Welcome to the show where we expose new perspectives on our ever evolving world through the lenses of various industries, cultures and backgrounds.
Our guests are disruptors, united by a common goal to bring their purpose to life.
Whether they’re from the commercial world or third sector, from the global North or the Global S, expect an inspirational journey that will transform your perspective on just what is possible.
My name is Philippa White and welcome to Tie on Earth.
What does resilience actually look like when life doesn’t go to plan?
When the spreadsheet stopped making sense, when the strategy you built your career on no longer holds, or when the people you love are facing something you can’t actually fix?
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And in those moments, what really drives the decisions we make?
Is it performed or is it something else?
Welcome to episode 114 of Thai Unearthed.
It feels important just to pause here for a moment.
Over the last few months, I’ve needed to step away from the podcast to focus on something more personal.
I’ve been completing my treatment for breast cancer and the great news is that I now have the all clear.
And while I’m back to business as usual, it doesn’t quite feel the same.
Perspectives have understandably shifted, and so as I return to these conversations, there’s sort of a renewed focus and not just on what drives performance in business, but on what sustains us as human beings, resilience, humanity, and what it really means to build a return on humanity, not just in our organizations, but in how we live, lead, and show up for each other.
And so that brings me to today’s conversation.
Joe Hamrahi has spent over 3 decades in the world of finance, including nearly 20 years as CFO and COO of M Booth, helping scale the business from 9 million to over 90 million in revenue today is the founder of Finstrat CFO.
He works with agency founders and professional service firms to turn financial complexity into clear strategic decisions.
But this conversation isn’t really about numbers, because behind the career, Joe has lived through something far more defining.
From navigating his wife’s stage 4 cancer diagnosis, to facing the breakdown of his marriage, to stepping away from a corporate world that no longer aligned with his values, Joe has been forced to ask some very real questions.
What actually matters?
What does resilience look like beyond the cliches?
And how do you keep going without losing yourself in the process?
In this episode, we explore what happens when life and work collide.
We talk about the kind of leadership that emerges not from control but from perspective, the courage it takes to walk away from what no longer fits, and what it means to build a business and a life grounded not just in performance, but in humanity.
So if you’ve ever found yourself navigating uncertainty, questioning the path you’re on, or simply trying to keep going when things feel heavy, this conversation is for you.
Joe, welcome to Tie Unearthed.
Joe, my goodness, this has been a long time coming.
Thank you so much for being my first podcast guest after such a crazy journey, So thank you for joining.
Me.
Oh, it’s great to be here.
It’s great for us to connect.
We’ve been talking along and I’m really, really honored that you have me on today.
So thank you.
So to kick off, actually, I’d just love to know where are you right now?
Where can our listeners picture you at the moment?
So I am in a town called Lakewood Ranch, FL which is about 10 miles from Sarasota, which on the Gulf Coast side of Florida.
As you know, I’m a lifelong New Yorker and I moved here about two years ago.
Now it’s starting to get through the what we call the hot season, which really gets hot, but I haven’t really like it.
So literally just back-to-back weekends to 25 KS.
I know.
I saw you’re running.
One by the beach, one on the beach actually, which is Siesta Key, which is our famous beach, which is beautiful.
And it’s actually for turtle awareness, like the all the turtle Reservation and all the kind of stuff that goes along with that because they’re an endangered species, though.
And I think that it’s a phenomenal organization that the aquarium runs.
And then I just did one which was more of a fun thing in town in Saint Petersburg this weekend with the Tampa Bay Rays, the baseball team for their foundation.
OK, wow.
Which was cool because we ended on the field after the end of the.
Oh my gosh, wow.
I’d love to start talking little bit more about you.
Well, obviously just for our listeners, I met you through Sam Theobald, who I’m sure will at some point be listening to this.
So hello Sam, our mutual friend.
And thanks to Sam, I met you and you so graciously helped write an endorsement for my book.
And I was so honored.
And it’s obviously for me, it’s hugely rewarding to meet like minded souls and particularly people who come from a background like yours, being a chief financial officer of huge companies and also understanding and supporting this human centered focus on business.
And so just for our listeners, this is sort of the context.
