Welcome to How Leaders Lead, where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. Today's guest is Michael Walruth, Chairman and CEO of Yext. I gotta tell you, Michael is one of the most remarkable entrepreneurs I know. Get this, in three years he built a $35 million company called Right Media and then sold it to Yahoo for almost $800 million. No doubt about it, those are some impressive numbers. But when you dig a little deeper, what makes Michael truly impressive is how he 's found lessons and growth and opportunities all along the way. He's always looking for what's missing and how he can build it. If you can see what problems haven't been solved yet when you look at your industry or your customers or even your team and then build something to solve it, let me tell you, you're going to find some success. It's a vital skill for entrepreneurs and every other kind of leader. And when you listen to Michael, you can see how he's done it. So here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Michael Wal ruth. Michael, it's really great to have you on the show. It's great to be here, David. I feel like we should just end it now because I can't live up to that introduction. You know, you've had such a remarkable career and it's full of highlights and some amazing experiences and I want to walk you through your career journey and get some of the insights that you had along the way. And I got to start by saying, here you are, a CEO of a public company, but I learned you actually tended bar after college. What did you learn from that experience? But I didn't want to tend bar for the rest of my life. You know, that's a true story. I went to the University of Richmond. I graduated with the University's finest bachelor's of English degree, which made me entirely unemployable. So I went to the job I knew I could do, which was tending bar. Actually, what I would do is I would tend bar until about three o'clock in the morning and I'd go home and sleep for three or four hours. And then you know me, I would sneak out to a golf course and play golf and have a little nap and then I'd go back and I'd tend bar again. I understand that one of your regulars at the bar was a wealthy commodity str ater. Yep. What intrigued you about this guy and that business that eventually led you to the DH Blair brokerage business? So there was this guy and who I won't name, but anybody who grew up in my town probably knows who I'm talking about and he would come in and he was a nice guy. He was a big personality, a little rough around the edges and he always had a fistful $100 bills and he was kind of demanding, but like you always knew you were going to make some money when he came in. And so I was just kind of fascinated by him and I'd grown up in a household that had, you know, my dad was a school social worker, spent 37 years in the inner city school system and my mom was a homemaker and there was no kind of real business grounding in my world, which was a long line of teachers, which was what I figured I was going to do. And so this guy with this business background just kind of fascinated me and I was kind of watching him and getting to know him a little bit and reading the paper, Juan adds in 1998 and there was this ad that said, you know, Wall Street job, no experience required. And so I picked up the phone and I called him and they said, yeah, come on down for an interview and that happened to be at that firm DH Blair. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I read where you had a little stint at DH Blair where you were making 500 cold calls a day for $250 a week. That's right. How did that experience impact the way you look at failure and rejection and even perseverance, and all these years later, I mean, that had to have a lasting impact on you. After that, selling anything was easy. Doing that job, you know, you got really good at dialing a push button phone with your right hands, cradling it against your neck and with your left side. And you just, it was a numbers game. It was, you had to make 500 of those phone calls and, you know, if you kept 20 people on the phone for more than a minute, then you were doing pretty well. And the goal was to have five people, you know, tell you that they might someday buy some stock over the phone. And I did it mindlessly for about, you know, two months there. And after that, no sales job selling anything was hard. And then one day, the company was raided by the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and they shut it down. This sounds like you can't make this stuff up. It sounds like a scene in the movie. Were you there that day? I was there that day. I was probably two months on the job. I was living at home in Connecticut. I had to drive 30 minutes to a train station. I would take an hour and 20 minute train to Grand Central. And then I had to take a subway down to Wall Street. So it would take me about two hours and 20 minutes each way. I would generally leave the house at 4.30 in the morning. I'd get home around 10. Because you were required to be in your seat by 7 a.m. There I am. I'm sitting in my seat one morning. I was 7, 15, and the guy who I worked for comes in and he says, "Hey, put your stuff in your bag and meet me in the lobby." And I said, "Well, it's like a field trip." He goes, "No, everything in a bag. Meet me in the lobby." And so I did what I was told, put my stuff in a bag. And as I'm walking out the elevators, the vans are pulling up outside and the FBI and the SEC are the DOJ. I don't know who they were. They're all running in the building. And it turns out that one of the guys at the firm had been doing something he wasn't supposed to be doing. How did that experience shape your view of leadership? It's a wild one. It was pretty wild. And the crazy thing was there were about five of us who were part of this little group at the place who worked for this guy. We got in these black cars and we drove up town to a different firm that operated in fairly similar manner, maybe a little bit more legit. And by 830, we were sitting at desks with phones doing the same thing we were doing down there. I mean, I literally changed jobs in an hour. So I guess it taught you that you had to be adaptable and move to the next thing if that was what the case said. It really, you know, it was, you got to roll with it. I mean, I'm learning this