From poker to startups
Jordan Raynor sits down with Will Barrett, Director of Field Operations at Threshold 360, to talk about their experience working together at Threshold 360, what Will has learned after making more than 100 hires in less than 3 years, and the spiritual significance of Will’s Two of Clubs tattoo. This episode also includes a bonus conversation with Patrick Gray and Justin Skeesuck, authors of Imprints. You can pick-up this great book at imprintsbook.com along with a ton of great bonuses.
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[0:00:05.3] JR: Hey everybody, welcome to the Call to Mastery. I’m Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for you, for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work, for the glory of God and the good of others. Each week, I’m hosting a conversation with a follower of Jesus Christ who is pursuing world class mastery of their work, of their vocation. We talk about their path to mastery, we talk about their daily habits and routines and how their faith influences their work.
Today, I am really thrilled to share a conversation I recently had with my good friend Will Barrett. Will is the director of field operations at Threshold 360 and for those of you who are familiar with my work, you know that in addition to creating content like this podcast. I also serve as executive chairman of that company, of Threshold 360 and I ran the company for two and a half years as CEO.
Actually, I believe Will is my first full time hire. I almost fired him on day one as we talk about in this episode. Not because he was under performing but because I was going to eliminate the role that he was filling at the time. And he turned out to be one of the most exceptional leaders I’ve ever worked with in my life. I have so much respect for Will and his leadership skills.
Will and I recently sat down to talk about our experience working together at Threshold 360. What Will has learned after making more than a hundred hiring decisions in less than three years. Talk about tremendously valuable wisdom and experience there, that was probably my favorite part of the conversation and we talked about the spiritual significance of Will’s two of clubs tattoo. Will’s a former poker player, started playing when he was a teenager, bought a car from his winnings, we talked about the spiritual significance of this big two clubs that’s printed on his arm.
I think you’re really going to get a lot out of this conversation. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with one of the most masterful leaders I know, Will Barrett.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:02:16.9] JR: I’m here with my good friend Will Barrett. Will, how are you?
[0:02:20.5] WB: You’re shaking. You’re so nervous.
[0:02:24.0] JR: I’m not nervous but we are recording in the coldest room, ever.
[0:02:29.0] WB: The coldest room in Florida.
[0:02:30.1] JR: The coldest room in Florida by far, we’re here at the library in Downtown Tampa and I just asked if they could turn the air up and they refused. It’s been six months since I left Threshold as CEO.
[0:02:43.1] WB: Six months of –
[0:02:44.2] JR: Best six months of the venture, right? As my listeners know, now chairman of the board but I think I told this to Kara after I came in for a meeting at some point in the last six months. I feel like you guys like didn’t miss a beat like when I left. Which was in some levels, satisfying but at the same time like very depressing. I was like very humbling. Did I read that right?
[0:03:06.2] WB: Yeah, here’s the thing I would say though. I mean, a startup like us that changes, I was telling the Uber driver on the way here about this, how much things change. Don’t know if he cared too much but we change every day every week and so, in a way, that makes it easier maybe. I’m just thinking through this now. But when you're changing so much already, even a big change like that sort of maybe minimizes the impact. Plus, you know, who took over was already in the fold, already at C-level person.
[0:03:35.9] JR: Yeah, that helps.
[0:03:36.7] WB: Respected the team and knowing that you would still be around and connected.
[0:03:40.5] JR: Yeah, it is interesting like when you’re growing as fast as Threshold has the last couple of years, is this like constant change. Something is always changing. Where leadership changes in bigger institutions maybe catastrophic, right? Which is not.
[0:03:54.6] WB: Year, I mean, the trickle down to department heads from there I imagine is huge.
[0:03:59.8] JR: Yeah, like everybody.
[0:04:01.1] WB: Yeah, but in a decision like this when we’re still small enough where everybody is pretty well informed and involved in the decision and the transition plan. And then, they kind of know how best to manage their team and empathize and communicate with them. Yeah, I couldn’t imagine a big organization, I hope to never deal with that.
[0:04:19.4] JR: Right. We’re going to talk about that and your startup experience and we’re going to talk a lot about Threshold, obviously. For those who don’t know. What tis Threshold 360. What do we do with Threshold 360?
[0:04:30.4] WB: I’m not the director of marketing or sales.
[0:04:32.3] JR: Right.
[0:04:33.5] WB: You’ll get the ops perspective. We’re a 360 imagery platform, this is really weird because you’re still kind of my – the boss. But we’ve built a really incredible platform for capturing and distributing 360 imagery or virtual tours would be kind of them, the common vernacular. In its current form now, it’s a platform that companies, especially in the hospitality industry, can partner with us and it’s a way for them to get access to really incredible interior imagery and content for a lot of their partners.
If you want to explore neighborhood, we think that we’re kind of the only one that can give you the ability to explore neighborhood, right?
[0:05:14.0] JR: Yeah, people are familiar with 360 tours, right? This type of content’s been around forever, the difference is, the way that content has historically been created, it’s been a professional photographer, going door to door, selling restaurant owners. You know hey, pay me $800, I’ll come in here, I’ll shoot the space, we take a very different approach, we create content for every restaurant, every hotel, every shop in a city in a few weeks, most of the time.
[0:05:41.9] WB: I mean, the big barrier there and I tell this story a dozen times a day on like recruiting calls and interviews, that’s a big part of my role and kind of explaining company history. It’s you know, we started in 2014 and one of the premises that Threshold was built on is just – our investors cofounders, noticing, there’s a huge lack in interior imagery. You can’t really virtually step inside of almost anywhere even though his program — Google's been focusing on it and pouring resources into it for years at that point and no one had really cracked that nut.
We really sought to crack that nut and it became all about speed, scale, volume. How do we capture locations quickly,? Really saturate a place where we can say hey, anywhere in Tampa Florida in New York City, you can look inside of this place.
[0:06:28.7] JR: Yeah, if you’ve come across a location on Google maps, that has this interior 360 imagery, you know it’s like super informative, right? You can get way more information about the ambiance of a space, of the layout of the space, where you might want to sit all those different things and especially at hotels, it’s even more valuable at hotels, than can from like two dimensional photography. The problem we’re solving is like scale.
[0:06:52.0] WB: Right. It’s incredible decision grade information is one way we would put it. Historically, it’s always been like art, staged, very professional photography, kind of geared toward real estate, you know, I’m going to spend 30 minutes in this experience, we took a very different approach of people just want to look inside. Everybody’s on mobile, I’m going to this restaurant, let me check it out for five seconds before I go there with a large group and it’s not really for that.
[0:07:20.3] JR: Yeah, you don’t need like DSLR quality photography. Although, I would argue, our content’s getting pretty close –
[0:07:27.0] WB: Yeah, it’s getting there, I think our timing, we’re very fortunate with timing. Just kind of basic startup principles, right? You can have incredible concept, incredible team, incredible product and your timing can be wrong and then you know, we’ve seen a lot of companies kind of die to that, it just wasn’t their time, five years too early, five years too late, you would make any traction but a lot of times, it’s five, ten years early.