We’re not just going to be talking about this, but it is a shared passion I think of the both of us.
And I just really admire you and your work.
But, you know, just reflecting over the past few years, personally and professionally, what moments most shaped the person you are today and that led you to doing the work that you’re doing now.
Well, I mean, it’s not just the last couple years, but it goes back a long way.
But I think I’ve learned COVID changed a lot for everybody.
And I say this to you as somebody who’s also gone through a tremendous amount the last couple years.
And I think you don’t realize that even as we’ll feel where we get, we think about, oh, we can’t.
We’ve seen it all, we’ve done it all, we’ve been through it all.
And then you realize you wake up one random Tuesday and you have it.
I’ve talked to a lot of people lately.
It’s like, you know, we’re going through these unprecedented times.
And I think to myself, I feel like I’ve gone through an unprecedented time every five years.
Those of us who we went through COVID, we went before that, we went through financial crisis before that we went through, you know, wars and 9:11 and all these surprises and horrible, mostly horrible things.
But there’s a lot of good things that happen in those periods of times.
Like, you know, when you find out like you’re having a child or your child got into school or you’ve got this great job or you’re starting business.
So you try to balance it off.
And what I’ve learned is that life is an unpredictable roller coaster.
And whenever you think there’s a good or bad thing, it’s never when you think it’s planned.
After COVID, we had the unfortunate situation in my family that my wife got diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer.
And it was like out of nowhere.
We didn’t believe it.
Also, it was really interesting when you see things on TV and you talk about things we hear about doctors and then you see how that plays out in real life.
It was quite phenomenal.
It went everything from you have cancer with like no bedside matter whatsoever to no, you don’t have cancer.
We think it’s just just some kind of cyst on your liver to like, oh, sorry, you do have cancer.
And by the way, it’s not liver cancer.
It’s coming from your lungs, which means we have to send you to a lung specialist.
So you know, as you’ve gone through some 10 doctors later and three months later, which you the time and the waiting part feels like it goes forever because you as people like me and probably people like you and a lot of people who listen to this or problem solvers, right?
Like we, my job is to solve problems and suddenly there’s a problem like that’s the biggest and the most glaring problem in front of me that I cannot solve.
And it literally made me crazy for days.
We did finally land with an incredible doctor, which is good.
The news is coming to this is Christie’s oncologist and she’s he’s still her oncologist.
So this is almost 4.
It is four years later and for those of you who I’ve ever had or seen the odds on stage 4 lung cancer, the odds are of living five years or longer had well when we when she was diagnosed for 10% and we’re in year 4 now.
Now this is where the science and this problem solver me and you and others comes in.
She was after 2 treatments and I’m sorry if I’m going along on this.
I think it’s really important story for people out there because because you’re an example, but there was others too.
And she went through a couple of infusion types of chemo treatments and immunotherapy, but they wound up because neither of us were smokers, that she was a candidate for this targeting chemotherapy treatment.
And she went on this drug called Alicenza, which is that had only been in existence in 2017.
So they didn’t have a lot of data on it.
And instead of infusions, which by the way is incredibly difficult to go because you go to these centers and you sit there for hours on end with a whole bunch of other people who have cancer.
So there’s two good and not so good.
The good part of that, the not so good is everybody has cancer.
The good part about it is I’ve never seen such kindness and eye opening situations in my life where people would literally come up and talk to you about like they’re going through treatment and they’re asking you how you’re doing, which is fascinating to me.
I wish sometimes the world could see some of that kindness because it doesn’t show off.
Luckily for costs, the treatment that she got or the targeted worked, so she takes 4 pills in the morning and 4:00 at night.
It’s almost like you have diabetes or something, like you take insulin every day, similar coming and it’s 12 hours apart, pretty regimented.
I will tell you that the doctors were phenomenal that we have and we still have.
They’ve been phenomenal to me.
We were very, very fortunate that Christie’s brother-in-law, Walters, the cardiologist who helped us find that has been through us throughout this whole thing.
Now, in the middle of all, and so the good incredibly important news in this whole thing is that Christy is has no active cancer in her body.
Wow wow stage 4 lung cancer to no active cancer in her body.
How?