again now. Every day there's going to be a surprise and you know, you got hopefully not quite like that. But now a week before this raid happened, you were planning to take the exam to become a licensed broker. And then I understand you actually went from there into the fitness industry. I mean, yeah, so this was pretty informative for me. So it was actually after that. So after the raid, we went to this other firm called Sam's Brothers, which was definitely a better place than the original place. I continued to study for the brokers exam there and was actually, you know, doing the job and making the numbers and doing all the things. And what's funny about that job is you're doing it 12 hours a day and you just don't even have time to think about what you're doing. And you're so tired and you're so exhausted. And so I finally am about to go take the test and kind of the bosses call me into a conference room one day and they give me this big pep talk about taking the test and about how I'm going to be so successful and about how, you know, I'm going to be just like them and they give me this whole speech. And so I leave and I go home and I'm actually feeling pretty good about myself because you work really hard and you want to progress and the craziest thing happened. So I went to bed. I was always just kind of fell into bed and I woke up at about two o'clock in the morning and I'm having, you know, what I now know was a panic attack, but I never, you know, I didn't know what was happening. I was sort of seeing strobes and my heart rate was up and I was sweating and I did at that moment the only thing that I knew what to do, which is I called my wife who was finishing her senior year at the University of Richmond where we had met and she happened to pick up the phone at two o'clock in the morning and I told her this whole story and I said, I don't know what's wrong with me. And she said, I think it's obvious what's wrong with you. By the way, this is a trade of hers is to be annoyingly right about everything. And she says, I think it's fairly obvious what's wrong with you. You don't want to be like those guys and, you know, you've been working so hard and it was like a light bulb went off and like my heart calmed down and the sweat went away and I was like, she's right. Like I had no desire to achieve the thing that I'd been working so hard to achieve. And so I woke up the next day and I went in and I quit the job and they looked at me like I was crazy. They said you've been torturing yourself for months and you're there. You're done. It's going to get better now. You're going to get to like go out with us and, you know, go to the clubs and I just couldn't do it. What was your boss like there? Ben was not quite the character that a lot of the guys were. He was actually fairly low key by these standards. You know, I mean, there were a lot of crazy bosses in these places. Everybody's aggressive in that environment, but he was on the less aggressive side. So you know, I don't think I would have lasted as long as I did with one of these screamers as a boss. Well, then you went to be a trainer. Well, yeah, first I went back to the bar. Oh, okay. You got it. You had to have a drink. You had to have money. I was making $250 a week, you know, at the time I could make $250 a night at a good night at the bar. So the first thing I did was I went back to the bar and I made a little bit of money. The second thing I did was I actually did a six month stint with an event marketing company where I spent six months on the road doing event marketing for Reebok. We just traveled from event to event and did shoe demos and stuff like that, which was a really fun job. And then I came home and I said, I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'd gotten really into kind of fitness while I was on the road. And so I decided I would become a personal trainer. And that was the next step in my obviously rocket ship trajectory career. Have any changed your career path again? You start selling online advertising at double click. How'd you get into that business? I had become pretty good friends with the guy who sold memberships at New York Sports Club, which is where I was doing personal training. And ultimately I got promoted to manage the personal traders, which was really kind of a sales job. And so the guy who sold memberships, he heard about this company called Double Click that was changing the way advertising worked. And he got all excited about it. He went and interviewed and he came back and he said, I got the job. You really should go interviewing. So I took his advice and I went and I interviewed him. At that time, though, this was I guess late 1999, the internet was on fire. Everything was up up and double click was hiring about 25 young salespeople a week, putting them through a whole sales training program. It kind of inside outside sales. And so pretty much if you had some sales experience, they would hire you. And so I told them about my 500 dials a day and they said, we could do something with you and they offered me a job. Now, you climbed the ladder there really quickly though. Well, I'd say that the ladder client, you know, kind of came down on me in some ways. I joined there in late 1999. The scene was late '99, the stock was trading it probably, you know, oh, I can tell you for sure my stock options were priced around $200 a share. And I think they gave me 2000 of them the day that I joined. And I figured I'd be a millionaire because the stock seemed to go up about 10% every day. And by March of 2000, the stock was down to about nine bucks. It was, I don't know where it was, it was on its way to about nine bucks. And I realized I wasn't going to be a millionaire. But I was having some success selling. And what happened was the company went through just a series of seven or eight layoffs. And every time there was a layoff, there was kind of something lying around that somebody didn't want to do. And I would just say, I'll take that, you know, I'll take that client or I'll take that project or I'll take that on. And for me, it was, that was business school. That's where I kind of figured out how to maneuver. And I learned like, you know, it was embarrassing how little I knew about kind of my vocabulary. And I didn't know what a P&L was and certainly didn't know anything about, you know, accruals and