I'm 13 years old. I come home. There's not a lot of food in the house. There were times when lights were turned off or the phone wasn't working and that level of dissatisfaction is greater than the cost of change. And whatever that takes, I'm prepared to do. And whatever sacrifices I have to make, I'm prepared to make. 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 that you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. Now my guest today is Tom Baltimore. He's the chairman and CEO of Park Hotels and Resorts. Here he is, running one of the world's largest real estate investment trusts, managing $9 billion in lodging assets, and yet growing up, Tom and his family never even owned their own home. Today, you'll hear how those humble beginnings shaped him and helped him on his path to success. And you'll see that Tom isn't afraid to push himself. In fact, it gives him the credibility to push others and make everyone around him more successful too. I'm telling you, powerful things happen when you're not afraid to push yourself and push your team. I know you're going to be inspired after this one. So here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Tom Baltimore. You know, you rang the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange in January of 2017 after Park Hotels and Resorts was listed as a public company. What's the story from that experience most people don't know about? You know, not everybody gets to ring that bell. Well, David, one, thank you for this opportunity. And actually, David, it was my second time ringing the bell. My first company I got to do in January of 2011, at that particular time, I had the privilege of having my wife and my two kids, my then eight-year-old daughter and my 12- year-old son, both of whom my daughter is finishing up her last year in college and my son is now gainfully employed. But every time, it's always a magical time. And for someone in my background to be there and really at the center of the financial world there at the New York Stock Exchange and to be able to ring that bell, there is one of euphoria, there was pride, there was a lot of excitement. But I think the thing that I remember the most in addition to having my family there was really having my team there and having them celebrate as a team in that accomplishment because obviously no man or woman succeeds alone. So having my team there is probably one of the biggest takeaways for me. Absolutely. And I'd love for you to give us a snapshot of Park and the business that you lead today. Well, Park O'Tells and Resorts is a publicly traded real estate investment trust. Today we own about 43 assets principally in the US. We do have a resort in Puerto Rico and about $9 billion in assets. We were spun out from Hilton. I rejoined Hilton in May of 2016. I had six months to build out my team and that's a full management team, a board, a logo, name, etc. Hilton at the time was owned by Blackstone and they had taken in public a couple years earlier but they were spinning out the other two businesses that were contained . One was a time share business, the other was the own real estate business which is the company that I run today. We're Hilton's largest owner and we're also a Marriott and Hyatt franchisee as well. What the heck is a read anyway? Could you explain that in layman's terms? Yeah, a real estate investment trust essentially is an industry that has about 200 companies, two plus trillion in assets and it's shopping malls, it's office buildings, it 's data centers, it's cell towers, it's hotels and typically we have to pay these companies are earning their revenue through lease streams and then as a result of that we have to distribute at least 90% of our taxable income and it's a vehicle that Congress set up about 60 years ago that allows a normal investor to participate in own stock and own shares in real estate companies. I want to learn more about how you lead but first you mentioned a little bit earlier your background, I want to take you back a little bit. What's the story from your childhood that shaped the kind of leader you are today? Well David I was born to two teenage parents. My late mother was 17, my father 18, they were high school sweethearts and attended the same church and the group in the same segregated environment in front row Warrington , Virginia really about 50 miles west of the nation's capital. My mother both unfortunately didn't live long but my mother was a bookworm and incredibly well read and my father was this bigger than life personality who was the son of a Baptist minister and his dream was to become a minister himself. Unfortunately he realized his dream. My mother had one dream and that was to see really all five of her children graduate from college which she did live long enough to see all of us graduate college and me finish graduate school. I'm the oldest of five children and so the background is humble. My family never owned a home so we lived in seven rentals growing up but I learned at a young age and a lot of that encouragement coming from my mother on the importance of education and how that was the escalator to a different life. So while they didn't see the good fortune and the good things that would happen I think about my parents every day and how I live my life is terribly important because it's important that I live the values that they taught me and that we're an integral part of my youth and how I