Right, they can.
She’s got and she’s gone through every scan possible.
They will not say remission because stage 4 is tricky because there’s so many cells in the body, right?
And if it’s traveled from the lungs to the liver, they know by the way, the one in the liver is not visible anymore.
They don’t know if it’s sitting in a blood cell or lymph node.
You just don’t know.
So they can’t use remission as a term, which is really fascinating because the things I’ve learned from that, which is this story for a different day, plays into our incredibly outdated, incompetent health insurance in the United States because actually using the word remission versus not remission changes your premium.
Again, that’s for a different day.
So she’s doing phenomenal.
In fact, I talked to her yesterday.
She just had a scan couple weeks ago.
And I said I talked to her yesterday because another thing that changed during this whole process of difficulty, and I’m very open about talking about it because this is how we live our lives is that the trauma of that and a lot of things that have gone on, we were married almost 27 years by that point just made our marriage and mostly because to me didn’t work.
We just, we hit a point where it was hard.
I mean, it doesn’t mean I wasn’t there and she wasn’t there.
You just things happen in life and we are still incredibly, incredibly close.
The things you encounter and I, it was hard.
I think it was hard for both of us for a couple years.
We never got away from each other being closed.
It’s just that we’re better not living in the same house anymore.
We talked to each other a few times a week.
But that was one of those moments where I said to you, you don’t, you wake up one day and the surprises are different, like they were too difficult surprises.
What I’ve learned from all of this is how to take some of the things that you go through in life and try your best to manifest them into things you learn from and grow from is what is the key.
And I sit here to you today and no one would ever believe this.
I have changed my relationships for the better.
I’ve learned so much more about myself.
I’ve learned that work is not everything, even though we sit here and we do it.
I don’t need or want anything material anymore.
I still, Christy and my youngest sons love them, live up in our house in New York, which is virtually paid for at this point, And I live in a beautiful, much less costly apartment in Florida.
But no one’s going to see this because it’s going to have Spotify.
But I wear shorts every day.
I’m not.
I’ve never been the CFO who is in suit and tie in that way anyway.
And you lived in a world where you saw Tim Dyson and you know, and people are next to the team.
We never really did that route, which is good for me personally.
But I think ultimately you’re just never going to know in life what’s going to hit you on a Cuban day.
And a lot of a lot of those are good things.
And we should we, we’re so focused on planning ahead.
What are we going to do in our retirement?
What are we going to do down the road?
What are we saving for?
And I just realized that like, you know what, I’ve lived so much more in the now because of all these things.
I am really well, I am as physically healthy as I’ve ever been like in 30 years.
I’ve changed the entire way I live.
My blood pressure was 111 / 79.
I’m not even joking.
I don’t think it was that way when I was 25.
I think it’s about what you do and what you make of it.
And I use that as a cliche, but I really honestly believe that now.
And here I am.
And I’m still work hard, but I still, I run 5 KS, which I never would have thought I’d be doing.
I ride my bike down to the beach or we go to baseball games, we go soccer games.
I have a whole bunch of friends in the neighborhood, some I ironically have moved down and I discovered friends I’ve known from 20 years ago that I lived here that I didn’t know that we’ve currently connected.
So life can be short, but it could also be in a different way longer where all these things you get a chance to redeem some of the things that if you choose to.
And I have a little stick, you know, as I said on another podcast couple weeks ago that I had, it’s called a GBED, getting better every day.
Just a reminder myself that one little percent of me each day is better.
And now my relationships with everyone are better.
And I’m mostly concerned about the ones with my kids because those it got a little tricky with separation.
Yeah, but they are phenomenal.
In fact, just before this made my oldest son texted me and say, hey, dad, how you doing?
I’m sorry for rambling about there.
I think it’s important for people to understand that what you can overcome, like stage 4 lung cancer, by the way, when people give you no odds whatsoever and not this, even the smaller things that we sometimes feel sorry for ourselves for.
Life is so damn precious and it’s still, it’s staring you in the face.
It’s really hard to really, really appreciate.
Thank you for that.
And it’s understandably I’ve been having conversations not dissimilar to this quite a bit over the last little while.