other accounting terms and things like that. So I had some good mentors there and I got a chance to learn a lot of things because the organization was in turmoil. Tell us a story of how you mustered up the courage to leave DoubleClick and go out on your own and start right media. What made you pull the trigger and jump out of the comfort zone? If it was a comfort zone. Well, it was comfortable. I mean, you know, for the first time in my life. So one of the things about that time period was I had developed this kind of niche there where I was selling to direct marketers and I was selling digital advertising to direct marketers. And during a time where the, you know, we were in a major recession and it was, you know, this is where direct marketers thrive, right? So they can buy a lot of stuff cheap and they were. I had a great book of business there and I was making a great living at age, you know, 24 or 25 or whatever it was. I had just had my first, I had actually just had my second child and things were great. And I didn't really want to leave. I actually had pitched this idea. So the genesis of this was I had figured out how to gain the algorithm that was delivering the ads. So I would sell something for $5 and I had figured out how to make that basically deliver ahead of something that was price much higher, which was really bad for the company. But it was just a matter of kind of, you know, figuring out how the, how the ad system thought and what it delivered. And so my first step was I went to the, you know, I got a meeting with the president of the company and I said, look, if I can do this, anybody can do this. Like, we got to fix this and I think if we do this right, we could build this kind of exchange like functionality where we always make sure that the highest paying ad gets delivered into each spot. And rightfully, I mean, I'm just some like 24 year old sales guy and they kind of looked at me sideways and said, what do you go back and sell, man? And so I did that for a little while and it just kept gnawing at me and I finally just said I got to go. So I left and I decided that I was going to find a way to make enough money to build a, to build a company that solved the problem that I was exploiting as a, as a salesperson. Hey, you know, because you're listening to this, I can tell you're the kind of person who wants to learn how to lead well. But there's a lot of companies out there who want to take that desire and charge you $500 or $1,000 or heck, even $20,000 to try and show you how to lead. That's just not right. If you want to be a better leader, I believe you deserve to have access to something that will truly help you and it shouldn't cost a fortune. So I want you to go to howleaderslead.com and start my leadership class. It's really and truly free. And after you take this class, you're going to feel more confident in your role and you'll be on your way to getting big things done with your team. Go check it out at howleaderslead.com. You become Ersen Young's entrepreneur of the year in 2007 after building the company to $35 million in revenue in just three years. And then you sell it for almost $800 million. I mean, that's not bad. No, it wasn't bad. What was the key to the, to your growth that others could learn from as they apply that to their businesses? Well, I mean, humbly, I think the key was, was, you know, sort of be in the right time at the right place with your idea. You know, we had a lot of tailwinds coming out of the sort of, it felt like 2002, the Holocaust of the meltdown was never going to end. That's sort of the nuclear winter was going to be around forever. And by 2003, you know, we were like, boom, and again. And so that was part of it. I think the other part of it was the biggest thing I learned was like, all I did was sort of question everything that, you know, I saw and then tried to figure out how do you build something better. I love this pogram story. So Paul, you know, why combinator pogram? He said something that to me always resonated, which was founders, they live in the future and they build what's missing. Right. And I think the only way you do that is by analyzing all the time, what's missing, what's not right here, what could be better, what can work better. What this story taught me was everything starts with understanding that. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. You know, that's how you disrupt categories. You solve the biggest problems that occur most frequently and you did that with right media, which is amazing. You know, it's always tough to sell your baby. I mean, you created this and sure, you're selling that for a ton of money, almost a billion dollars, but take us through your keeper cell decision because I'm sure it looks easy now, but probably wasn't back then. It was not easy. We had a great team of people. What made it a little easier was that we knew the Yahoo folks really well. They were investors in our business. Jerry, who I know is a good friend of yours, was, you know, I'd say had become a friend. We didn't know each other real well, but he had supported them investing in our business and we had a commercial partnership that, you know, that was important for us. And so, you know, it's a lot easier, I think, when you know the people who you 're getting involved with, but it didn't make it easy. I mean, it was really, I think in the end of the day, what was going on in that like three week period of time, double click sold to Google and we were competing with double click and then a QANF sold to Microsoft and we were sort of the last significant asset in the ad delivery and management space that hadn't been acquired in like a two week period. And so, you know, it was clear that we were going to get a significant premium for the business and, you know, in the end, it was a kind of a gut call. And I think if we had stayed independent, we would have wound up building a much bigger business because what we built became an industry. I think, you know, inside Yahoo, we struggled to continue to innovate and that wasn't the easiest thing, but there's a lot of good that came out of, you know, that whole experience. And, you know, I think, you know, I'm a big believer that one thing leads to the next thing. And I probably learned a lot of things that I never would have learned if I had held onto it. You know, it's