Todd Gagne:

Luke, welcome to the podcast, man. I appreciate you taking some time. I don't get as many, like, local people to interview, so I appreciate it. Thank you.

Luke Nehring:

Well, it's great to be here, Todd. Thank you.

Todd Gagne:

Well, good. Well, good. Why don't we kick this off by maybe talking a little bit about your background. So today, you're basically a coach. So you help a lot of entrepreneurs.

Some of it's technology, some of it's not technology. But maybe give me a little bit of a snapshot about how you got here and a little bit about your background.

Luke Nehring:

Yeah. So I I love a quote from Steve Jobs where and I'm not gonna I'm not gonna I'm gonna paraphrase it, but he said, you can't connect the dots looking forward. Can only do that looking backwards. And so as I look backwards on my life, I'm able to connect quite a few dots. So initially, was gonna be a high school wrestling coach and history teacher.

And after interviewing a couple of my former high school teachers and one of my college professors and the feedback they said was they don't go into that field. We wouldn't go into that field if we were you. I'm like what? And so I didn't. And so then as I looked back on that, like, had this innate desire to wanna coach and teach.

But what I found is that where I'm at today, I'm coaching and teaching, but not in a classroom and not on a wrestling mat. So, you know, as I bridged all these experiences, you know, I was in sales, I did financial planning, I was a real estate agent, I was a loan officer, and then I did a ten year, we'll probably talk more about that, but a ten year period of my career was with a defense contractor, which was both foundational and informative for me and helped me to get to where I'm at. Ultimately, you know, I love helping people get either owners get what they want out of their business and life or just entrepreneurs and executives that are trying to leave a make it have an influence on people and leave a lasting impact.

Todd Gagne:

Luke, if you looked at like, you've had a pretty diverse background, and so is there a theme to a lot of those jobs and stuff that you did? Or something that you kind of pulled through where you say, you know, small business, you know, doing the defense stuff, doing real estate, is there a thread that basically you kind of over time have realized these are the things I like to do, these are the things I don't like to do, and then basically this has led to kind of where you're at today? Or is it more like, I know that was good for this time in my life and I need to do something different and there's not a lot of corollary between those jobs?

Luke Nehring:

If I was to put one kind of the glue that puts it all together, Todd, it would be that I'm an integrator. I'm an operations guy. And so I work really well with entrepreneurs and business owners because the things that they tend typically don't like to do, I'm actually, I really enjoy and I'm really good at doing. So, the first example that I had of that was going back, again, one of my first jobs out of college was a financial planner. And my most successful and most fulfilled part of six month period of that two and a half years was when I was working, I was partnered up with the top agent in the office.

So, he allowed me to manage directly his tier two and three clients, and then assist him with his tier one. And so I was always busy, I was doing all the paperwork that he hated to do, but I enjoyed doing because I like there's some I get some weird sense of fulfillment from going through an application of any kind and just doing it right and doing it complete. And so I took that initial experience and it took me a while to really understand that. But then the most recent was being partnered up with Nathan over at Rapp Foundation Repair. Again, he's an entrepreneur.

He sells stuff and then builds it later. I'm that guy that wants to build it before we sell it. And so there's this rubber band relationship between was between he and I, Where he's trying to stretch me into areas of discomfort and growth and risk. I'm like, well, let's bring it back to process and comfort and, you know, predictability. And so that is an innate innate part of my personality where I like to take things that chaos is is not necessarily the right word, but things that are disorganized and not optimal and bring them into a place of structure, order and discipline.

Todd Gagne:

So I think that's good. I guess what I maybe to put a finer point on this is maybe you're not the visionary that wants to go figure out where to go, but you're the one that's trying to figure out how to get there. Right. And I think every startup has got this problem, right? There's a founder who's a visionary that sees the world needs to be different, right?

And I have a better idea. But I think what they usually lack is just the ability to actually execute in stages, to actually do it and deliver to the client. And I think what you're saying is that's where you really have a strength.

Luke Nehring:

Absolutely. So Michael Gerber, his book, E Myth Revisited, you know, published probably twenty years ago, talks about three personalities, the entrepreneur, the technician and the manager. And most business owners are technicians with entrepreneurial characteristics. I'm a manager with entrepreneurial tendencies. And so it's a great compliment to where I'm very strong in the managerial side and weaker on the technical side.

And so that's where I've tried to kinda niche in or insert myself into the world of small businesses, bring that managerial hat in a fractional kinda place to the business.