And thank you for your vulnerability and your honesty and your emotion, because I think that particularly in your area, I imagine, as you know, the chief financial officer of companies and being that money person, I think it can sometimes be a very cold and unemotional area of a business to work in, unfortunately.
But I guess the question is, does it have to be like that?
And I just think it’s so wonderful when we meet people who have a heart and a soul.
Thank you for that.
I also think I’ve been really fortunate to work around people.
Sam is one of the kindest, caring as people I’ve ever met.
Sorry.
OK, so the whole thing, I was so supported through all of this, both with Christie and after I moved and the changes.
I don’t even really know what to say about that.
I mean, I could have gone a different way.
I mean, I joke about this sort of a joke.
It’s not really a joke.
I had, there was a really dark time right after when the August when we had separated.
And you know, this person, I’m going to say it because he deserves to know it.
Alfredo, who’s the CTO of Ben Booth, was a really close friend of mine.
He’s like a brother to me.
And he’s like, how are you doing?
I don’t know what I even said, if I said anything.
And he just said just keep going.
And I needed to hear that today because it was really dark.
So we all need people, no matter how tough or independent we are or how we think we are.
And some of them show up in some incredible ways that you would never believe.
And he is probably one of the least emotional people I know, but he’s extraordinary perceptive.
What did that period then teach you about yourself?
That perhaps no leadership role ever could, you know, it is focused on that resilience.
And I think just to comment on that because it’s interesting, isn’t it, when things get really tough, you can be a victim and you can close doors and you can be passive and you can sort of say this has happened to me and it’s.
Really.
Shit, actually.
Or you can just look at what’s happening.
I mean, it might be really shitty and it still feels pretty bad, but you can open doors or you can look at where that can take you.
And if you are open and you move forward, it’s amazing how kind of like what you said, how suddenly people show up and there’s little flickers of light and little flickers of hope.
And then if you can be positive enough to then hold on to that flicker of hope, it then turns into more hope and it turns into more light.
That’s how I feel this whole process for me was.
And I’m just wondering what did this teach you about yourself?
It’s a really good point.
And I think for me particularly, there were three specific things.
One is there are people that show up that they’re close to you, but you just don’t realize how much you mean to them, how much they mean to you until something like this pops up.
There are people you think are close to you who aren’t really as close to you as you.
And I don’t think it’s because they don’t want to be.
It’s because sometimes they don’t know how to be and they have a million other things going on.
Like we all have so much in our lives every single day.
Like I’m just talking before.
And I said, like, if I didn’t, I should have got up at 6:30 this morning to get to the older things I needed to get to today.
Because and some of them are silly, but like it’s my routine and it’s like how I keep myself going right.
And it sort of like gets me in the straight line.
And but the open mind is part that you brought up was is really the key.
I actually have now incorporated like it open minded, even first about myself, about how I act and react because reaction is such a hard thing for me.
Like I react and I’m passionate and I care and I want to solve that.
I would do that.
We sometimes react.
I have to, I’ve had to learn how to kind of like listen, absorb, hear what people say and not jump right into it, but also open minded to other people like I used to go, they’re not they don’t do the same things I do.
Then how can I be friends with them or hang around?
And I’ve been much more open to that.
Like none of us are going to be like perfectly suited in every aspect of our life for each other.
So maybe this one friend wants to go to out to see live music with you this weekend or one friend wants to come over and watch a game with you or just have a conversation or they or we’re going to talk about something that we both saw at work.
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And I become a bit of an AI junkie, which is has a whole bunch of things with other people, but like in a ways that are actually will help our society at some point.
Those are different things.
I think we just sometimes put people on such specific boxes that we just, you could enjoy each other in parts of each other.
You don’t have to enjoy every part of every person.
Otherwise we’d be really boring if we do all those kind of things.
So I’ve learned a lot about that and being open and also helping others keep an open mind.
It’s been significantly game changing for me.
Yeah, interesting what we’re talking about as well, because I mean, that’s really interesting just how often it takes these difficult moments or just shaking life up.
It can be positive moment too, but we suddenly see ourselves in a different light and, and how actually out of a negative situation, you learnt friendships and what those look like.