really interesting because here you are, you're an entrepreneur. You know, you've really started this thing from scratch. So this entrepreneurial spirit has to be in your DNA. And then you move into a corporate environment like Yahoo. I think you're the senior vice president. You basically are running your business. What did you learn from that experience? Sometimes you don't know when you're going to use the things you learn, right? And so in the moment, if you'd interviewed me in the moment or shortly afterwards, what I would have said was like I had no idea how hard it was going to be to make the shift from, you know, kind of running a startup where like I got to control everything. I got to have my hands and everything. I mean, you know, every wire in that company kind of ran through my head, right ? And I actually thought that was a really good thing at the time. And so then you go and say, are you going to Yahoo? And, you know, I sort of got myself grounded there. And I wound up with this huge organization. I was running the basically operating all the ad marketplaces there. It was a almost 5,000 people. It was a global organization. I was spending most weeks on an airplane. If you had interviewed me during that time or right after, I would have told you I hated it, you know, that like it was too much of a transition and this place operated differently and everything happened too slow and you had to get too many people to buy into things and too much bureaucracy. And in hindsight, my view is really different. I learned a completely different mode of operation. And I learned, you know, what it takes to do things at scale. And, you know, that's serving me today. Literally today because if I had never had that experience, I would still be the guy who thinks that you got to do everything yourself. And so, you know, I didn't realize it was going to take as long as it did before I really got to put that experience to work. But, you know, that's a perfect segue because I want to get into how you're now leading the next. But before I do, I got just a couple more questions. You know, tell us a story from your childhood that impacted the kind of leader you are today. My childhood was awesome. I grew up in Brookfield, Connecticut. I had great parents. I have an older brother and two younger sisters, really tight family. You know, we were not a household where the Wall Street Journal or, you know, financial publications were coming to the house every day. And it was a sort of idyllic environment where I grew up. But we didn't think too deeply about a lot of the, you know, entrepreneurial endeavors or anything like that. The first kind of, I think, touchpoint I had with an entrepreneur was when I was about 14 years old, my brother had gotten a job at the local convenience store. They needed someone to come for three hours on Sunday mornings and put together the New York Times because they would come in all these different sections and you had to put it all together. I took the job for five bucks an hour, three hours a week. I would go in there and I'd eat a donut and I learned to drink coffee because it was five o'clock in the morning. And I would put together the New York Times. And the guys who owned that business turned out they had bought this convenience store, but then what they became were like the karaoke kings of Connecticut where kara oke was super, this is 1990, I don't know, maybe it's 1990 and they're sort of karaoke is hot. And you can just see these kind of two young guys who owned the convenience store and they're out there like running karaoke shows and stuff. And you know, there was just something about the hustle that got my attention. And it turns out I worked at that store. After my high school career, I was, you know, became a pizza place and a convenience store and I just kind of stayed and figured out. And by the time it was done, I was kind of half managing the place, which really I wasn't qualified to do, but they didn't have anybody else. That's what you keep saying, but it seems like you do pretty well and everything you get into. It was just another thing to figure out. Yeah. Now tell us about Yext and how you hooked up with this company. It's funny. It segues from the Yahoo story, right? So when I left Yahoo in late 2010, my tour of duty that I had agreed to when I sold the company was over. And it was time for me to move on. There were a lot of changes going on inside the company. And I really didn't have any plan. You know, I sort of somewhere thought I'd probably start another company, but I wasn't in any hurry to get right back into the grind. And so, you know, what I did was I got together with my partners, Jonah Noghad hart, who'd been part of the whole right media story since day one as investors and board members and advisors. And we started investing. And one of the early investments we made was in this company called Yext, which was run by a guy who you know named Howard Lerman, who was a brilliant entrepreneur and was early in his cycle. And I just, you know, really liked what the company was trying to do and the people who were around it. And so I made the investment and I got involved in this visor and then invested again and eventually Howard asked me to be the chairman. And so around 2010, I became the chairman of the company and we proceeded to have a really, you know, great run for about 10 years. You know, I was a non-executive chairman. I was hands off, but I was talking to Howard, you know, a couple of times a week or daily sometimes and just really enjoying the ride of kind of a disruptive startup again. Yeah, absolutely. And I understand you were aiming to be the next yellow pages, except for digital. Explain what the business is. So what the business is today is actually nothing like what the business was when I invested, which is part of the, what makes the story so interesting. So the original business was a pay-per-call marketing company that had come up with some really neat technology to transcript phone calls. So you could buy leads. If you were a locksmith or a gym or something like that, you could basically pay for leads based on people driving phone calls to your business. The company would provide a transcript of every call. It was a really neat piece of technology and the company had a lot of headway and then it kind of hit a wall and it