[0:07:50.0] JR: Leah, just to make this a little bit more practical for our listeners to understand. Traditional model creating 360 imageries, you take a big DSLR rig, you would spend half a day in a coffee shop to shoot it. We come in and create content at a restaurant in 60 seconds. We’re in and out, we create the content, that’s how we can do San Francisco in four months. We get the whole city done.
[0:08:11.9] WB: Right, if you break it down that way, there’s 20,000 points of interest in a major metro area, say. How many independent freelancers are going to go in with DSLR’s and spend a half day shoot at every single café, bar, restaurant? And how many of those are going to pay them 500 to a thousand dollars to do it?
[0:08:28.8] JR: Right. It’s never going to happen. We’re creating the future, right? We’re just saying we’re going to go build the asset. The business model’s different than the professional photographer. The professional photographer is making a profit on selling the service to the hotel, to the restaurant, we go in, we create the asset. Most of the time, at no cost to the location owner but then we license that content out to organizations who are licensing content or for who are marketing lots of locations.
San Francisco Travel is a customer of ours, right? They’re marketing every hotel and every restaurant and every attraction at San Francisco and we’re kind of the only way that they could get that content, right?
[0:09:06.2] WB: Right, yeah. There’s markets who are – they’re realizing we need to sell location, we need to sell destination as well. So these are hotels, lodging, short term rentals, they’re realizing, we have to distinguish ourselves, I mean, the short term rental market for example, AirBnb and these types have exploded of course, we all know this. Well, now they’re sort of competitive with each other and how do we sell neighborhood and give kind of our perspective guest about our sense of the whole area that’s around us.
Increasingly, our content, it’s starting to make more sense and kind of find its place in other markets as well. But yeah, essentially, our business model’s different, there’s enterprise customers who want the content.
[0:09:45.1] JR: We’ve created this content now at well over 100,000 locations, we’ve experimented in a bunch of different — I mean, we have content in I think 20 different nations at this point. That’s a massive undertaking, right? Your job as Director of Field Operations is essentially to go get the content, right? You’re not developing the software, you’re managing the team on the ground that’s getting the content. Tell us, I think hopefully our listeners understand what Threshold 360 does. Tell us what you do as Director of Field Ops?
[0:10:15.6] WB: Right, it really is that. Go get the content. We’re an interesting business in that we’re a SaaS platform, this piece of technology, you know, you buy into and can use but we have this hard dependency if you will which content has to be in it. Typically for us, it’s a lot of content. A normal project for us would be go capture somewhere between a hundred to a thousand locations or more. These are physical locations, I and my team have to find a way to get someone there, to show up at the place and capture the content.
You know, we equip these people in the field, we call them creators with the 360 cameras which we're continually sort of assessing and that evolves and changes every quarter or every six months or so, as they get better and better. Like technology does. We get them the equipment they need, the training and then what, I’d say I’m most proud of now even since you left is the level of support we provide those people. Because at the end of the day, for my management team, we’re playing much more of a logistics game.
That is the difficult part of this. We’ve built a technology to make it go fast, the cameras are there in place, they’re getting better and better, it becomes really a logistics management, tough puzzle to solve, to get to and capture a thousand locations efficiently.
[0:11:35.8] JR: It’s incredibly complicated. Will has one of the harder jobs on the team. I thought it would be fun to actually – this is somewhat selfish, I just want to take a trip down memory lane and revisit kind of our personal timelines within this venture we love, right? At the risk of sounding selfish, I guess I’ll start because I started at the company before you and we’ll kind of meet in the middle. I actually served as a consultant on this venture that didn’t have a name at that point. It wasn’t called Threshold 360.
I’ve served as a consultant on the project from – it was like September-ish of 2015 to October 2016, right? I love the founder’s division. I mean, the vision from day one was allow anybody to virtually step inside of any location on earth, it was like wildly audacious. I think that gets like anybody really excited. As a consultant, I was helping the founders and the CEO at the time experiment with a bunch of different business models and the founders came to me one day and like, "Hey, we really think you’re the guy to bring the company and market choose a business model, help us make that choice, help us build the team and really start to find product market fit. And start to scale, right?"
I started to see a full time in October 2016. I had a consulting practice, working with early stage companies, I shut it down to put all my eggs in the Threshold 360 basket because I believed in the vision that much. Yeah, start on 2016 and on week one, pretty much fired almost everybody, right?
[0:13:01.5] WB: Well that’s one way to put it, yeah.
[0:13:03.8] JR: What’s another way to put it?
[0:13:04.7] WB: Yeah, a lot of people, by the way, that is what happens, not just in a transition, a switch over but the reality of that becomes very hard for people to deal with. I mean, even the Uber driver, what’s it like at a startup, you know? I give the short answer. Over a year's time, you change so much and it’s not just the change people have a hard time dealing with change. It’s this, right?
People leave or force leave, sort of that rapid pace, new people show up, the business model changes so much. You know, people typically have focuses. Some sort of specialization and when your model changes next quarter, that specialization is no longer needed. It becomes very hard to manage and manage the morale and –
[0:13:48.3] JR: I didn’t fire everybody?
[0:13:49.5] WB: Maybe 50% of the team.
[0:13:51.7] JR: Yeah, I almost fired you. Very glad I didn’t. Week one, I come in, I almost fire you, it wasn’t like you weren’t performing. You were just doing a role that I didn’t think was necessary within the company anymore. Pick up the story from there and talk about kind of your trajectory within the company and our first interaction?
[0:14:11.1] WB: Yeah, I was a consultant too at that time and we were – I mean, not to put details too much but there’s kind of an R&D project within the company that I was working on that was starting to make less and less sense. And then, when you came on and made so many changes and people left and really, just instituting more structure in a more clear direction forward and you know, at that time, we’re thinking, go to market, we have to have customers and revenue someday, right?
Companies get to this point, the R&D aspect of what we’re doing stop making sense and I was sensing that at that point too. I actually never fully wrapped my head around that myself. I think one of the helpful things at the time was, maybe you noticed that I noticed that. When you go, "Hey, I’m not sure this makes senses," I go, "Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense."
[0:15:00.4] JR: Yeah, when we sat down, I remember, we sat down at The Attic, the coffee shop, Remember the same conversation. I was like, "Hey, I don’t think your role makes sense anymore," and I was about to say, so your contract is terminated but you’re basically like, "Yeah, no. I know, it makes no sense at all." Right?
From there, I hired you full time. I think you were my first full time hire after that, right? As Director of Field Ops?
[0:15:23.4] WB: I believe so, I mean, because that was – when did you take over, October? My day one was January 1. Yeah, from there, we had that conversation and I think I said, well, there’s field operations like what is it? There’s no Director of Field Ops. I think maybe you expressed like this is a need we have, we’re going to have to actually build out a team for this. I said, "Well how about I shift into that on interim basis and we’ll see how it goes?"