And but it, there’s also that resilience there.
And I, and this is something that I’m trying to sort of dig into one because I’ve also been through a hefty challenge.
And again, you know, you could either embrace it or you can run from it.
And interestingly, just on the point of view of oncology, when I talked to my oncologist and I asked her from your experience in all of the cancers, because obviously mine was breast cancer, but from your experience in oncology, do you see more positive results responding to the treatment if people are more positive?
And she said 100 percent without any question.
Now, does that mean if you’re positive, you’re going to be cured?
No, but it does mean that your chances, if you embrace whatever it is and you’re not scared and you take it for what it is and you look after yourself.
And obviously there’s so much that then falls into that, right?
So it’s sort of you’re probably being more active and you’re eating better and you’re, you know, you’ve got the people around you and you feel supported and all of that plays into a better immune system.
And so, I mean, there’s so many factors and it’s just, it’s never just one thing, but I feel like this plays into business and leadership as well.
And I just from a resilience, you know, resilience is a word that gets thrown around a lot.
Some people feel in business, we shouldn’t be talking about resilience.
It’s not about putting all this pressure on people and expecting them to sort of push through.
That’s not what I’m saying.
Because what I’m saying about resilience, it’s not about putting people under tons of pressure and expecting them to keep going.
It’s about the world around us is just constantly changing and there’s so many challenges that from a personal level or even just you’ve done something for your work, it wasn’t how your boss wanted it.
They say that isn’t actually what I wanted.
I’m sorry that you spent five hours on that, but that’s actually not correct.
Can you go again actually, and it’s just from your lived experience, What does resilience actually look like when life and work collide?
It’s great that you brought this up because resilience to me is the word that takes the most prominent place now and not from the standpoint of what you were like we were hit.
You were right about this.
Not from the standpoint about like how much can you withstand before you crumble?
Like you shouldn’t be forced to be in like a situation where you should take on no matter what until you burned out kind of thing.
That’s not the resilience we’re both talking about here.
You’re talking about like the ever changing environment or again, what I send them sort of what I said in the beginning about like unprecedented at the time.
Yes, there is very divided world around the leadership of of all world leaders right now, right?
Like I don’t know there’s any kind of someone could point stand up that point and say this person is a good or bad leader and it’ll be unanimous support for that.
I think there’s a lot of that.
I mean, these are things that are disrupting people’s lives day-to-day and day in and day out.
I mean, and we’re and we’re talking across you and I are talking across continents right now.
So we think about how that affects different ways.
I think that there is we’re resilient and how that affects how it’s about.
I really want to make this state like the in terms of the silly Rocky, but it’s true.
Like I go back to the, you know, where there’s a moment where he says it’s not about how hard you can hit, but it’s about how much you can take and keep moving forward and not in the standpoint of take as much, sit here and be a punching bag, but like be able to take the little deflections.
What I’ve also learned through this is that so much of our life is like out of our control, but then is the part about how you respond to that, which is in your control.
And it’s not just about people saying that’s like getting out of bed and walking down to the store or walk getting out and getting to your desk and saying, all right, this was a horrible morning when I’m going to just push through it.
I had, this is another thing that happened during this time.
Nothing I’m going to pile on and this is not at all.
If you would ask me this three years ago, I may have played a little bit of a mortar role because I was just so in a weird spot.
Not so long after my separation of Christie and her cancer.
My personal trainer, who I happened to have a personal trainer was phenomenal, 36 years old.
He would say a lot of these things to me.
This is online.
I would see him three to four times a week.
They’d probably talk to him more than talk to anybody in my life.
He literally got this crazy, insane cancer and died in four months.
In that same period of time, there’s one known person who’s made it through that cancer in the history of the world.
It’s that goes into like the spine and the sheaths of the brain.
And it happened so quickly.
And what was interesting about it is that in some strange way, the Brazilians were kept coming up and we talked a lot about cancer and health.
But what I wanted, the positive is Mike still lives in me every day.
And his words live in me every day.
And in the last thing he, I remember him saying was like, all right, we went through it all.
Like, let’s try whatever we’d even go through because I have one more shot at this thing.