raised a bunch of venture capital and it just became clear that the growth in that business wasn't, you know, kind of what was needed. And around the same time, Howard had this idea to build an engine that would help people manage their listings, their local listings, because that market was becoming very fragmented and you needed to be able to make sure that your phone number and address and hours of operation were correct in more than just one place. There was a major kind of moment where the company actually sold the legacy business to IAC and started over and used the money from the sale as basically refresh its coffers and started over as an enterprise software startup. And the fundamental value proposition of that company was your customers have questions about your business such as where are you, what time are you open, what are your specials, things like that, and you need to make sure they're getting the right answer to the question. And there's been a big evolution of the company since then, but I would still say fundamentally at the center of everything we do is that principle. Now, you mentioned earlier and I thought it was a great insight about finding out what's missing and then solving that. When you look at your business today, what's missing out there or can you even talk about it? You don't want to give it to your competitors. Yeah, no, look, I mean, well, I'm sure there are things missing that we haven't figured out yet, but the company, as we've talked about, hasn't had the best run the last couple of years and there's lots of reasons for that. And some of them are us and some of that are the market. And when you sell a big part of our customer base is retail and hospitality and pandemics are tough on those industries. So there's a lot there, but I think fundamentally, if you go from 2010, what we built was something that wasn't there. It was a platform that lets you manage your local listings. When we first built it, it was an evangelical sale because no one had a platform that did that. By the time we got the company public in 2017, it was a business business because the market was established. And so we went through a similar exercise around that time where we said, this is a great market and we really had a lot of it, but there was a question about the growth prospects. And so we started right back to that same question of, okay, what's missing? It's not working that we can make work. And the thing that jumped out at us was search. So we all know how well search works on Google, but what was missing was the ability to make search work elsewhere. And so the company launched a new product in late 2018 that enables businesses of any kind to basically embed different search functionality into their website, into different functional areas of their business. And it turns out that I think a lot of people don't know how much that functionality was missing because the same problem that comes from not having the answer to the customer question on Yelp or on Yahoo or on Google occurs when the user comes to your site. In fact, it's probably worse when a user comes to your site and they can't get the answer to the question they want. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Michael Walworth in just a moment. You know, Michael's journey as an entrepreneur has been about seeing what's missing in an industry and then building that thing. And it reminds me of another leader with a clear philosophy on how they build products. Patrick Spence is the CEO of Sonos. And in our conversation, he shares a lot of wisdom about the importance of building things to last, whether it's a product or a whole company. It's really been a philosophical thing to try and build amazing products that last for a long time because it's something we would want as consumers. It's something we think is better for the environment. And so it's just something that's been important to us. And I think when you're hiring for that, when you're thinking in that way, it can't help but influence also the kind of people that you're attracting to your culture. And so I think that helps in trying to build a company as well that's enduring. Go back and listen to my entire conversation with Patrick, episode 81 here on How Leaders Lead. Here you are, your executive chairman. You're not involved in maybe a couple phone calls a week just to check in with Howard. The business obviously goes the wrong direction. And now you're the man. They bring you in to basically turn it around. What have you learned about that turnaround period? How long does it take you before you? You basically own the results because I've been in those situations where I came in and I'm not proud of myself necessarily, but I blame my successor. But how long does it take you to where you say, "Hey, this is on my dime now," or does that happen immediately? Well, it's easy to look back and criticize decisions that were made before. And part of this is, "Look, I was here. I may not have made the decision, but I was in the boat. I could have said something." It's been an interesting transition. Six months in, I think we're getting to the point where we really need to own the results. I think those first couple quarters, you're spending a lot of time figuring out what you don't know. If I don't know something, that's my bad. The decisions that I make now are going to impact the performance of the company going forward. And I think my team thinks the same way about this. And by the way, my team is awesome. We're going to have to own it. Good or bad, it's on us. What's the biggest leadership challenge you have in this situation now? Right now, it's just, change is hard. Even when you know it's the right thing. And even when organizationally, I mean, one thing I'll say about this company in particular is like, it is a group of people who want to find the right answer. And more than any company I've ever been part of, there's a spirit here of, you know, if you can show me that there's a problem, I want to help find the solution. Even if that means that my role's got to change or the scope of my job's got to change or I got to do something else or I'm wrong about this, there's a real great culture here of that. But even with that, it's just changes hard. And we've had personnel change and we have some strategic changes and some approach changes and every time you do