[0:15:50.0] JR: Yeah, we went to Texas. We went to Austin because we were recruiting a team there and I agreed, I was like, all right, Will. I knew Director of Field Ops it was like, the number one hire we needed to make at that point, right? You were doing interim basis and part of what convinced me to give you a shot at this was you know, I was thinking about like nobody had done that job before, nobody had managed a global team of 360 photographers before, I thought I needed somebody from the political world.
I thought, this like resembled almost political field canvasing at the time. But I hired you for a couple of reasons. First, I knew that you shared my faith and because this was a very people centric role, you have more direct reports than anybody else in the company. I wanted somebody who would love employees well, right? And treat them well.
Secondly, was like this need for speed which has been a theme throughout your career and you had the core strength I was looking for, you’ve proven that you are competitive, I remember talking, like one of the first conversations I was talking about, your experience as an athlete, poker, in startups, I want to talk about the story in a minute but I actually wanted to talk about poker for a second.
Because that’s actually kind of what convinced me that you might be right for the job was your competitive streak. How did you – poker was kind of the first job, right?
[0:17:08.5] WB: Right.
[0:17:09.8] JR: How did you get started in poker?
[0:17:11.4] WB: How did I get started in poker? Well, it’s in my blood, it’s in my family. Not poker per se, gambling is definitely a common theme amongst my extended family. But really, cards, my parents are from the Midwest, they’re from small town Indiana, we play this game called Euchre. I grew up playing Euchre. That was the fondest memories growing up is sitting around the table playing Euchre from a very young age.
My son’s five now and I probably around then was already seeing that that was like after dinner what we would do. Cards was big in my family and then you know, it wouldn’t have been uncommon for my parents to kind of go to the casino or play poker or this or that. I was sort of exposed and then I mean, I guess I remember playing for the first time with my dad when I was 12, 13, something like that.
Of just like teaching me with like quarters, pennies, whatever. I very quickly, within a couple of years, 14, 15, started playing relatively competitively. Now, the timing there is, that was beginning of like poker craze, the emergence of online poker.
[0:18:18.4] JR: This is when like poker was on like ESPN.
[0:18:20.5] WB: Yeah, it’s on ESPN all the time so you’re seeing it, I was very attracted to it and then just my friends were playing, we’re playing at school, we’re playing in the bathroom and in Florida, it’s pretty accessible, there’s dog tracks, there’s horse tracks, there’s all these things but the laws on that side now they regulated too much.
[0:18:38.8] JR: But you did well.
[0:18:39.4] WB: For the scale of that age, that level of income, yeah, you couldn’t do really better. My first deposit online, it was really mostly online. That’s where you can make money especially young kids. If they’ve been playing online for a couple of years, they have dramatically more experience than older folks who have like played in a home game, even on a weekly basis, right? Because now you’re starting to see data like, you play thousands of hands a day.
The young kid’s got it from – this is math and I’m learning how to process that and make quick decisions and what not, instead of you know, it’s the Internet, right? All the secrets are gone. The books are published, this is math, this is what we are the pros are doing. The young people take to that, right? Not the older folks who are like, that’s not how you play poker, son. When online hit, it was like a high school and college person’s game to win.
[0:19:33.3] JR: But you made enough money to buy a car, right?
[0:19:35.9] WB: Dumbest purchase I ever made was a brand new car in 2007. That I wen the Kia dealership of all things, I bought a Kia. Brand new.
[0:19:45.6] JR: That was the decision?
[0:19:47.0] WB: No, just a brand new car.
[0:19:48.9] JR: Right, why do you need that?
[0:19:50.2] WB: yeah, why do I need that? This is crazy. My dad was with me by the way. Shout out. Said nothing.
[0:19:55.5] JR: Chuck Bear was there?
[0:19:56.8] WB: Chuck Bear was there and said nothing about it. This is cool.
[0:19:59.6] JR: You paid cash?
[0:20:00.8] WB: Yeah, paid it, I eventually totaled that so –
[0:20:04.3] JR: That’s a dumb decision. All right. You already have this competitive streak, you played poker, you’re a D1 college athlete.
[0:20:13.0] WB: Very generous term.
[0:20:13.3] JR: Very generous term. You were on the team, you went in New Jersey. Technically on the term. Football, right?
[0:20:18.9] WB: Right, at USF. I’m going to try to speed up the story just a little bit.
[0:20:22.5] JR: You're playing football or you’re on the team at least and you’re interested in startups, right? Really, the rest of your career is kind of startups. I think like there’s an interesting bridge here from poker to startups. I can’t remember if we’ve talked about this but like, have we talked about Tony Shieh–
[0:20:39.0] WB: How long do we have?
[0:20:39.2] JR: How long do we have? For those of you that don’t know, Tony Hsieh founder of Zappos shoes, that’s sold to Amazon for what, 300 million dollars or something like that and then his book, Delivering Happiness, he talks about how he learned poker and kind of the parallels between poker and startups. Do you know this like enough to talk about?
[0:20:58.6] WB: What I would tell people is, you sort of have to out fold a lot of people, you have to out fold everybody recognize the right opportunity and shift in the fifth gear at that time and maximize as much as possible because then when you double that chip count, that compounds from there. You don’t need to make all the right decisions.
In fact, the strength is when I can fold and not even knowing it’s the right decision. But the risk of me being wrong even if there’s a 20% risk, like way outweighed everything else. You have to be able to be okay with – "I’m not really sure what happened there, I’m going to move on," and be confident.
If me, that’s a one to one player, I go, okay, we’ll see. I’ve got three more hours with this person. He/she’s eventually going to show their cards, I’m going to collect more data on them and then be able to categorize them and then make a more informed decision on that’s probably what happened back then and I was right or wrong.
[0:21:54.9] JR: It’s really a lesson in patience, right? Disciplined patience and waiting for the right time to move, right? How do you apply that to startups?
[0:22:03.0] WB: Yeah, I think mostly with startups, for me, it’s about – that relates to internal decision making. Not necessarily, again, not like on the sales and marketing side but I am involved in long term strategy. It could be applied there but for me, on a day to day, I think I use this when like when should we do this? When should we introduce this new policy to the team.
Really, where and when should we focus effort so you can know something’s very important but you have you know, certain resource constraints and so you’re always having to prioritize, right? Then you go, "Well, actually, this is very important." But for me it becomes gut intuition. I feel like we‘re still missing some information to make a good decision because when you go down that route, we’re going to build this thing, we’re going to create this program, I’m going to hire this person, there’s a lot of time-resource investment, right?
You want to as well as know that you can’t, you want to be close to 100%. I go, "Let’s go another quarter and see what happens." Things tend to fade away, it becomes very clear.