grew up. When I interviewed Condolee Sarai she talked about growing up in segregated Birmingham and the work ethic that had instilled in her. How has being a minority impacted Utah and just the fact that you went through a similar experience? I learned early that I not only needed to be as good but candidly be better and you know I have sort of three guiding principles and I call them my three P's. The first is sort of prayer. It sort of centers me. It anchors me. Second is preparation and the third is really perseverance. I've always believed that in every life a little rain must fall and it's not that it happens but it's really how you respond to it and I believe that perseverance is sort of that secret sauce of life. To that end I still work even though I'm you know the advanced age of 60 and I 've taken two companies public and I've had the privileges serving on a lot of boards. I still work six days a week. I'm in the office every Sunday if I'm in town and my team will vouch but for me the phone's not ringing. I can read. I can prepare so that concept of over-preparing if you will is terribly important to me. You talked about your dad making a pivot to become a minister when you were a teenager. That had to be a risk for him to you know move into that field. Tell us that story and what it taught you about taking risks. My father David was 33 years old. I was 15 and my father had a concept of he saw this migration particularly and where of the Baptist faith and he saw this migration. A lot of people moving out of the city and into the surrounding suburban communities and he saw this void and really believed that he could build a church in Montgomery County, Maryland which is a suburb of the DC area. I remember him coming home and he had put together the plan, the timeline and he wasn't making a lot of money at that time and we certainly were a lower middle class family at best and my father was 33 and he said I'm going to be starting this church. I was always respectful but there was a part of me that said he is out of his mind to try to do that but I will say I learned a lot. I learned a lot about sacrifice. I learned a lot about commitment. I learned about risk taking and I watched my father and unfortunately my father passed at 58 but he led that church for 25 years and not only did he buy the land, build the church but when he passed he probably had close to 4000 parishioners and made a great impact on his community and on the men and women that he served. That's fantastic. Yeah. He was a good man. Tom you're known for being a bit of a bold risk staker yourself. Tell us a story about the biggest risk that you've taken. In 1999 I was working for Hilton, my then wife and I were living in Brentwood, California and Hilton was buying Promise Hotel Corp. Out of the Memphis area and as part of that transaction they inherited the Hampton Inn brand and Embassy Suites and Double Tree brands and they inherited 17 hotels that they wanted to franchise and manage but not own. There was a high net worth individual on the Hilton board. His name is Robert L. Johnson. Bob is the founder and former CEO of Black Entertainment Television and I reported to the CFO at the time but I also knew the CEO Steve Bolumbach very well and I asked them if I could work with Bob to launch a hotel investment company. So this is pre-Sarbains Oxley and Hilton was kind enough to allow me to keep my day job. I had a handshake deal with Bob for a year and I worked for a year to launch a company while working full-time at Hilton. In 2000 we launched and bought our first portfolio of those seven hotels and at the time we were probably the largest minority owner of hotels. We later did three private equity funds, merged two of those funds and we took that company public and that company R.O.J. Lodging Trust is still a public company today and Bob and I are still very close friends and both still large shareholders in that company and I ran that platform for 17 years before rejoining Hilton to start park hotels but that was a huge risk. I was always prepared to bet on myself and I knew that I could make a good living working in corporate America but that I really wouldn't make the leap to a better life in the life that I had hoped and the life that really my parents had dreamed that I would have if I wasn't prepared to take that bolder risk and I've always been prepared to bet on myself. It's calculated. I study it. I still review it. I'm thoughtful about it but I'm always prepared. You're not going to get to the next step in your life if you're not prepared to take that risk and bet on yourself. You know I've heard you talk about the satisfaction being a motivator for change. Tell me a story where this has really been true in your life. I would say for me growing up in a very humble background I had no fear. When you're living in an environment and you're living in rentals and I can remember to this day in excruciating detail the smell, the look, sometimes shame, sometimes the embarrassment. But in many respects that was a catalyst and that was a motivator for me and that I'm going to live differently and whatever that takes I'm prepared to do and whatever sacrifices I have to make I'm prepared to make. A simple example of that is I'm 13 years old. I come home. There's not a lot of food in the house. There were times when lights were turned off or the phone wasn't working and those things that level of