it, it's hard. And, you know, there's no way to make it easy. Do you have a process that you use yourself to navigate through these challenges or, you know, how do you go about it? So my process, and it goes to, you know, what I think what I learned being an entrepreneur and being in the center of every decision and realizing that that doesn't work that well. And, you know, I think in a lot of ways, and maybe I've overcompensated. So I've gone from I'm going to control everything to, you know, what I think some of my team members refer to as, you know, radical delegation. So big part of my process is like, I don't believe in tops down at any level. I think communication is important at the top level, but I can't ask my team to do things that they're not bought into. And so one of the ways that I try to manage the change process is just making sure that, you know, that everybody knows that the discussion is transparent, that we're all being very honest and very transparent about what's not working. And then to the extent that we have to make changes that everybody's, you know, buying in. And the way I do that is by delegating a tremendous amount of responsibility and then making sure that we all feel a sense of accountability for the decisions that we make. And I'm not going to say it makes it easier, but I think, you know, generally it feels easier to me when everybody's kind of bought into the choice we're making. What you most excited about now at Yext? I think one of the things I'm going to benefit greatly from is the fact that we were too early to this search market. And you know, we brought a product to market that was aspirational, which is just kind of a, you know, disruptive startup thing to do. But also just people, I think a lot of companies weren't ready for this phase of their digital transformation yet to really think about what does my customer journey look like across every, everything that I control, my support site, my website, all the different properties I might have. And so I'm excited because I'm now meeting with CEOs of companies and they're, they're acknowledging, hey, one of the biggest problems we have is getting correct information to people through all these different channels. And that is right in the company's wheelhouse. And frankly, like I'll wind up getting credit for executing on something that was Howard's idea and Howard's mission and Howard's vision. And he was frankly just ahead of the curve. And he probably, you know, and he and I talk about this all the time, he probably pivoted too aggressively towards it too early. And so it'll look like I did this, this big fixing of the problem. But really the market's ready for it. And that's, that's the thing that's most exciting. Great. You know, and Mike, one thing I know about you. You have such varied interests and you founded a production company, Atlas Films, along with your wife, Michelle. Tell us about that and what you're working on today. I guess technically we founded that it was with one of my great friends from childhood who had gone to NYU Film School and worked in the, she worked for Barbara Walters and Bill O'Reilly. And we actually lived next to each other when I first moved to New York City after college. And we used to sit around in her, in her living room and we talk about like, you know, I mean, either one of us had two dimes to rub together, but we talk about how cool it would be to like someday make, you know, documentary films that matter about subjects that matter. And so, you know, she was sort of at a turning point in her career right around the time that we had done the right media transaction. It just felt like the time to take on some of these projects. And so we got pretty actively involved in the couple documentaries. First one was around bottled water in the plastic industry and the second one was around. And this was the one that I think we were kind of most involved and was around the food industry and the kind of health epidemic that was being created by sugar and the added sugar in our food supply called FedUp, that was the kind of most commercially successful of those endeavors. But I got to say, like Stephanie really drives this thing and she runs it and she does a great job of it. And, you know, we're incredibly proud of the content that comes out of it. So, you know, I have to say we're less involved than the founder title would suggest. Yeah, but you're making a big difference in the world by dealing with those big subjects, you know. And you've also had a little fun and you've founded Ohoopy Match Club, which is one of the most prestigious and top new golf clubs in the world. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you thought through the member and guest experience. Because it's amazing. I've had the blessing to be able to go there and just enjoy your place, but there's no place quite like it. And you have definitely thought through what I just called the customer experience. Tell us a little bit about how you went about that. Ohoopy has been one of the great, you know, sort of surprising adventures for me. And surprising in the sense that like it's the kind of thing you wouldn't even dare to dream about when you were, you know, when you're a kid who grew up loving playing golf and when I grew up playing golf on a nine hole municipal golf course, we had mats instead of T boxes. It was 10 bucks and you could go around as many times as you want. We'd lose all our golf balls and go in the woods and find more. And that was how I grew up playing golf. I wasn't a country club kid and I was probably 25 years old the first time I ever played on a private golf course. But Ohoopy came along at a time in my life when, you know, I was really passionate about golf. I was really fortunate to have friends like yourself and others who, you know, who were part of a network of golfers that expanded my universe in ways that I never could have imagined. And a lot of the great experiences that I've had over the last 10 or 15 years have been on these golf trips with friends with, you know, sometimes they're for business , sometimes they're just for pleasure, sometimes it's some combination of the two. And you know, getting to spend that quality time, I mean, I think you and I got to have a four hour conversation on a flight to a golf event at one point. And it's impossible to put value