everybody's moving towards bed, I jump back on the laptop and back on the couch.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: I bring the laptop upstairs.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes it's hard for me to separate from that.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_01: If one of my kids comes down, Emerson came down last night.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: I was working on some forecasting stuff, and Emerson came down and she was having a conversation with me, and I didn't decouple myself from the work, and I was not fully present.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I was talking to her, but I wasn't talking with her, and I wasn't communicating with her.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_01: And she left.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_01: And this morning I told her when I brought her to school, I'm like, buddy, I'm sorry that I totally missed that.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: I dropped that ball, and she's like, it's okay, but it really isn't because I'm reinforcing something to her.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I need to pull myself out of that and I need to recognize in those moments like shut the laptop, even if it's like quote unquote work time, shut the laptop and have a conversation with the kids.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: The second one is I need to model better sleep for my kids.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: I've noticed my kids are not getting great sleep right now, and I think a lot of it has to do, Casey, with them watching me because I'm I'm up late and I'm up early.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm setting that example for them of what a sleep pattern looks like, and I and I can't do that.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: I need to show them for myself, for my health, for my for everything, I need to be able to get the right amount of sleep.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: But I also need to show them what that discipline actually looks like.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_04: Two great answers.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_04: Do I have permission to offer a coaching to you?
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_01: I would love it.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_04: So I, in this world of entrepreneurship and this journey that found me, I created these things called swear words.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_04: And they're not like shits and damits, they're different types of swear words.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_04: And so these swear words are need to, should do, want to, have to, and can't.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_04: So when I remember working with a client, I'll say, Hey, stop effing swearing at me.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_04: And we'll start laughing.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_04: So like when I hear the word need, like you dropped like four need to's, and I'm just like ultra like sensitive.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_04: Oh man, I'm like, damn, this guy's got a potty mouth.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_04: What's what the F's wrong with him?
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_04: Swear jar is full.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_04: And so I when I instead of me, and I I replace need to, should do, want to, have to, can't, which to me creates anxiety with will.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_04: And I just say, and I either I will or I won't.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_04: And if I say I I like I will, and then at least you can hold yourself accountable back to your A's.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I need to do that.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: Funny part is um I was texting Cassidy, texting Cassidy earlier today.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, hey, what was that that wise thing you said last week?
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that's actually what it was.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_01: It was one of those kind of things where I'm like, hey, I I should do this, or she's like, that don't you mean that you you're going to do this?
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: Nice.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, so I think my kids are better than this at this than I am, Casey.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for the coaching.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is fantastic.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_04: It's uh it's hard.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_04: And I I uh I get called out sometimes too.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_04: And um, my favorite part about the the swear words that turned that was like sarcastically turned into like a kind of a fun little thing for people to use.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_04: My all I shared with another client.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_04: I said, Hey, tell your wife if you're if you really want to improve in this, tell your wife to tell you to stop swearing because I'm I only get you for an hour every some weeks.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_04: And he's like, dude, this is so annoying.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_04: She just loves this.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_04: She's just like, I'm like, but it's working, right?
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_04: And he's like, Yeah, yeah, that's amazing.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, as we get ready to wrap up here, I want to I want to make sure that we help people.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_04: Um, because I I think what you guys are doing at Assemble is really, really cool.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_04: Tell us if people are like, we've heard Assemble a couple times, but I have no idea what what Assemble is.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_04: How can we um make sure we help people learn more about what you guys are doing and get people to go visit what you're doing?