[0:23:11.8] JR: Yeah, I want to talk about leadership. I think you’re a world class leader, you know, that’s not just my opinion, I think it’s fair for my audience to ask like, how I judge the guests on this show as masters. One of it is just, I feel like I have good intuition for it but second for you, I have data. When we did upward feedback surveys while I was CEO at Threshold, you consistently got the highest rate and it’s from your team and as a manager but also your team was also always just like all in on the company’s mission.
I don’t know, I just think you created a great culture within that very large block of people within the team. I guess the question is, how have you thought about shaping the culture within your team within this startup?
[0:23:55.1] WB: Yeah, this culture question is very interesting to me lately because it’s so common and I like –
[0:24:01.5] JR: The question’s so common?
[0:24:02.9] WB: I don’t know how to answer it from those people. How do I create a culture and it becomes about like things you do in events and stuff and I’m like, for me, it’s like the people I’ve chosen, there’s kind of the hiring side, right? The culture’s made up of the people, make up of people to determine the culture. I mean, I think that’s been our number one priority.
Even now, short term contractors for 30 days, it’s pretty much number one.
[0:24:32.1] JR: Even if I’m doing a 30 day contract.
[0:24:33.2] WB: Even if it’s 30 days. That can be very tough to balance and sometimes you do have to deviate depending on the need at the time but yes, we’ve seen tremendous benefits from that. I go, I never just care about getting the job done. Even if it’s 30 days, this person might help us learn something, they’re going to be very engaged, I want them to feel like they’re a full part of the team and they can contribute in all of the extra ways outside of just capturing content.
It’s those kind of hiring, vetting decisions are very important and I think it’s just who we are, everybody has a side of very series, all on the mission and we genuinely like each other. It’s you know, these are the surprises when new people come in, and they’re just on a team meeting and they’re like, "These are my people."
The great thing about that is that we always have fun, that’s not what’s important here. The great thing about that is, any issue I can pretty much address immediately and call them and speak nothing but the truth. This is like paramount. This is so important. I hope no things are left unsaid. But even if they do, it circulates, we end up talking about it.
A month ago, we had a family meeting, this doesn’t mean we never have problems because I think we have a great culture or I’m a half decent leader or whatever. At the time, the change is actually too fast, enough for when I feel it. When I feel it, it means we’re going too fast.
[0:26:02.8] JR: Right.
[0:26:03.2] WB: Because I like fast. Then we just had a full family meeting of everything on the table, a couple hours, how do we make this sustainable for everybody because companies might say, the customer’s the most important, getting the content is the most important, hitting the deadline’s most important. That’s cool. These seven direct reports and my 50 contractors are actually more important than that.
[0:26:28.7] JR: Yes.
[0:26:28.9] WB: Those other things are going to be okay, I just promise.
[0:26:33.0] JR: Yeah, no I think that’s good advice. I think when you ask the culture question like how do you shape your culture. I do think most people expect answers about programs or pay-benefits or perks, events, stuff like that but like, I think the wisdom here is like no, it’s like people and decisions, right?
It’s knowing who you are as the leader, as the hiring manager and the type of people and the values that you want those people to have on your team and kind of perked in that.
[0:26:59.5] WB: Yeah, I mean, I would say, "How do you have a great relationship with somebody?" Marriage, romantic relationship, friendship, a good relationship with teachers at a parent teacher; conference yesterday at my son’s school and it’s like, we both feel heard by each other, our inputs valued and so those relationships, sort of, they’re added to, that’s all this that’s happening here, right? In this company.
There’s a bunch of relationships. If the relationships are good, and healthy and cultivated and there’s like truth and love and genuine care then like, you have a great culture. The pay and the perks, the benefits and that stuff is like it’s important, it’s relevant but it’s not the most.
[0:27:42.6] JR: Right.
[0:27:43.2] WB: The first part just like how healthy are the relationships in your company?
[0:27:46.7] JR: Yeah, those other things like checking the boxes, they have to be there in order for those deeper things to be-
[0:27:52.5] WB: Yeah, it’s like having a house with water and electric and this and that.
[0:27:57.1] JR: The plumbing.
[0:27:57.0] WB: Food in the fridge, okay.
[0:28:00.0] JR: That’s not what makes a family.
[0:28:01.8] WB: That doesn’t make the family, it doesn’t mean we have healthy relationships, it doesn’t mean this house has great culture and hospitality and feels like home.
[0:28:07.9] JR: We use the family term. I think you and I have talked about this like Netflix’s value of we’re not a family, we’re a team, where do you side on that?
[0:28:15.4] WB: I do like that. The Netflix thing, yeah. We’re not a family, we’re a team, they want to have sort of sports performance oriented culture. We’re not a family because a lot of times families devolve into just gross codependency, right? I’ll do anything because we’re blood, which means you can just take advantage of me and vice-versa and all that stuff. I think there’s insight there but at the same time, I grew up on teams.
That’s all I did, I didn’t care about school, I cared about poker, football, baseball, all my best fiends, I talked to them all this week, I’m 31 years old. Are we family? There is a unique environment culture on the teams that create family like bonds, if not stronger.
[0:28:57.2] JR: Yeah, I think the difference, I was actually talking to somebody about this today, right? In a family, you’re loyal to each other regardless, right?
[0:29:06.4] WB: It’s blind, yeah.
[0:29:08.1] JR: It’s blind but like loyalty for loyalty’s sake in business is really dumb. Really dumb. Because you’re sacrificing by being loyal to people regardless of their performance, you’re sacrificing loyalty to the mission and the vision of the venture, right? If I’m in the loyalty of an underperforming employee, I’m choosing to be loyal to that person instead of the mission that I feel like I’ve been entrusted, right?
[0:29:31.8] WB: This is like easy to say. I have good results even from like the last couple of years though, I think. Of if you prioritize that loyalty, it's doing them and you and everybody disservice but I mean, really, it’s just to me, it comes down to like not speaking the truth. This is when somebody exists in that environment for so long, it’s bad for everybody but it’s particularly bad for them.
[0:29:55.2] JR: Can you, without using names, give a story of this because I think this is a hard concept for people to grasp.
[0:30:00.1] WB: I could, well, here’s what – maybe I’m most proud about this. Besides one person. This means I’ve actually collected the data and I’ve inventoried this for myself. Everybody I’ve fired or let go which is different but fired for very real reasons over the last few years, I have a – I would say, very good relationship with still and we communicate on somewhat of a regular basis.
Those were very hard conversations, except for maybe one person. That’s like, 95% or something like that. I think that’s because the conversation was just about the truth of our relationship and the relationship with the company and what’s happening here. Typically, then that starts to make sense, there’s always a shock, there’s a - change is hard, right?
They leave, but then they find themselves in a lane, more where they belong, there might be some struggle to and it might take two or three more opportunities from there, "But this is where I belong, Will I see what you're saying," you know? Everybody’s in a better spot.
[0:31:02.0] JR: How many people have you hired? Like roughly? Including contractors.