Todd Gagne:

So maybe we should pivot a little bit and talk a little bit about your methodology. Right? So you, you know, you can work with somebody who's in a technology start up. You can work with somebody who's in a more of a brick and mortar. Maybe talk to me a little bit about kind of your approach.

I know, you know, looking at your website and stuff, you kinda got this Rubik's cube analogy and you got some frameworks that you talk about. And so maybe just talk about like how your philosophy and your experiences have really kinda geared you to like look at different businesses that you know nothing about day one, but you have to go apply a framework and a philosophy to it so that they start to see benefit relatively quickly.

Luke Nehring:

Yeah. Perfect. So thanks for bringing up the Rubik's cube. Yeah. It was a that's a long story, but I'll just say that in 02/2010, '2 mathematicians proved that a Rubik's cube, regardless of how scrambled it is, can be solved in 20 steps or fewer.

That's pretty A Rubik's cube has six sides to it, and at the time we were using at Rapid Foundation Repair, we were implementing a model that has six key components, And so it just kinda hit me like, oh my gosh, like, just as a Rubik's cube, you know, has these six sides, you solve one side at a time. It's the same with this business model where you start with vision and then take that all the way to the discipline to do everything that needs to be done day in and day out. And so I just thought, you know, businesses are obviously different than a Rubik's cube. But in some ways, no matter how scrambled the business feels to the business owner, if they go back to those principles, and just some of the foundational elements of what makes companies successful, you know, some of the things like just there's tons of books written about it, but Jim Collins in Good to Great comes to mind. One of those things that he coined was with the people side, this is something that is one of the biggest assets, but sometimes seems like the greatest liability to small business owners is their workforce.

How do you get the most out of them? But just that simple idea of getting the right people on the bus and then in the right seat. And I've come across some tools, know, Gina Wickman has a tool called the People Analyzer. I think it's one of the best tools out there for helping an owner know if they have the right people in the right seats and what to do about it if they don't.

Todd Gagne:

That's good. I was gonna talk, we can talk a little bit more about Geno Wickman and just, you know, some of the traction and EOS type stuff that they have. I guess one of the things I think about almost every small business owner, technology or other, they have this problem of they think they have 10 number one priorities. And I think that's super hard for employees, right, where they're basically kind of switching or it's all of the same importance. And I think good entrepreneurs or good executing teams realize there's only one, number one priority, and really, there's only a couple things they're actually gonna have a material impact on in the short term.

And I think a lot of what we end up doing with our entrepreneurs is creating that focus, right? What is it? And sometimes that's against their tendencies, right? Like we have technical founders who would rather write two more features for a product than go out and sell it, right? And so you're basically saying, yep, that's my domain expertise.

That's what I wanna go do. But at the end of the day, your company really needs you to go find another customer. And so I'm curious if you if that experience holds for a lot of what you're doing and then how if it does, how does how do you resolve that with them? Because founders all say these things are super important to me. You're like, yeah, but there's gotta be one that's more important than all the rest of them and we have to tier them so we're giving good direction.

Luke Nehring:

Yeah. We could probably spend an hour talking about just that, Todd. But that's really one of the the primary questions that I ask as an owner of what is your number one problem? Or if you're an individual, what is that number one thing that you want to overcome that you haven't been able to at this point in your life? And if they can't articulate it, that in and of itself is their number one problem.

Todd Gagne:

Tells them something. Yeah, exactly.

Luke Nehring:

So just going through. But you're right. If everything is a priority, then nothing is. And as you know, entrepreneurs entrepreneurs and business owners have an ability and a tendency to build to to live in worlds of uncertainty and chaos much better than your typical just average employee. And so while an owner may feel stressed and kind of overwhelmed in their world of chaos, it's magnified for the employees.

It's important for the owners to focus. So I loved what you said about the word focus. Like we can only control what we focus on. So focus on what you can control. And that's not just the owner.

So but it's the employees as well. So if they feel like they have more burdens or more responsibilities than what they can actually can control, then their focus is going to be limited. So a good example for me personally, how experienced this as an individual contributor, and that at the defense contractor was, I had all of the responsibility in the organization at this site, you know, we were $15,000,000 there, but no response, no authority to do it. So everything in the organization was a priority, but I didn't have really any authority to do it. And so I like to think about the traditional organizational chart as this pyramid, right?