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so thanks for asking.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, first of all, if anybody wants to connect, I've got my LinkedIn profile.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_01: Please, please, please reach out so we can learn together and grow together.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: We're not meant to do life alone.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_01: We're meant to do life in relationships.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I would love to connect anyone who's listening and learn from you and learn build a relationship.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_01: If you go to assemble.com, as y-mbl.com, uh, you can learn a lot about us.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_01: And what's kind of cool that we're doing right now, Casey, I know when Brad was on, he talked a lot about applicant tracking systems and that side of things.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: We're now a workforce orchestration company.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: And what that means is yes, we do have recruitment software to find, to hire, and to place the right person at the right time, whether a company is a talented staffing company or whether they're a corporate recruiting company.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, every company is a recruiting company because everybody's got jobs to fill, and we can help with that side of things.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: We also, though, have a digital labor advisory practice, and this digital labor practice helps to train to onboard and to coach digital workers to work alongside human workers.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: And you made a joke that about uh about AI.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: Cool part is we view AI as a team as a team member and somebody to enhance what the human is bringing.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: So for me, an AI is not AI is not gonna replace anybody from my team.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_01: What it's going to do is unlock the potential that they have.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna unlock their ability to connect with people and build relationships and build trust.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_01: The AI, the digital worker that sits beside them, is going to do all the stuff that they probably don't want to do, anyways.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_01: And what we've been able to do at Assemble is we have about 250 employees right now.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: 100 of those employees are digital workers.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_01: Now we haven't we've moved people from one place to another to unlock more of their talents and gifts and skills.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_01: Once again, aligned to my why statement.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: But we help other companies to do this as well.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then we have this Salesforce expertise, this platform expertise to be able to tie all this stuff together and make it work.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that's what we do.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it's a cool place to be right now because it's about unlocking human potential through some of the tools that we have.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_04: Well, it's been cool to be on the sidelines.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_04: And um, I gotta give a shout out to Lauren Jones.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_04: Actually, Lauren Jones is the one I don't know if you know Lauren, if you've ever met her, but Lauren connected me to Brandon and well Brandon, and then I went met Greg, and then they introduced me to Brad, and um, and then obviously then Brandon introduced me to you.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_04: But um, it's been so cool to see the growth that's happened with you guys, and uh, you know, seeing I think it was at Dreamforce this year when Brandon was pretty much like the looked like the Pope up there.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_04: Like, you know, I was crazy, man.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was crazy.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_01: We ended up having 10 sessions at Dreamforce.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_01: We won the the customer success award, the first ever live demo by a customer on stage during a keynote at Dreamforce.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I joked while I was at Salesforce.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I studied Salesforce.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: While I was at Salesforce, one of my goals was to be able to speak at Dreamforce.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't think I was gonna need to leave the company in order to do it, but I had the chance to speak twice at Dreamforce, and what a cool experience to share like what we're doing, to share how we're finding success, blending both digital workers and human workers.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_04: Love it.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I will make sure this is all linked in the show notes so people can easily um find you on LinkedIn and also find Assemble um in the wide world of the internet.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_04: Amazing.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_04: Um Michael, if you were to summarize everything we've talked about, the dads can take from our conversation that they could say, man, this is a cool.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_04: I love I like learning more about what these guys are talking about.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_04: Here are here are two or three things, or maybe one thing that he could take to say, man, this is I could definitely learn from this conversation and apply it my own life to be a better quarterback or leader of my house.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_04: Tell me what comes to mind.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_01: Relationships, it comes down to for me, it comes down to relationships, man.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: It comes down to the relationship that I have with my wife and modeling that with my kids so they can see the way that I treat my wife.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: It comes down to the relationships that I have with my kids and understanding that they're all unique and meeting them, to your point, meeting them where they are and and building that trust and giving them the confidence to be able to become who they were meant to be.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_04: Love it.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_04: Relationships.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_04: That is gold, my man.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_04: Um kids are watching, everybody.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_04: They are watching.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: They are.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: They are eyes, yeah.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_04: The eyes are stronger than the ears sometimes.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_01: When they start parroting back the stuff that uh that we say, whether it's good or bad, it's uh it's a mirror.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's a mirror to our soul.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_04: 100%.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_04: Well, it's now time to go into the lightning round, uh, where I will show you the negative hits of taking too many uh hits in college, not bong hits, but football hits.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, your job is to answer these questions as quickly as you can, and my job is to hopefully get a giggle out of you.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_04: All right, let's go.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, true or false, before joining uh Salesforce, you once played guitar with Van Halen.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_04: False.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_04: False.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_04: Um, true or false, you have 68 guitars hanging on your wall.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_01: False.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_01: There are seven.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_04: There's a lot of guitars there, but you can't see it, but I can.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_04: They look I feel like I'm like in an MTV studio staring at this chap right now, which is pretty cool.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_04: Um, what would be one genre of music that might surprise your colleagues at Assemble that you can play?