And I think that that’s the mentality I’ve started to take, but also to, like, appreciate the people around you at your job or your work.
All right.
So we didn’t make the targeted number this quarter.
Yeah, sucks and we all want to make it and but what it also is like we’re going to have another month where we not going to make the number and it’s going to suck.
So like we just when we do, it’s better.
What do we get one ounce of better?
Now I actually take that approach to like even with AI now because everyone’s like, Oh my God, everybody AI is going to take all our jobs.
What if AI creates like thousands of different jobs?
Yeah, there may be some skill shifts.
I remember this vividly when people used to say to me, there’s never going to be a time when the Internet is going to be where you’re going to buy and sell things there.
You know, malls were safe, right?
And yes, people who worked in a mall may have shifted out of working in a mall, but now they work for the online commerce because they learned a new skill.
I think we sometimes again goes back to your open mind, like how do we keep our minds open to things that could just create other opportunities for us?
And I’ve learned out more than anything else.
You obviously were working in big companies as the CFO.
You’re now off on your own.
And I’m just curious how this thinking and your soul and your humanity, how has that influenced your work?
And now if you look at yourself as a CFO, the clients and the approach that you have, what does sort of return on humanity mean for you, your relationship with your clients?
What does that nuance change?
So this is great.
I was hoping you’d ask this question and I’m glad you asked this question.
And I also remember reading something in your book about this.
Forgive me if I’m not remembering this correctly.
The best thing about this for me is that I get to pick and choose who I work with and they have to aligned at least pretty closely with my morals and ethics.
And when they don’t, I end that relationship.
And in my position it sounds, it’s like I may be jumping there.
Like we get you go off on your own and you want to do this and you have to make a living still, right?
So you can’t just say no to everybody that comes along because they but I will tell you that I have said no almost as many times as I’ve said yes already in the short time I’ve been doing this about a year.
I just can’t do that again.
I am not the judge and jury on who people are.
I just know what my values are and my alignment is.
I have seen too many unethical things in my lifetime in my role working with senior leaderships and bigger and even smaller companies, how they have treated people, key stakeholders, or mistreated people for their own gain or benefit.
And I promised myself that I will never, ever, ever be that person.
I promised myself that a long time ago, but it’s really evident now about how I will not take on a client or try to help a client who has significantly mistreated other people or I will call it out.
I’ve gotten this title from some of my friends and some people close to me, which I’m not sure this is a great one that I’m like the justice warrior now of this poll because I know I can’t save the world but it sometimes gets me so pissed off at what I see.
Here’s the thing, I was been fortunate to work with mostly people who had some.
I’ll go back to my other thing about knowing what you know.
We be there and not be there.
There’s some people and the ones I will who in my opinion weren’t as ethical about things in work environments.
I just don’t think that they knew what they were doing per SE.
And I think sometimes the pressure consumes you and the bigger you get, the harder it is to get as to do is to really like walk that line.
But I will tell you that frankly, that that my time at X15 and then booth, which spanned almost 20 years for the most part, was really a great time for me.
And I learned so much.
And I do know that there and there’s, it’s never going to be perfect no matter where you are or where you go.
But I I’ve been able to keep that group.
And what’s made my life so much better is the people around me that I see more good than I don’t.
But it’s by choice.
Like at least in my opinion, that’s good.
And I guess that, you know, we talked about this.
I don’t need, I’m not interested in the material things anymore.
I want to see people learn.
I want to see people go.
My best accomplishment in my 20 years at M Booth is that the CTO, Alfredo, who I mentioned, the CFO, John Lezniak, who I grew in there, and the Chief People Officer who is Alexander Mackey, are all still there and grew up when they were junior people and now all have C-Suite titles.
That is far more than any accomplishment of any target numbers we hit or what bonuses I got or any of them.
None of that matters anymore.
Like it doesn’t matter.
Like you have these aspirations of getting the big house and the big car and you get there and you’re like, what the hell am I doing with this?
What is that going to give me?
I stopped short of doing that and I invested in my in my kids education and they’re developing never.
I just don’t know what that brings when they so when they say money can’t buy happiness, I think that’s really true.
As a CFO, that’s kind of crazy to say because it’s my whole job is to be.