[0:31:06.3] WB: Including contractors?
[0:31:08.4] JR: Over a hundred, right?
[0:31:09.6] WB: Over a hundred if we include contractors.
[0:31:11.8] JR: You’ve made a hundred or so, more than a hundred hiring decisions, right? In the last two and a half years, almost three years.
[0:31:19.8] WB: Right.
[0:31:19.8] JR: What has that experience taught you about what to look for, what is most important to look for in a hires and try to make this like, agnostic of the role, don’t think about creators like try to apply the advice that anybody who is hiring anybody listening to this podcast. What are you looking for?
[0:31:37.2] WB: Jeez. I should have a much better answer for this.
[0:31:41.6] JR: I mean, you’re talking about culture, right? Is that it?
[0:31:44.6] WB: Culture fit, I mean, synonymous for me is like do I like them after I go, "That was an enjoyable conversation." That doesn’t mean – because I’ve had t hose and but they still weren’t eh fit because they didn’t have the technical skills or even just availability or kind of goals where they want to go. I mean, for us, it’s pretty easy to identify its culture fit.
For me, I want to walk away, I want them to ask me because they know they’re applying for this 30 to 60 day capture content type contract. If they ask the question, "Are there like long term opportunities here? What does full time look like? This is really interesting. I just want to be involved in the company." because at the end of the day, I have to keep in mind, we’ve changed so much, we’ve stabilized, I’m very proud of our processes now but as this goes, a year from now, it’s going to be very different.
[0:32:39.5] JR: It is but the missions never changed. Mean, Threshold has been through three CEO’s, right? In four or five years and the mission has largely stayed intact. I think there’s a lot of wisdom here and looking for people who are fired up the mission because regardless of what else changes. –
[0:32:58.3] WB: Right. I have to go when this changes, how are they going to respond, right? Which is why I get to and I am very biased towards generalists because I am a generalist like I don’t think about sales, I am not technical, so what am I? I don’t know, you tell me. So for this role, even though there is a technical side of it and a creative side so it is a lot of freelance photographers. So it is people with that sort of background but I want sense like, “Oh you’re a generalist and can plugged in over here.”
I mean you can solve this problem because every full time person on my team every single one besides myself capture content full time. So they were in the field full time and now they are managing the field to some degree, which by the way is totally different. So they went from capturing content creator focus to project management details logistics even if it is a 30 day contract, I want to, “Oh I can see that happening.”
[0:33:53.8] JR: I want to ask one more question about hiring. You and I have talked about this before but there is this age old debate between hiring people or hiring positions, right? So do you hire the best people, the best culture fit or do you hire the person that has the experience you know?
Really the debate is do you hire great people, just look for really smart people and then plug them into whatever role or do you hire for the role? You say I need a whatever, sales associate and you are going to have XYZ experience, where do you side on that debate?
[0:34:26.6] WB: This is a good one. I think as I grow more I have a side but I am open to both like it is not one or the other. So I think it is both because it really depends on the role, right? If we need a very specific developer that codes in a specific language right. You know –
[0:34:44.4] JR: You should probably know how to do that language right.
[0:34:46.0] WB: You have to go for that. In general though, I side with people.
[0:34:51.1] JR: So I think that is because the majority of your experience has been in a startup. I have been thinking about this a lot lately. So in a startup and when it is a startup where you are doing something that is truly never been done, right? So something like Threshold, there is no map. There is no proven paths to like making this thing work. I actually do think like siding with people makes sense.
You just want to find in the words of our core value at threshold, humble, scrappy and hungry people. Yes, that is a quasi-Hamilton reference, you know how much I love Hamilton but in a proven business or a more proven business model in my opinion, it is much more predictable. You know what the roles are going to be that you need to hire for. It is like you are looking for more specific people, would you agree with that?
[0:35:36.3] WB: Oh yeah, as we mature I can see that changing. I mean also this, so there is kind of – I have recognize it last year because again there has been a lot of change and by the way, it is good growth change meaning new problem. It is just a lot of process change. It is not even strategy change, nothing core to the business really changing. It is process in how we do things. So recently going back to the family meeting, conversations with my people became, someone in particular, calling me and saying like, “I think this is hard for a lot of people but I am just having fun with it," and that to me is I was like it just hit me.
I was like, “Oh we are the same.” Because I like it. I am having fun with it, so when I say hire people, it’s like we need that. So maybe it is a specific skill, maybe that is the role like they have fun with that but that will obviously stabilize our process is going to change every month forever. In fact I think we’re getting very, very close to where that level is out so.
[0:36:40.5] JR: Let us talk about your faith. Let us talk about your faith impacts your work. So one of the things that I knew about you fairly early on was you take Jesus’ words pretty literally especially as it relates to serving the poor. You have intentionally live below your means so you can minister to people in poor neighborhoods. How has your heart for the poor affected your ambitions professionally? Is that part of what drives you to business? Is there an element of that they’re creating other opportunities for people? Help me understand that.
[0:37:11.2] WB: Yes, so a few things. So I got into I guess business if you will, I would say it was a way startup minded and wanted to do ventures. So the first thing, after poker, the first paycheck was money I fundraised through a non-profit that we started. So as a co-founder of this men’s recovery program, that just leads to if you get more and more serious about it, you move into the neighborhood and then it just became the recovery program was our house.
That is a short way to put it. So that became purely about creating opportunities for people. Now I happened to be in business school and say at the time was coincidental but I did not love it. I was mostly reading like theology books and stuff and just getting by and using my financial aid to fund my life to go do mission, ministry work that is literally what I was doing. Going to enough class to make that okay. But then you know through business I stumbled upon concepts like micro-finance, I was an e-con major, you know creating small loans in developing countries and stuff like that.
And it was just, “Oh okay, this can be important for creating opportunities for people.” I saw that these two things can converge and then at The Timothy Initiative, which I would say – this is a non-profit yeah, which is more or less a men’s recovery program without getting too much into it but still doing very well. I am on the board of that. So that became about creating opportunities for the guys.
And you know we had a concept of work therapy at the time too, which is this belief that for recovery purposes, I mean whether it is drugs, alcohol, depression or anything, I need to feel better about myself, work becomes very crucial, right? I mean it is for anybody, when kids are growing up it is a part of maturity like I have to work. I have to work hard at something, I have to feel good about myself. I have to accomplish something and work alongside people. So work therapy became very core. It is one of our core tenants now at The Timothy Initiative. So that just turned into a construction business, ultimately. So I got thrown into the construction business because of that.
[0:39:24.1] JR: Because you are doing this recovery program for these guys, you started a construction business to give these guys jobs, is that right?