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: The majority of them probably worship, but I've played a little bit of metal before.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: I actually played a lot of metal, I'm not gonna lie.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_01: Nice probably surprise them.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_01: Cut my teeth on some Metallica and some uh some Megadeth back in the day.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_04: Good poll.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not I think this is the first Megadeth reference we've had on the podcast in seven years.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_04: So thank you for I feel like they should give you a t-shirt or something.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_04: Nice.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_01: What was the last book you read?
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_01: Ooh, uh I'm currently reading like four books, so I don't know what the last time I read a book cover to cover.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'd say the last one that I read was since it's on the top of the list, The Common Sense Way.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's by a an ex-Delta Force operator on leadership lessons.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'll send you the I'll send you the link.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty good.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I'm actually looking for a new book.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_04: I'm traveling next week.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_04: Um, favorite comedy movie of all time is ooh, uh the recency effect is telling me elf.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think we watched it like seven times over the Christmas break.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's a lot of good ones, man.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_01: But but I'll stick with elf for today.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_04: Solid choice.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_04: Um, if there was to be a book written about your life, tell me the title.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: Fiction or non-fiction?
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_04: You pick.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'll go with non-fiction.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it'd be simple.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_01: I would I'd go with the three A's.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_04: Love it.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_04: And we're not talking about the chipmunks.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_04: We're um we're talking about your your values.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe the maybe that's what who stars as me in the movie.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, so the three A's is now crushing it.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_04: Uh we can't keep we can't keep these books on the shelf, and and we're gonna now start um taking phone calls from Netflix because they're gonna make a movie.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_04: And so I need to know which, which, not the chipmunks, which Hollywood star, you're the casting director.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_04: Who's gonna star Michael Clark in this fantastic movie?
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man, I'd love if it was Chris Pratt.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_04: Solid choice.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he he's pretty awesome, but at the same time, I've got the same tooth gap as Michael Strahan, so he might be a better fit.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_04: Well played.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_04: And you and bring some diversity into the movie.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_04: I like it.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_04: Um, okay, and then last and most important question tell me two words that would describe your wife.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, uh world changer.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_04: World changer.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_04: I've never heard that one before.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_04: That's a fantastic answer.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_04: The lightning round is complete.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_04: We both giggled.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna give you the nod though, because that's what good guests do, good hosts do.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_04: I appreciate it.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_04: Um this has been awesome, man.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_04: Learning more about you, your story, uh, your family, um, their your excellent great point average, uh Gil.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_04: Um fantastic.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_04: And uh I love them by 1.7.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_04: Got the nod.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_01: You doubled me.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you almost doubled me on that one, man.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's amazing.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_04: Uh wait the man that I am, Casey.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, all right.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_04: Um we will um I'll make sure all these links are in the in the in the show notes, everybody.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you again for continuing to listen.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_04: If this episode's touched you or made you think, please share it with a friend.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_04: If you've not taken time to leave us a review wherever you consume your podcast, please do it.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_04: That is helpful for us in the wide world of algorithms.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_04: And if you think that there's something we can do differently or better, please reach out and let me know.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I want to continue to get get better at this.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_04: And um, if there's um uh uh uh if there's anything else we can do to help support you from everybody, we we appreciate that.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_04: But Michael, it's been a blast to spend time with you, and I hope our path to get a chance to meet you in person across soon.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, Casey.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for the uh the hospitalities, it's been fantastic.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_04: Bye.