dissatisfaction is greater than the cost of change and so whatever it takes. For me I knew that education was going to be that escalator to really change my life and to help me get to the point of candidly. My life has exceeded my dreams from that standpoint but I'm still working hard because I'm passionate about what I'm doing and I'm passionate about the men and women that I work with. You work six days a week and you come in on Sundays and work ethic is a big part of what really drives you. How does this impact your leadership in this world of work-life balance with your team members? How do they look at that? Do they see pressure to do the same thing or what's your message to them? The younger Tom probably wasn't his understanding and I'd say that many of my senior team members at my former company also worked probably a similar schedule coming in on the weekdays. I missed a lot of my kids activities and there's some regret there but I knew that I had to make that sacrifice if I was prepared to change my life and to change candidly the quality of life that my kids would lead. I'm a different leader today David. I recognize that work balance is important. We're open. We're in office four days a week. We allow people to work remotely on Fridays. I still come in the office on Fridays and I tell people that they're not expected to come in on Sundays and to work the hours but I also think a good leader shows by example and the fact that they see me working the hours and preparing I think is a motivator. I think it's a unifying force when you have an authentic leader and someone that leads that way and I really wouldn't ask my team to do anything that I wouldn't do myself has been a real benefit for us and our company. You talk about prayer, preparation, perseverance. You've already mentioned being prepared just kind of comes out of your natural conversation here. Preparation is really important in the key leadership tenet of yours. When you look at your career, what would be the biggest career moment where you really had to get prepared to make it happen? I had an assignment early in my career at Marriott and it was I'm 28 or 29 years old and I'm leading a presentation for a piece of business that was very important to the company and I had one of my mentors was accompanying me. He was a senior executive and I knew that Bill Marriott was going to be aware of our success or our failure and for me I remember working, locking myself away for a couple of days and just preparing. We were successful and having my mentor there. I always say that mentors can turn into sponsors and can really change the path of your career. In this case, that particular gentleman Bill McCarten was that person and really helped shape and to this day we're still very dear friends. He's still a mentor and he's still someone that I reach out to even though he's retired and but the fact that he took an interest, the fact that he saw the work ethic, the fact that he gave me a chance was terribly important. That's some 30 plus years ago but really made a difference in my career. Tom, I've heard you say that complex thinking skills, you see that as a really key attribute for leaders. What do you mean by that? I think David, it begins first with this mindset of continuous learning. You have to be thinking about what you do well. You have to be honest with yourself and what are your gaps? When you're honest and how do I improve? How do I get better? Every year I look at where I think I've got gaps even today in my leadership skills and think how can I improve? I sit down with each of my direct reports and I walk them through. I put together a development plan for them and I try to be a mini coach if you will. For me that's important. I'm making an investment in them. I care about them. I want to push them out of their comfort zone. I don't think you really grow until you push yourself out of your comfort zone and also push your team out of their comfort zone is how I think you really can achieve extraordinary success or certainly outsized success. How do you cascade this notion of continual learning throughout your organization? We have a number of initiatives that we have in place. We do a series of what we call Lunch and Learn's where we'll bring together associates, we'll bring together executives and we'll have a speaker of the day and it's generally a colleague who will talk about his or her role and their contribution. It's a way also to test people and put people on the spot and it's a growth opportunity. We have a pretty intensive leadership development program. In fact, we have a graduation next week where we pick four to six rising executives where we put them through a 360 review. We get them a coach. We have them have a senior executive sponsor that will work with them and it's had tremendous success for our organization. We also go through a process of what we call June compliance period where we talk about issues of the day and we have a hundred percent participation where we make sure that everyone goes through and these are about our values. These are making sure that as a public company people are complying with it. That's really important and as a result of that and we also take multiple surveys. We'll do at least once a year engagement survey and then on top of that we'll also do some post surveys. It's really that outreach is important but also when people see that we continue to invest in them as associates and help them grow to reach the next level I think is important. Those kinds of programs really touch the organization at multiple levels and it 's been really beneficial for us. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Tom Baltimore in just a moment. You know another leader believes in the power of pushing yourself is Jenny R ometty, the former CEO of IBM. She says that if you want to grow you've got to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. You will only grow when you're uncomfortable. I've talked to so many people around the world that resonate with that and I try to say to them I actually got to the point where I love to feel uncomfortable because then I'm like yes I'm learning. I'm learning. I would even look to put myself as a CEO particularly in those positions. I'd be seeing a client that ran a railroad. I got to learn railroad business before I get there. If you start feeling like you're not I would say to people if you're feeling so comfortable on a roll you do need to change it because you are not learning. So growth and comfort never coexist. Go back and listen to my entire conversation with Jenny, episode 66 here on How Leaders Lead. You know you and Robert Johnson the founder of Black Entertainment Television and he's clearly one of the most successful entrepreneurs successful business people in the world. You work together a long time. What did you learn about entrepreneurship in those 17 years? And we're still very dear friends today. He's a serial entrepreneur and you think about the courage it took to launch Black Entertainment Television in 1978 and he had John Malone and I know you know John and you know John invested. I believe approximately $500,000 and that return payout when Bob sold a Black Entertainment Television Divicom for $3 billion. Everybody benefited from that. But one of the things that really worked for Bob and I were very different people. I wasn't in the entertainment business. I'm a real estate finance guy but you couldn't find two people who were more aligned. We had shared values, we were focused on business outcomes, we were focused on doing the right thing for our associates. We were focused on making sure that we created wealth and we're not ashamed to say that. To this day we still look at deals together, we still traveled together and it was a magical 17 year journey. In fact, when I got the call from Hilton in Blackstone to leave R.L.J. and re join Hilton to spin out my current company, the first thing I did is I flew to Florida and spent the day with Bob talking about it because I really wanted to make sure that I had his blessing, his support and in typical fashion that nobody could have been more supportive. For me, what I love to do, my passion is really building businesses and building teams. I love to push myself out of my comfort zone but I love to push people out of their comfort zone and see them achieve a greater lens than they really thought they could have. For me, I get great joy and great passion from that. You and Bob, you have this partnership for 17 years. You're obviously comfortable and very successful. I'm sure a lot of people at the time thought you were absolutely crazy for leaving. How have you learned to turn down that outside noise and go with your gut? I think everything has a season and I thought 17 years was a great season, a great run but the opportunity to rejoin Hilton to work with the extraordinary team that Krist a said I had at Hilton coupled with Blackstone executives. Two of them were going to be on my board. We also had H&A, one of the Chinese conglomerates as a major shareholder. For me, that opportunity to candidly climb another mountain, build another team and as I said earlier, I was always been prepared to bet on myself and believe in myself. It was an opportunity that I couldn't pass up on. You obviously are a relationship person and you had this great relationship with Robert Johnson and you talked about the mentor that you have. I also understand you have your own personal board of directors. What's the most difficult situation you've brought to them and how did you work through it together? Are these people you go to one at a time or do you ever bring them together as a group? How do you make a personal board of directors come alive and use it? Yeah, it's interesting. I never bring them together and not all of them know that they are members of my board of directors. But I think it's important to have truth tellers around you and to have men and women that you trust and that will always be straight with you. I'll give you a great example. The most difficult period, you can imagine, I'm in the hotel business, March 13 th, the pandemic and the world shuts down. We're in a daily leasing business and we're in a business that's got high operating leverage. We also were not eligible for any of the PPP money provided by the government and we're hemorrhaging cash. That was the most difficult time. But to have, I think it's important to be calm, to be measured and everybody around me was panicked, including investors that couldn't sell our stock and get out of the company fast enough. And I remember talking with two of my key executives and I said, "This is the time when we really have to separate ourselves." And that's when I could reach out to members of my personal board of directors, really just as friends to sort of talk through. I knew the banks weren't