30:27
I try to keep them in balance.
And so just on that, so you’re in a system that you’re very close still with many people from where you were working, but you obviously were looking for something else.
And there’s a number of reasons why you chose to leave.
But now that you have and now that you for a year have been working with your clients and you’re very particular about the clients that you work with.
I’m just curious from the point of view of control or even just identity leadership, being a business owner now and having that relationship with your clients, how has that relationship with your day-to-day changed?
Because I think where I’m getting to is so many businesses are so focused on the bottom line, on that return on investment.
And you know, when I think of Sam and I think of the people first narrative and that strategy to your point, it isn’t just about the money and so much of life.
Yes, of course you need to make a profit, of course, and no one is saying that you don’t need to.
But the question is how you go about getting that profit.
And I’m just wondering, you’re having these conversations and everything that you’re doing because obviously at the end of the day, your job is to focus on the return on investment.
How do you balance that?
It’s really, it’s so funny you said, because it literally was not until the moment you started talking about this that it kind of hit me.
So I have about half dozen retainer clients and then I have a bunch of project type of clients.
So let’s just focus on the retainer clients from the moment because I think it’s really plays into this.
They are such good people that I am constantly trying to get them return on investment than they already are.
But I think what I have to understand is here and I’m, I’m learning again.
I’m learning now as even as we talk right is that there’s a certain point where it’s enough.
I have a good life.
I have a good company.
Why does it need to be pressured into so much more?
And I think that I’ve almost gravitated.
It must have just been like, I don’t think it’s by accident.
I guess it’s where I’m getting a that I’ve landed.
These are the clients that I’ve landed with who are people first or semi first as opposed to it all being about the money and at all cost.
And what I think I’m doing is what I’m how I’m helping them is it could be incremental and even different ways, like one client has been struggling and how do we get the next level of leadership up so that there’s a succession that is really rewarding to me, but that can make them 123 points more profitable because they’re they’re out of the work as most senior leaders and on the work as opposed to in it, right?
Yeah.
And I think that’s where my focus has really been.
It’s not super granular.
It’s about problem solving.
And ironically I said this to one of my clients last week.
I said you’ve done all the things you always have done.
You stayed completely true to that.
And then the years since I’ve been working with you’ve actually your margin has went up two points.
So we’ve kind of did, it’s more tweaking than it is overhauling and also preparing them for what’s next in all of their lives, whether it’s the succession of the next level of leadership or the exit of theirs into their next part of their lives is what we’ve been focused on.
That’s where I’ve been able to tote, you know, make the line work.
And then and then and thank you for sort of bringing out that realization to me that I wasn’t like, why aren’t you doing this?
Because you could be so much more profitable if you just listen to me kind of thing is now I’ve toned that down a bit.
And I think it’s because I’ve seen now what they are and it’s actually really good.
And if we had more of them, I think we, the world would be a much better place.
Better place, how interesting.
And I wonder if you can articulate this sort of where have you seen that humanity actually create the long term business value?
I think it’s been about, I’ve seen it in meetings like what you would have think, you know, sometimes a more difficult meetings like budget meetings or quarterly review meetings of like targets, you know, where you need help or maybe these people aren’t performing.
I always thought that this particular industry, which I work in mostly which is communications and digital advertising and VR were very slow and moving on from people who we deemed underperformers.
And I think maybe that it’s not only about that, it’s about really finding the right place for people.
And I, I learned that a while ago, but I also think that maybe there’s something good about and some people about not rushing to move on from people who have just had a tough year or like, you know, their family is sick, which we have seen or there’s something happening with their children or they’re just not into this specific job and they’re trying to find where their life is.
I’ve seen people leave jobs that can go on to be like 30 into 30 candidates.
So I think none of this is, you know, black and white.
And I think I’ve learned more that there’s a heck of a lot more of that Gray area that we need to be paying much more attention to.
And maybe it is OK to pause for a minute.
Yeah, but these are showing up in day-to-day activities.
These are showing up in budget meetings, are showing up in quarterly review meetings, are showing up in conversations about the next level of leadership.
They’re not outliers so they can be incorporated in everybody’s day-to-day business activities.