on that. The whole thing started with, well, what if there was just a place that was like only about that sort of friend's trip and it was casual and it was relaxed, but it had a serious kind of golf component to it. And that's what started it was just this idea of like, you know, same, I'll go back to it. Like, what's missing, right? And there wasn't a lot missing for me in the world of golf, but what was missing was this sort of retreat where it was all about that trip and the interaction with people. And everything we've done there has been to, you know, in service of that. That's such a simple yet bold vision. It really is and people can rally around that kind of thing. It's great. Have you always had that capability to just kind of wrap things up in a nice bow like that so people get what you're talking about? Well, first of all, you're so kind and you put these amazing spins on things, which is really, you know, what I just described was just an incredibly selfish act of wanting to create a place to hang out with my buddies and you turned it into something much higher value. So I appreciate that from you. You know, one of the things that, for better or for worse, that that English degree composition and literature from University of Richmond gave me was the ability to communicate an idea and I never would have guessed how important that was going to be to me in business and in life when I was, you know, basically taking the classes that came, came, you know, most naturally to me to avoid, you know, those chemistry and biology classes that I couldn't seem to pass. You and me both. I'm a journalism major. You know, so we have a lot of common. I think that's why we hit it off. You know, you have so many projects that I could go into that you've been a part of, you know, it's really interesting, you're involved in a lot. You got to be getting multiple phone calls, ringing, which call do you pick up first? I mean, how do you focus? What have you learned about, you know, you got all this stuff on your plate? How can you help others navigate through such a situation like that? I'm sure I ignore or don't pay attention to a great opportunity every day. And it's one of the downsides of, you know, having a lot of really interesting things to think about and to work on. One of the things I'm figuring out now and, you know, this experience unexpectedly coming in to take on a big, meaty public company kind of turnaround situation is like, I think for a little while there, I forgot how important focus can be. And I've been refocusing myself of late. And what it means is it's sort of a distilling process and figuring out what things I don't have time for is just as important as how I manage the time I have with the things that I am focused on. And it's not the easiest thing because there's a lot of things I'd really like to be giving more time to right now that I can't. But I think that's a very high class problem. Yeah, I would agree with that. And, you know, I understand that the amazing chef Thomas Keller has inspired the way you live and lead. Tell us about that. I don't keep in touch with Thomas as well as I wish I did. And he and I got to know each other, I'll forget even what the original connection was. I believe it was through his wife. I'd been to his restaurants. I'd always admired the way he delivered his experience. And when I got to meet him and spend some time with him, I was even more impressed because he's as low key as they come. He's a really nice human being, but his dedication to his graft and his focus on quality and the elegance of what he delivers. I've just always been so impressed with it. I find him as a human being to be inspiring. Yeah, he's a very humble guy who's done a lot. You know, he's not looking for the limelight and neither do you. In fact, I was really happy to get this podcast because I know you don't do it very often. So thank you. Thank you very much. Listen, I'd pay a lot to talk to you for an hour. You know, this has been so much fun. And I'd like to have a little bit more with some rapid fire questions. It's my lightning round. Okay. I think three words others would use to describe you. Hopefully they would be words like thoughtful and patient and engaged. But you know, if we're not including my college buddies, they might have different ones. If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be and why? I would be Rory McElroy because just once I want to feel what it feels like to hit a driver the way he does. What's your biggest pet peeve? I think my biggest pet peeve is just, you know, lack of attention to detail, lack of focus on the core things like, which is actually, even as I say this, it sounds hypocritical because one of the things about myself is, you know, I sometimes lack this. And I think it's one of the reasons that bothers me is like, if I'm going to do something I need to try to do it with detail and with focus. And I think it's one of my weaknesses. And I think it's one of the reasons why it bothers me when I see it in business . What's your biggest joy builder? This time with my family, I've got an amazing group of kids and an amazing wife and an incredible extended family. It's huge. It's enormous. It's chaos. But time with them and, you know, of late, it's become even more precious. What's something about you a few people would know? I don't know. I feel like people know a lot about me. Well, I thought you might say that you're a helicopter pilot. Oh, geez. All right. Well, now they know everything. Yeah. So I'm not a very good one and I'm not a licensed helicopter pilot, but there was a period of time where I was doing a lot of helicopter training and have about 350 hours probably in the cockpit. Although I don't have a license, which means I always have to have a real pilot . What's your golf handicap in your most memorable hole in one? Well, okay. Here we go. So my golf handicap, the last time you and I played together was probably one and today it's it's almost four. So that shows that I'm working at least as much as I should be. I have never had an official hole in one. I've been playing golf for the 37 years. I have one hole in one, but it's not official because I was entirely and completely alone. This is actually a great story. I was playing at Meadowbrook one day. I went out by myself on Long Island. I went out by myself. I