going to foreclose because who in their right mind would step into my shoes in the middle of a pandemic? They were better off to work with us and keep the management team together. And I'm really proud of the fact that we survived it. We didn't do a dilutive equity raise. We didn't file bankruptcy. We paid back all of, we did three bond deals and pushed out maturities and paid off all the banks. But having the self-confidence, having the patience, having the right people around me and then also having that personal board of directors where I could brainstorm was really, really helpful and a difference maker for me. So there's no industry where COVID had a worse impact than your business. I mean, you basically hit rock solid bottom, no doubt about it. What's the biggest thing you learned about yourself when you were facing that adversity, Tom? As I said earlier, you learn the most about yourself and the face of adversity that believing in yourself, remaining calm in the face of that crisis, communicating both internally to your team and keeping them steady. I took a pay cut. I didn't ask anyone else in my company to take a pay cut. I thought it was really important to send that message. We kept our core team on the payroll. We provided benefits. I did a series of frequent calls. So I really thought internal communication to focus the troops made sense. I also had tremendous outreach to our investors and also having a great board of directors. A board of directors that seasoned and experienced made the difference. And then I was just relentless. We were working at that point seven days a week doing everything we could to retool our operations, to take cost out of the business and reimagine our operating model. And I had a spirit that failure isn't an option and that we were going to get through this and we were going to get to the other side. Tom, you talk about believing in yourself. That's easier said than done. When you have times like that, what do you do to dig deep and really have that? You have that belief in yourself. How do you get that belief? I think faith plays a role in a David. I think confidence. Now I wouldn't say I didn't have bad days. I'd have bad days and I'd go into my office and I'd kick the chair. I'd have a pity party for about 30 seconds. And then I'd say, let's get at it. And I think it was for me the importance of I had thousands of families that were dependent on the decisions I made. Many women at our investment company, the men and women that were still working out of a few of the hotels that we kept open. And I owed it to them to make sure that I was making the right decisions, both in the interim and long term for the company. You said you got the opportunity to go to park and build your team from the ground up. What's something that you look for in the people that you hire? I mean, if you had to pick one thing that you just, it's a must have, what would it be? It's grit. It's determination. My team's incredibly diverse, incredibly different, but there's a grit. There's a determination in them. There's a will to succeed. You know, I know that you love building teams and you're a big believer in collaboration. As a leader, how do you go about building collaboration with your team? I think authenticity is really important. There isn't any real space between my executive team and me and my board of directors and me. And I think being honest, being open, having them understand exactly what I'm thinking, making sure they understand this is the mission. Here are the priorities and here's how we're going to execute our game plan. I would imagine in real estate, like any business, being an individual contributor is really important. You got a lot of high power smart individuals working for you. How do you get them to play on the team? It's important to have that align what I call shared values and alignment of interest. Incentive plans are a set up such that while there's an individual component, more importantly, there's a company component. We all do well when the company does well. I also work on individual development plans for each of them. And I work hard to make sure that I'm setting them up for not only success today, but the future. Whether they're with me or not, I'm always going to be available to help them. And I think when they believe that, when they know that you have their best interest at heart and when you're authentic, I think it really matters. You've been very outspoken about getting more women into the leadership positions in the hospitality industry. What's the key to making this happen from your perspective? How do you break these ceilings that exist? I think it's important. I'll give you an example. I've got a woman who runs ahead of human capital. And she was in a mid-level position at Hilton. At the time she was working with me, she had been assigned as I was building out my team. And I could see this enormous potential. She was smart, strategic, hardworking. I said after working with her for a couple of weeks, "Why don't you join me in this journey?" And she's been on this journey and she has been extraordinary. I have an Asian woman. It's my general counsel who had worked for me at a former company and then joined another company. I saw, again, the extraordinary potential. And when you see that, I've had a history of being able to identify talented people, push them, encourage them, be loyal to them, but also have their