From the top down, you've got the owner or CEO at the top and then the directors and all this all the way down through the organization. When I was at RAP Foundation Repair, Nathan and I were talking once and he's like, it's actually you flip. This is how I feel. He flips the pyramid upside down and he's at the bottom. Right?

Yeah. I'm like, yeah, that's exactly right. So you can never delegate away responsibility. Right? Like, the owner's always gonna have that owner's responsibility, but what he can do is give authority to other people to help shoulder that responsibility.

So as you add people to the organization and as you add them to the organization, both from a value standpoint, so you know that they're the right person, but then also in that right seat, they clearly understand what their role and responsibility is and what they're supposed to focus on, then they can truly take over some of the responsibility, but without that authority, they're just, they're limited.

Todd Gagne:

So this is good. This brings me to another point where we see entrepreneurs and, you know, good ones will scale with a business, right? Like that's what you want them to do. And I think that as mentors or coaches, one of the things that you're trying to do is get them to move through different phases of management or like leadership. And, you know, I always think about it at least in three different buckets.

There's one where at the beginning, you're kind of doing everything. Right? You're trying to maybe don't have a product or you don't have any revenue to hire people and so you have a combination of you doing it and then evangelizing it to get people to help you. Right? That's the first phase of it for us.

The second phase is now I've got a product, I've got some revenue, I can start to hire some people and really what you're starting to do is say, how do I get these guys to not do everything but to start to delegate. Right? They're starting to like give some stuff to it. And it's probably not ownership yet, it's basically just delegation. I need you to go do this task, it's relatively tactical.

The third step for us is how do you get to create ownership in your group. Right? How do you find people that start to think about this as my part of the business and I'm creating ownership and your value proposition as a leader needs to be different in each one of those steps. And so I'm curious in the in the work that you've done, do you see a a progression and do leaders get stuck at different spots?

Luke Nehring:

Oh, for sure. One of the challenges is to get employees to think like owners and also to help the owner remember how employees think. Because you get the greater that gap. So there's there was a great a great book. It goes Reid Hoffman wrote the Alliance years ago, talked about creating an environment of mutual investment or mutual trust, which then led to mutual investment and mutual benefit.

So part of the challenge, and this comes back to company culture, is getting everyone to believe that what everyone's doing is in the best interest of the organization. Right? The greater good, not just an individual including the owner. So one of the one of the biggest challenges that I experienced or that I see is that owners there's a concept of the owner's box, and I can't remember who who I think it comes from Rocket Fuel from from

Todd Gagne:

I remember that.

Luke Nehring:

Mark and Gino Wickman wrote Rocket Fuel. But the owners can do whatever they want in that owner's box, and that's fine because they're the owner. Nobody else is the owner. So they have that they have that freedom. But as soon as they gravitate or put themselves organizational chart, they have to remove that owner's hat, and they have to act like everyone else.

So if you have an owner that wants to be on the sales team, then whatever standards and schedules and things that they've set for the other sales team members has to apply to them as well. Otherwise, it's, hey. Do what I say, not what I do. Right? And that just it it undermines the overall culture of accountability because now the owner and it doesn't matter if if that's in the field, if that's in the back office, doesn't matter.

The owner has to operate equal to whatever the expectations are for that role on the organizational chart. So that's one thing that I would say is first and foremost is, if the owner is just being the owner, and they have someone that's running, you know, a general manager, for example, in a construction business, that's running all that, and the only interaction they really have is as an owner, then that's fine. They can come and go and do whatever they want, and people get that. But as soon as they're an owner and one of the direct reports to the general manager, that has to change. So that's one, is just that accountability.

And then you've just gotta have these clearly defined roles and responsibilities as to what is expected in the function. So one of the first things, you know, we talked about, hey, what's your number one issue? And you're right, Todd, like there's a point in the evolution of a business where it's totally fine for an owner to do everything. And that might be what they choose for their whole life. Like my father-in-law has been in the construction industry for forty years, and he's specifically chosen to be just a sole proprietor.

He never wanted to have employees because he didn't want to deal with exactly what we're talking about.

Todd Gagne:

Talking about

Luke Nehring:

You know, like having jobs scheduled for a two man crew and then that person not showing up. So one of the first things that I like to do is just to make that apparent. So sometimes the owners are wondering why do I feel the way that I feel like in my business? I feel overwhelmed. I feel like this this business is running me, I'm not running it, is to do like a critical functions audit.