And in kindness, you know, we we take things so seriously.
If just have a joke or two on these meetings, it changes the entire sense of it all.
Yeah.
And it’s so interesting just listening to you say the word pause that that’s allowed.
And one of my clients, it’s something that we’re really trying to kind of build into the day-to-day in the fabric of meetings, just the day-to-day of everyone because I think everyone’s rushing and trying to get through things and deliverables and KPI’s and.
Pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing.
The thing is, is if we don’t allow ourselves the space to think, and if we don’t allow the people who we work with with the space to reflect, then how are we going to respond to what’s going on?
And we need time to sort of digest it.
And you often hear, yeah, but we don’t have time or no, that they haven’t built in time.
We don’t have time.
And it’s like, well, OK, but you can.
You have to to build that in and then you have to push back.
Maybe that becomes a KPI.
Yeah, like you know what I mean?
It’s.
100% like I mean, so that’s another thing I do and I was actually, I didn’t do well and I, when I was in corporate America per SE is I actually put blocks in my schedule at the start of the week now.
So I know these are times that like I now there’s always going to be an emergency here and there, but I try to do it more importantly.
In fact, I’m going to do another crazy I just found out about this morning.
I’m doing another 5K on Wednesday night.
I’m like, screw it, I’m just going to put the block on my calendar at 5:00.
I’ll just do it.
But these are the things that like, you know, I have like I feel like I have permission to do.
But I also think it’s the evolution of what we’ve gone through in corporate business.
And, you know, I was going to say corporate America, but it’s not just corporate America.
It’s everywhere.
And I think we as a society are learning at a little bit more.
And I do think it’s going to change.
It still continues to change.
I think COVID did open that for a lot of people.
Yeah.
And I mean, there’s a lot of awfulness about COVID, don’t get me wrong.
But I think 100%, yeah.
But I think that there’s the part about like, we don’t have to be on every minute in a place, every minute, doing our work, every minute to get a job well done and resolved.
Is there a?
Quote or something that stayed with you through everything that you’ve lived or brings to life.
There’s keep telling has become like my, well, I mean, it’s literally tattooed on my arm now, but I think beyond that there and I don’t have it in front of me, so I apologize, but it’s also a long quote, but it’s a quote by Tecumseh that I used to go go back too often.
I’m also a very big fan of the show Ted Lasso because it really is about authentic and empathetic management.
I am very much about working with people as I am about people saying they’re working for me or I’m the boss.
I do literally, I cannot stand the term boss.
I hate it.
We all have to do this together and I’m not perfect at this.
I find myself writing a lot and saying a lot, and then I realize I’m not living by my own rules and I have to go back and reread it myself.
We’re always learning and I think that for sure, you know, however senior you are, you still make mistakes and we still are learning and and every experience teaches us something else about ourselves and our limitations and 100.
Percent, yeah.
Agree more.
Oh my God.
And the key is to recognize that and not to be absolutely.
Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you’d like to tell our listeners?
No, this was actually not only great to see you and talk with you about this, and I’m honored to be on here with you.
I also think that it brought out a lot of things for my own self reflection, which I didn’t anticipate in the beginning.
So thank you for that.
You’ve done that a few times in our calls over the years, but so that’s why you wrote that book.
Well, thank you for your just honesty and just authenticity, which is a big part of who you are and for joining me.
And I’m so happy we finally made this happen.
I’m sorry it took a while, but we did make it happen in the end.
So until the next time.
Thank you.
Hey everyone, it’s Philippa again.
I hope you enjoyed listening.
Now if you’d like to dive a little deeper, why don’t you check out my book Return on Humanity Leadership Lessons from all Corners of the world.
It reveals how putting people first is actually the smartest, most competitive business strategy of our time.
And if you’re ready to breakthrough disengagement, spark innovation and build agile, purpose driven teams.
Let’s talk, whether it’s workshops, off sites, keynotes, or full scale, leadership programs will shift paradigms and create the change you’re looking for.
Visit philippajwhite.com to learn more or get in touch.
A huge thanks to Benna Vieira for the music and to Pete Morgan for his help with the editing.
Until next time, and I hope we’ll meet again soon.