best interests . And I've had success with that. And I use that as examples. I don't do a lot of the industry panels anymore because I've been around so long and people know me. I slot my team and I slot women as much as I can. My two women executives are an example of that. But I really push as I get involved in the industry to make sure that we're getting more women and people of color in the industry and roles of influence. Now, you mentioned this, the first woman you talked about, you said she runs human capital. Yeah. Okay. What's a human capital executive do? She runs, in the traditional sense, would be sort of human resources, but she's far more strategic than that. So from our engagement, from our leadership development program, to our lun cheon learns, to looking at all of the different surveys that we do. Did you coin this human capital phrase, Tom, or where did that come from? I don't think I coined it. I think others have used it. I think a capital in terms of investment. You have to keep your associates engaged. I think you want to keep them aligned. We tend to have low attrition and low turnover, not at the property level, but at the corporate level. And as a result of that, I think because it's the investment that we make in people, and I think that outreach that we have and that constant engagement, I had a lunch today. I do what we call these Tom B. lunches, and I break the group into eight to 10 people, and I do them frequently. And there's no set agenda. It naturally will evolve talking about the business, but it really is talking about them as people. And when they can see that the leaders authentic, the leaders comfortable, I think it really helps the connection between the leadership team and the broader associate base . You mentioned earlier that you like to climb new hills. What hill are you climbing now? I'm getting parked back to pre-pandemic levels. And so we're still climbing, but we had a great 2023. We are one of the top performers in our sector. And I'm proud of that given the fact that in 2020, we were essentially shut down and hemorrhaging cash. So the fact that we have recovered is encouraging. But I'm enjoying the journey. I'm enjoying pushing myself, and I'm enjoying pushing our team. We're going to do a little retreat this latter part of this week and really continue to map out our strategic plan for 24 and beyond. And I'm looking forward to our discussion. When you do a retreat like that and you go offsite, how do you bring the team together? Do you do team building exercises in addition to the strategy? How do you make those things really powerful? It's interesting. So I'll put together an agenda. I'll put together topics that I think each of my direct reports should cover. We'll do some team building exercise. But because the team has been together, it really is a working session. And I won't dominate it. I will be the last in many cases to speak. I want to hear from my teammates. I want to hear their thoughts. I want to hear their observations. We'll talk about high performance players. We'll talk about those that are gaps. We'll talk about what we can do to bridge those gaps and where we want to go as a team and leading the business. I feel strongly about that. Do you have any rituals, Tom, that you keep in place or that help you stay grounded? A lot of times you get the success and it's the beginning of the downward spot ter. Yeah, the good news is David, I don't take myself too seriously. I'm blessed with an incredible wife and partner. My wife, Hilary, and I have been married 27 years. And it's important to keep in mind that when I started the first company, R.O.J . Development, which became R.O.J. Lodging Trust, my wife and I had just been married three years. We had an infant son. I come home and I tell her that I'm going to walk away from a corporate job to start a business. She never blinked. She always believed in me. And when I come home, she's quick to tell me that I'm not the boss here. And she's right. And she's been an extraordinary partner. And then later, you fast forward 17 years later and I say I'm going to start another business. And she didn't blink. She didn't doubt me. And I think when you have people like that in your corner and you have that type of partner, it really matters. Absolutely. You know, Tom, this has been so much fun and I want to have some more with my lightning round of questions. Are you ready for this? I'm ready. Okay. What are three words people would use to describe you? Humble, authentic, focused. If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be? One of my heroes is Nelson Mandela and I'm being in prison for 26, 27 years. I mean, that's somebody that I certainly would have wished I could have met in my life. What's your biggest pet peeve? I think that people who aren't committed and don't give it, they're all every day. What's a piece of advice you'd give to your younger self? We're all full of contradictions. So this will surprise you to probably have sought a little more balance early in my career. You get two front row tickets to anything you want. Where would you go? Oh, Masters 18th Hall Sunday. What's one of your daily rituals, something you never miss? I try to take a few minutes every day for reflection and to ground me. If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear? You'd have Squawk Box at home and you'd have gospel music playing in the car. What's something about