[0:39:28.9] WB: Yeah give them jobs and it was the natural fit because that was at the time and still most of their background was in the trades. They came from the construction industry or if something related. So that was the natural fit for us. So it became a few goals, work therapy for like new guys. This is like I am just barely out of detox and I just need to be out there with people and the discipleship element of that where our leaders are on the job sites –
I mean they are there for eight hours and I don’t know construction still but the toilet explodes or whatever happens fix the problem together is essentially The Timothy Initiative’s model of discipleship, is do that together. That is where they are sharing life, right? On the job site and then they go home together too. So it is work therapy and then it becomes more real job opportunities.
They transition to hour rate salary blah-blah-blah and then it becomes funding for the organization. So we don’t have to continually – we don’t have to fundraise as much because that could be a problem itself. So yeah, I was sort of thrown into that business and then we were given screen printing out equipment and thrown into the screen printing business, I built that so yeah. Does that answer the question?
[0:40:39.5] JR: Yeah it does. So we’ve actually never talked about this in depth and I listened to half of a podcast episode you were on and I didn’t get to the answer to this question in 45 minutes.
[0:40:48.1] WB: That was the idea.
[0:40:49.3] JR: The two of clubs?
[0:40:50.3] WB: Yep.
[0:40:51.1] JR: So Will is sitting here with the two of clubs card tattooed to his arm, what is the spiritual dimension to the two of clubs tattoo and the follow up question to that is how does that shape your leadership style?
[0:41:04.4] WB: So the two of clubs again, it is obviously poker. It is documenting that chapter in my life or just cards in general. So for me, it’s become a reminder. So again going back, my first – I mean it really wasn’t until almost late 20s, where I was in full time, for-profit business, in a more venture like this Threshold. So I was focused on kind of mission and ministry work if you will but there are these business elements to it and so I was very much like day to day with people who have a lot of needs.
And that really shaped me and shaped my world view and ideas of leadership to one another, how I manage people now I guess. And so it wasn’t until I got to this venture that I have been much more detached from that life where I need a reminder because –
[0:41:55.7] JR: A reminder of what?
[0:41:56.6] WB: Of the poor. So the two of clubs you know this goes back to the old cards. As cards developed really it is not until France 1500s were they really were formalized and it was almost a card deck that we know of today. So that is when the suits are introduced and the face cards and all of that. It’s reflective of the society of the culture of the day. And so the suits represent the class or cast system if you will at the time, which the clubs are the poor, hearts are the people, spades are the military, diamonds are the royalty.
Yeah, so the two of clubs is the lowest card and it represents, it literally means like the peasants. So for me it became a reminder of that but it is also poker and everything that I have learned through that and how I operate in the venture now. It is about strategic risk taking. So combining those ideas for me, the one sentence is it means strategic risk taking for and with the poor.
[0:42:56.8] JR: Yeah, so can you think of a time during your 10 years director of field ops, where you’ve had a situation with a member of your team? I mean really, the two of clubs is a reminder of humility, it is a reminder of how Jesus has called us to serve the poor. You know the members of your team, I would not call them poor, right? They have pretty good jobs, has that tattoo reminded you of that call to serve those people? If you think about specific example of how you felt called to serve those members of your team.
[0:43:27.4] WB: Right, yeah good point. You know well even, I’ll say and I am not sure this answers the question but how I worked with the poor and the people. I did that very much as a part of a broader community at the time, how we did that has changed as well. As I’ve grown and matured and you realized, I mean I think the special thing we ended up doing with people is just treated them like people like not pandering to everything if you will.
And so it just goes back to what we are talking about with interview and management of the truth, we are just telling the truth here right? So a lot of my experience that time was with men in addiction, which is just the truth. I mean it is a relatively harsh environment of you are messing up in this way and there was a ton of like kicking people out. This goes with, you know, that is the name of the game at that time. So I would say a lot of those lessons have translated.
I mean, honestly, you know people are people. The poor in my experience have a lot more needs and less opportunity like right then and there at the time. So there is a lot more guidance needed. So, I don’t know.
[0:44:39.3] JR: Yeah, so I am hesitant to ask this question – I didn’t give you –
[0:44:43.4] WB: I probably don’t care at all.
[0:44:46.4] JR: I didn’t give you advance warning to this, major accountability time for me, I ask this to somebody on the podcast recently and I really liked their humility and responses but you’ve had a unique perspective on my leadership style, right?
Having worked for me for almost three years in this super high pressure environment. I am curious to hear your perspective on what will be different about Threshold if I was not personally committed to following the teachings of Jesus Christ? Would anything be really different?
[0:45:19.0] WB: I see your insane commitment to performance and standards and productivity and time management and organization as like intrinsically connected to your faith, right?
[0:45:37.8] JR: How so?
[0:45:38.2] WB: Well I think you have this conviction about excellence and that you know, we’re probably not going to talk about that. But that especially maybe people listening can relate in the ministry-church-mission-non-profit world can be tough. That has always been tough for someone like me who aspires as well. Like I was first a competitor. We want to win the game and you have to keep getting better. You have to train every day. You have to keep better and better and better.
And so, for me that was so attractive about Threshold was that you were there, you are going to set the standard. Some of my life I was like noticing these things but you become what the complainer, you become holding an impossible standard. But when you instituted that, I just felt never more free to be myself. So for me it was incredibly valuable but yeah, I think you’re so committed to excellence.
That is I think rooted in your faith and as a result of that there’s how you operate. How you manage your time, how you hold people accountable and then if you’re the CEO then I am one person, the fact of the matter is that sets the tone of everything.
[0:46:50.3] JR: Yeah. So yeah I would certainly agree. I think other people can have high standards of excellence certainly without finding Jesus Christ. But that is the motivation, right? I believe we worship the exceptional God, a perfect God. I think he has called us to glorify him and reveal his character and we do that through the ministry of excellence, through creating great products and great companies and also, we are given a finite time on this earth to live out the mission and the work that we believe got has created us to do, right?
And I take that very, very seriously. So that is an interesting response. All right, so three questions I like to ask every guest before we wrap up. So I am curious, I actually don’t know the answer to this for you because I don’t think you have ever given me a book. What books do you give out the most?
[0:47:32.1] WB: I will recommend. So there is a couple of books that are very, very important to me. I don’t give them out a lot because they are rare and they are dense and people probably aren’t going to read them. But I am still going to recommend because this might change your life. So at least one of them is in my bad right now. So there are two books, one is A Failure of Nerve by Edwin Friedman is very important to me.
So this is a book about leadership, right? And he is a clinical psychologist, he is a counselor, he is a practicing family counselor, who sort of develops his idea of leadership within that environment. Long story short, he recognizes if I have this very dysfunctional family, I recognize the person with the most leadership ability, which might be the mom, dad, kid, I don’t know but oh, I just need to pull them aside. I am just going to counsel them and that will change everything.
That will change the whole culture, right? And so when he says a failure of nerve, he uses that interchangeably in the book with backbone. He’s like, “I actually just needed to instill strength in them because they know what truth and kindness is. They’re the reasonable kind person here, they’re not just all over the place with emotion and reactive. They are going to be able to manage this I just need to give them confidence," right?