double bogeyed the first hole. I double bogeyed the second hole on the back nine. I double I bogeyed the third hole and I got to the 13th hole and I hit this the only good shot I hit all day from about 220 yards and I couldn't see it go in. I assumed it went over the hole over the back of the green and I got up there and I'm at the furthest point on the golf course. There's no one within 500 yards and the dang thing is in the hole. So I take a picture and I call one of my friends and I'm like, you're not going to believe what just happened in the first thing he says because my friends are wonderful people is you know, it's not official, right? And I say, that's okay. And so I go back to the clubhouse and the pro is the only one there. I mean, it's like this was like a Thursday afternoon in October. I walked into the pro shop and I said, Rick, Mescal was the pro and I said, Rick, you're not going to believe what happens. And he goes, I bet you had a hole in one. And I said, how did you know he goes? What else would you be in here to tell me about? And so about a week later, he, he sent me one of those plaques that you get if you make an official hole in one. He included a note with it and it said, dear Mike, here's a plaque. He said, if you were going to lie about it, you would have done it long before now. That's a good one. If I were to get into your car right now, Mike, what would be coming out of the speakers? It would be a very eclectic mix. I have a collaborative playlist with my children, which has been growing over the last two or three years. So it could be Post Malone. It could be Zach Bryan. It could be Zach Brown. It could be Dave Matthews. It could be a lot of things right now. Last one. What's your superpower? I guess it's patience, maybe some combination of patience and optimism. And it may be a curse it sometimes, but I always believe things are going to get better. And sometimes, maybe sometimes I hang on too long and investments or other things like that because of it. But I just am allergic to quitting. You know, Mike, I know you're a great family man. What's it like working with your wife who's an outstanding entrepreneur in her own right, great restaurateur, great creative person? And what have you learned from that experience? So Michelle is an incredible entrepreneur. She would argue with me on this, maybe, but she raised our children while I was off, you know, doing my entrepreneur-ing thing. And as they got old enough and were school-aged, she decided she wanted to do something. And she had a number of projects, but the one that really stuck was she started this organic crush, a lifestyle cafe. And initially, it was just something she and her friend of hers wanted to do in our town. It really kind of caught legs and she opened a few more and she has 10 of them. But I have to say, like, the last three years as a restaurant entrepreneur is going to test every ounce of patience and fiber and commitment that you have in your body. And nothing I've done has ever been as hard as what she's been doing over the last few years between a pandemic and inflation and a labor shortage. And to her credit, she has not closed a single restaurant one day since the pandemic started. She's increased wages. She's decreased time. She's increased benefits. And she's done this at a time where, you know, I mean, you know the restaurant business. And I'm sure you can imagine how hard it is for a small operator of a multi- store operator. And I just can't say enough about how tenacious and how unbelievably committed she is to it. And let me wrap this up with one last question here, Michael. What's the one most important piece of advice you'd give to aspiring leaders? Understand the complexity of human beings. As entrepreneurs and as tech entrepreneurs and as scale operational leaders, I think one of the things that we have a tendency to do is we want to create systems that make sense on paper and work in real life. And you know, I think the best leaders I've ever worked with, they understand the difference between a system on paper and how it works when you put human beings into roles . And I look, I think this applies to coaches. I think this applies to executives and leaders in all forms. And it's one of the things that I catch myself, you know, doing all the time is I want to perfect the system. But you don't always have the perfect player for every role in the system. And so there's a human complexity element to this that I think, you know, has to be considered and it's one of the biggest challenges that we face. And the more tuned in we get to it, I think the better outcomes that we'll produce. You know, Michael is never going to to his own horn. He's got to be one of the most humble guys around, but I'm sure you can hear for yourself just what a tremendous thinker and leader he is. Through all the twists and turns in his career, he's always tuned in to what's missing and how he can build it. I just love the way how he finds insights. Obviously, it's crucial for entrepreneurs who want to disrupt any industry, but really it's wisdom for everybody to consider. Great leaders are always considering what's missing from the lives of those they serve and then they go out and build it. Now this week, I want you to tune into that kind of thinking. Ask yourself, what's missing in your industry or market? What's missing for your customers or your team? And then schedule some time to consider it and you might just uncover a big opportunity of your own. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders build what's missing. Coming up next on how leaders lead is Bill Ferris, founder of Woodford Racing and General Manager of Lane's Inn, which is one of the world's premier thoroughbred breeding farms. You just want to leave the industry in a better place than you found it in and that's really the driving force for me. The Breeders' Cup is sold out every year. The Derby is sold out every year. Royal Ascot is sold out every year. So we're doing some things right, but we can't stop. We've got a lot of things to try to make the sport better. So be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation and you might get something that'll give you an edge for the Kentucky Derby. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How Leaders Lead, where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]