you few people would know? I love fast cars, but I rarely drive them. All right, we're out of the lighting. Good job, that was great. Now, you have served on a number of different boards. What was the most challenging situation where you know your leadership on that board made it an indelible mark on the outcome of the event? I was the lead director at Prudential going through the succession planning process back in 2018. Now, sitting CEO had been on the board for north of a decade at that point, just making sure with a systemically important financial institution, so being a SIFI and going through that was both stressful, important, and something I'm very proud of because we had two internal candidates and at the end of the day, we were able to keep both candidates, which was a great success for the company. That's interesting. Looking back when Jack Welch was doing his succession planning, he had three or four candidates and he told them all they would need to go. You take the view, "Hey, I want to keep both these people." What was your thinking on that? Our thinking was that we had two exceptional candidates and the win for the company would be either outcome, could we keep both? In that case, we were able to keep both and I retired from that board last year as I think you know, and those two leaders are still there. That was, I think, an outstanding contribution during my service on that board. I also love how you're giving back and I understand you've endowed scholarships at the University of Virginia for minority students. I think you've done so much for that school. They have a statue of you out there somewhere. I'm not sure. What more about what you're trying to do with the minority students? Well, David, I can remember when I was in college, my biggest fear wasn't that I couldn't do the work. It was that someone would show up with a bill. I didn't have much of a margin of error and I didn't have much of a safety reserves and I largely put myself through college, through work study, scholarships. The Pell Grant, thank God for the federal government and the Pell Grant, I'm grateful for that. My wife, Hilary and I have always wanted to give back. For us, education is really the cornerstone of our giving. We've been fortunate enough to endow scholarships at a number of places and we 've almost always set them up for minority students that are from impoverished backgrounds who we know need it. It matters to us. Fantastic. What's your unfinished business, Tom? I loved and it's probably not achievable. I'm probably a 13, 14 handicap on golf. I'd love to get down to a single digit, but unless I practice more or retire and I think I can get a little more practice, but the retiring, I don't see that in my future. Well, it sounds like you're working a little bit too hard to be a great golfer at this stage, but that work ethic will work for you when you do retire. I guarantee you that. Last question. What's the best piece of advice you could give to aspiring leaders? I think authenticity. I think you've got to be the best you. I think you've got to recognize your strengths, play to your strengths, but don 't be afraid of your gaps. Look at your gaps and work hard to improve your gaps over time. We're all evolving. We're all imperfect and continuing to work hard, I think, is terribly important . Tom, I want to thank you so much for being on this podcast and just congratulations on what you've been able to achieve. It's very difficult to start out at the bottom and take yourself to such high heights and take so many people with you and you've definitely done that. Thank you for sharing your story. It's very inspiring and I appreciate it very much. David, you're an inspiration to me and so many other people and it's an honor and I mean that sincerely to be on this podcast. Well, Tom is a shining example of the American dream. No matter where you come from, you can find a path to success if you're willing to work hard and bet on yourself. And there's a line in this conversation that I just love. Tom says, "I don't think you really grow until you push yourself out of your comfort zone. Boy, he's spot on. As a leader, you just won't achieve that next level of success by strolling down easy street. Just like Tom, you've got to push yourself to work harder, to take risks, and to be honest about where you can improve. When you authentically push yourself like that, you earn the credibility and respect you need to push other people forward too. And that's how you build strong teams and get great results. This week, find one place to challenge yourself and get out of your comfort zone. Give yourself that push. I can promise you, that mentality will be the biggest source of growth for you, for your company, and the people you lead." So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is the great leaders push themselves and push others. Coming up next on how leaders lead is Chris Bevelockwa, founder and CEO of the innovative sports betting company, Simple Bet. People do business with people that they like and they trust. It's not that complicated. And you sit across three feet from someone, and that's how deals get made and relationships get formed. So be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation. 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. Thank you. for watching. a lot of people have been working hard to do, and I hope you have been working hard. (Silence)