So then he translates that to corporations and other organizations and government. He ends up consulting for all of these big groups. So old book, Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve. The other one is The Way of Suffering by Jerome Miller, who is an unknown theologian philosopher kind of but he talks about suffering being like the golden moments of your life to really discover the truth of yourself and God. That is where you meet God in a lot of ways. So at the time for me, that was very important because I felt like I was in that season.
[0:49:23.7] JR: That is interesting. What one person would you most like to hear talk about this intersection of faith, work, vocation maybe on this podcast, maybe not, who do you like to hear talk about that stuff?
[0:49:35.9] WB: Oh, I mean I am interested in the unknown. So I don’t know a person but by the unknowns I mean like I am always incredibly impressed by people, just like in the community, in my community doing seemingly basic work. It is not Threshold 360, necessarily, fun exciting scale, woo-woo, but doing very simple work with relentless commitment. So it might not even be business, like for-profit business, whatever you want to call it.
But I am thinking of like I did an internship one summer in college with this Franciscan community and lived with these Franciscan priest for a summer and a couple of them had been doing the same thing every day for 40 years. Now that is not my style and I don’t know if I am going to be able to do that but it doesn’t make sense. They were operating on another level. So someone along those lines I think would be really interesting.
[0:50:36.6] JR: Yeah, I really want that to be a big theme of this show, right? So I want to have a lot of people who are not in super high profile roles. In fact, I got an interview later on with the middle school Spanish teacher whose story I told in the Master of One and she’s exceptionally good at her craft. Nobody knows her, can’t find on her Instagram but she loves Jesus and she loves her work and she is committed to it. So I think this story is really interesting.
I say a lot on here, you don’t have to be world famous to be world class. I think we equate those things a lot doesn’t it? That is not just true. All right last question, what one piece of advice would you give to somebody who like you is pursuing mastery of the art of leadership?
[0:51:15.7] WB: If that is really their pursuit, it is not just happenstance, I want to make a bunch of money or start a venture or do this and leadership happens to be a requirement but you are pursuing the mastery of leadership, I would say like lead in a very difficult environment, you know, and it is almost weird to say like you are going to pick and choose like that but what I am very thankful for is my first few years in college, just out of college as a young person for the first three or four years.
And my first venture paycheck fundraising was an extremely difficult environment. So the leadership, the sacrifices you would make is well there is a new person and we can move another bed in my room and we can split this room and just break all boundaries and it is unrecommended in a lot of ways but everything was so incredibly difficult about it.
And you saw all aspects of life because we are serving the whole person. We are not managing them for a few hours a day. We are not having one on one a week or eating almost every meal together. So there is just a lot to learn from those intense experiences. That could be achieved in a number of ways.
[0:52:25.0] JR: But choosing the difficult path, right? That is where you are going to learn the most.
[0:52:29.0] WB: Yeah, being faced with really hard decisions on a daily basis. Because now I mean I am not really faced with a decision that I think is that big of a deal to be honest. So that might be like over exaggerating a bit but the world is not crumbling. We are having fun.
[0:52:46.4] JR: Right. So Will, I just want to thank you. I mean as a brother in Christ but also as the chairman of the board of Threshold thank you for administering the ministry of excellence. Thank you for working so hard, one of the hardest workers on the team, working hard to serve our customers and our employees and our investors well.
Thank you for the way you love people, the poor in particular, your work as a leader of people is ministry. Even though it might not be The Timothy Initiative, I think it is incredibly important and I am just grateful that you do it extraordinarily well. Hey, if you want to work with Will, he is always hiring, right?
[0:53:20.5] WB: Yeah always.
[0:53:21.8] JR: Always hiring. So go to threshold360.com you can learn more about the venture and find his contact information as well. Will, thanks for hanging out.
[0:53:30.8] WB: Thank you.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:53:32.7] JR: Thanks again to my friend, Will Barrett for joining me. I hope you guys were able to soak up a lot of his wisdom on leadership, on hiring there.
Hey, if you are enjoying the podcast, make sure you subscribe so you never miss a conversation in the future with another masterful leader or entrepreneur or author or teacher. Yeah, make sure you subscribe. If you are already subscribed, do me a huge favor, can you please take 10 seconds and go review this podcast on Apple, on Spotify, wherever you review podcasts to make sure that we can get this content into the ears of more listeners. If you have no idea how to do either of those things, go to jordanraynor.com/podcast and we have made it really easy for you to find those links.
Now, hey before you guys go, I want to share another I recently had with an authors of a book I recently added to my reading list. The authors are Patrick Gray and Justin Skeesuck and they wrote this interesting book called Imprints and basically the premise is that you know, changing the world, we talk a lot about changing the world especially millennials like myself, changing the world doesn’t require huge audiences, huge platforms, having your own podcast.
What we do day in and day out at work, at our offices, at home has great eternal significance. So this book, I started skimming the book. It has been a great encouragement and challenge to me, I think it will be a great encouragement to you. So I recently sat down with Patrick and Justin, the authors to just ask them a few questions about the book to help you make a decision as to whether or not this is something you would want to read.
So without further ado, here is my conversation with Patrick and Justin.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:55:21.1] JR: Patrick and Justin, thanks so much for joining me. Hey, I love the concept of this book, Imprints. It is why I have been putting it in front of my audience of Christian professionals. So Patrick, why don’t you start and just tell us a little bit about what is this book, what is this book all about.
[0:55:36.7] PG: Yeah, you know when Justin and I, we travel all over, speaking to different audiences and we get asked a lot of questions about focused on how do I make a difference in the world and we point people back to conversations we have with CEO’s of companies, what inspired them to make a difference in the world, maybe like a non-profit that is say, put in fresh water wells in Africa. And every time we talk with someone who is affecting change on large scale they are pointing back to someone who made an influence impact upon them when they were younger.
In childhood, teenage year, someone who just modeled grace, compassion and mercy in the everyday and so when people asked us how do I as an individual make a difference, what can I do that is actually going to matter, you see man there is a lot you can do. And so this got our wheels turning in a way, “Okay what can we do to inspire people to have a different perspective in life, to look at their life as an opportunity to make profound change in every interaction they have?”
And so we started with the idea that every human interaction is the opportunity for something sacred to occur, as long as we had the mentality that it can happen that we can be a vessel to for God to pour through. You got to be intentional with that. So we started looking at just stories of individuals that have shaped who we are and then friends that we have met along the way and stories that have shaped who they are and so the whole book is not about compassion on the large scale.
It is, “Okay, what can we do in the simple intimate every day moments with our neighbor, with a server at a restaurant, with someone we meet on the street?” How can we profoundly shape the trajectory of their life just by simple acts of compassion, grace and love?
[0:57:14.2] JR: I love that so much. We talk a lot on this podcast about how can we do that through our work. I mean you know helping neighbor as self is a good and God honoring thing when we just serve customers well, show compassion to employees, care about the lives of those around us and serve them well. Those are sacred things, right?
Even if it is a “secular workplace” we are being the hands and feet of Jesus as we go and do those things. So Justin, I am really curious to hear from you on this, who is this book for? I mean it is easy to say every single believer on the face of the planet, is that who the audience is or is it more new ounce than that?
[0:57:49.4] JS: That is a very good question because as an author, you want to say, “Yes, for everybody,” right? "Everybody in the whole world should buy a copy." You know what? I would probably say the best answer I can give to that question is if somebody is yearning to show either if they are a Christ follower and they say, “You know what? How can I be reminded of how to do that in the day to day?” Then this book for them.
If it is for even a non-believer, somebody that is like, “Hey, I don’t believe in this Jesus dude or whatever. I don’t subscribe to that.” You just want to be able to be compassionate to people you meet every day and learn how to listen. Patrick and I are firm believers, you know? Sometimes the best way to listen is to shut up so –
[0:58:33.9] JR: Kind of the only way to listen right?
[0:58:35.7] JS: Yeah but some people have a hard time with that. So this book is a really great reminder for those individuals who might have over the course of their lives or recently or who knows what that might be for them is to be reminded to say, “Yeah you know what? Okay let’s get back to the basics. Let us get back to being just a good human in this world.”
[0:58:54.8] JR: Yeah, I love that. Wherever you are, right? If you are a stay at home dad, if you are working in a Fortune 500 company, you are starting your own business, be the hands and feet of Jesus wherever you are. I love that.
So Patrick, I will ask this last question of you. So our audience, the people listening to Call to Mastery, they love Jesus but they also really love their work and they are thinking about how to integrate those two things really deeply and they are ambitious for their work, right? These are high achieving Christians, how is this book going to serve that specific audience?
[0:59:27.2] PG: Yeah, you know I am a firm believer that it is not a work life, there is not a home life. There is this life, right? There should be no delineation of who you are in the workspace versus who we are as a father, as a husband, as a partner and whatever it might be or our parents and what I mean by that is the same dynamics that are at play in any relationship we have and business is about relationship period.
If you don’t have good relationships, your business is going to fail. It won’t last. We have worked a lot of different companies where the leaders they understand man, my ability to cultivate healthy strong bonds with my customers, with my employees, with my peers or my superiors even you know even say a board, that is key to my success and if we strip all the buzz about relationship stuff out there and get back to those basic things like Justin mentioned, dig in the scripture to what has Jesus called us to?
What kind of life is that? What does that look like? That is what this book is about. It is not a self-help book. It is not a step by step kind of thing. It is like let us look at how I can, in simple ways and every single interaction, whether it is in a board room or in the hallways of my business or it is on my way home and I meet someone on the street, how can I profoundly open someone’s eyes to a new perspective of what it means to live and love well.
[1:00:41.3] JR: I love that. So one follow up question, so y'all’s story, the story of Patrick and Justin started with this big grand act of love, right? Can you very briefly, Justin, maybe you briefly tell that story, take about a minute to tell that story and then Patrick, why don’t you follow onto that and talk about how you guys serve each other in this friendship and this partnership in smaller ways.
[1:01:03.5] JS: Yes, so I mean in a nutshell for those who are listening, Patrick and I have known each other literally our whole lives. We are born just over 36 hours apart, same hospital, same town, our moms knew each other growing up, our parents went to college together and we have a long family history. So there hasn’t been a time in our lives where Patrick and I haven’t known each other. You know we have lived life together, growing up as kids.
And those who may not know my personal journey, I will give a quick snapshot. When I was 16 I was involved in a car accident, ended up triggering a progressive neuromuscular disease in my body. So it is very, very rare disease that I have. It is almost identical to ALS. So I live life in a wheelchair every day. So I can’t feed myself, I can’t get my clothes on. I can’t go to the bathroom by myself. In many aspects of my life, I depend upon others.
Patrick has stepped into that role of not only being – he is not only my best friend but he also stepped into caregiver. He’s also stepped into showing me what it means to love and live well. And then you know we do crazy stuff. A few years ago, we successfully completed The Camino de Santiago. It is a 500 mile pilgrimage across Northern Spain, while Patrick pushed me in a wheelchair. There is an award-winning movie called I’ll Push You is what was our book. Our first book, a memoir called I’ll Push You.
So we’ve had crazy interactions, not only with one another but with many people that have stepped into our journey along.
[1:02:21.4] JR: So those are the big things, right? The 500 mile journey has got to top that list. Patrick, from your perspective, maybe talk about some of the small things and also y'all's relationship where you are serving others, serving each other really well.
[1:02:32.4] PG: Well you know you mentioned earlier hands and feet, right? Wherever we are in life that is what we’re called to be as hands and feet and I through this whole evolution of housing my faith over the past six, seven years is just life has been very different from what I expected it to be. My eyes have been opened to different things especially in the scripture and just the way Jesus lived and he chose relationship over religion every single time.
And that is an easy trap to fall into choosing religion over relationship because religion is easy. It is a checked box. It’s defined where stepping into the amazing wonder and it’s magic, it’s magic as we can't explain it of God is still so beyond of our understanding, yet He gives us of you know what? In the everyday, love your neighbor as yourself that is how you love me. In Mathew 22, He makes it so clear that He loves you, God, with all your heart, mind and soul.
And the second commandment is love your neighbor as yourself. And to take that to heart in the little things where there is Justin and I or it’s people we meet, hands and feet doesn’t always look like hands and feet. I got to be Justin’s hands and feet every day and it is awesome. But he gets to do the same thing for me in different ways as he encourages me. He opens my mind in new perspectives in life and so it doesn’t have to be that physical, tangible piece.
It is are you pressing into relationships in a way where you’re inviting someone to – like there is story to crash into yours and your story to crash into theirs and so that you could be the church together and it can be a big thing like going through Spain and it can be something as simple as asking a server their name, looking them in the eye and saying, “Hey, I really appreciate the help you gave me today. How is your day?” That can change everything for somebody.
And there is so many of these things we can do in between the big and the small but it is having that mindset that I am going to be hands and feet in some way, shape and form every chance I get. At least I am going to try to.
[1:04:23.1] JR: Man, I love that. Guys, thank you so much for writing this book. I have started skimming and I am really enjoying the lessons in it and thank you for sharing a little bit about the book with our audience. I appreciate it.
[1:04:34.1] JS: Thanks Jordan, we appreciate it man.
[1:04:35.1] PG: Thanks Jordan.
END OF INTERVIEW]
[1:04:36.5] JR: Thanks again to Patrick and Justin for sharing a little bit about Imprints. The book is out now. If you want to find it, you can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, wherever books are sold.
Hey, that’s it for today’s episode. Again, if you are enjoying the podcast, please be sure to subscribe and review the show. Thank you so much for listening to the Call to Mastery. I’ll see you guys next time.
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