Just go through all the critical functions in the organization and write down whoever's responsible for that in the organization. And when we did that at Wrap Foundation Repair, it was so insightful because the owner realized at that time, like, oh my gosh, his name was attached to almost every function that we wrote up on the board. And so one of the benefits to me joining the company was that then I took over the operations and the accounting and finance immediately, and his name was no longer on those. And so, but, and our relationship was based on trust and his ability, and he, we were very much an entrepreneur organization. So we, the culture was, hey, we're not going to tell you everything that you need to do.

Here are the, Here are the kind of the key points, top 10. That's how we said, here's the top 10 things for a foreman. And then if they did those top 10 things, everything else would get done as well. And I think that's what the best cultures are the ones where leaders create an environment where everything gets done, where everybody knows what they need to do, and they go do it, versus the owner making sure that everything gets done. But it's tough, and it takes time.

It doesn't happen overnight.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah, think it's all a good point. I guess one of the things that's interesting is when you start to free up the executive or the owner of these, is it clear about what to go focus on? This has been a secondary issue for me is like getting them to focus on looking down the road, right? Like most, like if you're an executive, you're an owner in these businesses, starting to look around the corner to anticipate either scale or their problems or economic issues or sales or whatever it happens to be. You know, they talk a good game in a lot of cases about I'm too busy, can't get to stuff.

You create the capacity, then how do you make sure that they're actually focused on things that are beneficial to the business longer term?

Luke Nehring:

Yeah. That's Yeah. You've gotta have Like, the goal of the owner When I I got to rep Foundation Repair, my whole goal was to still be wanted, get to a point where I was still wanted. People wanted to work with me, but I wasn't needed anymore.

Todd Gagne:

Right.

Luke Nehring:

Maybe that was easier for me because I wasn't an owner of the organization, but that and maybe that's because how I think as a manager, just that managerial set skill set is that's my whole goal is to delegate and elevate.

Todd Gagne:

Work yourself out of a job.

Luke Nehring:

I totally agree. But first and foremost, the owner has to under or whoever it is, the executive has to understand what that looks like for them and make sure it's what they want because like you said, they are craftsmen to some extent. They are technicians. That's typically their strongest dominant personality type. So what are they gonna do next?

Well, I can speak Rapid, it was more to to get Nathan going to bigger and better things, more commercial products, trying to push, you know, something that we were trying to push and try to get in Rapid City, especially as new new construction helical peers, you know, trying to get builders and others to say, hey, you know, here in this area, you're probably going to pay for it at some point. So you can pay for it now at a third of the cost or you can pay for it later for a much greater cost, you know, once the structure's in place. But yeah, I don't have a great answer for that other than I would go back to, and this is why my first pillar of my model is purpose. It goes back to, Todd, like, what is it that fulfills this executive or this owner or this individual the most? What are the activities that if they were doing most of the time, would leave them feeling with their reservoir full at the end of a long day and not depleted?

Leave them fulfilled and not frustrated. So I think that's why I've gravitated. And for me, I might be kind of an outsider, I think I've always put priority on fulfillment over achievement. And so I've always found myself living a pretty fulfilled life, but then, you know, on the financial side, or maybe some of the professional side being left not achieving exactly what I wanted, where most entrepreneurs are, they're driven for achievement at the expense of fulfillment.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah, it's good perspective. And I was pretty excited to see this piece of it as we were doing some research for this call. You know, I think you listed as kind of purpose driven leadership. And I'll just even use my own kind of world. And so I'm probably more like I've been, you know, I've had a good career in technology and I probably put some stress on my family.

I don't think that's a surprise to anybody, at least my family. And so it's a balance. But I think getting to your original point of what gets you up in the morning and doesn't feel like work, right? And so I think so many people that we talk to don't love what they're doing, right? They basically go through the steps of it and I think it has an impact on the rest of your life.

And so I think about some of the things that like I would do for free. That was always my criteria was like would I do this for free? If I got paid, even better, Right? And so usually it had to be a hard problem. It usually meant I had to learn something and it had to be development of talent.

Those three things were the things that got me up in the morning. And, you know, that applies to a lot of different things. And so wildfire is a product that came out of our heads and we're, you know, going and building it. And so I think, you know, if you can find that as a purpose, whether you're an entrepreneur or you're an individual, and work life balance, like we'll talk about this a little bit later, like I think it's a balance that everybody has to define kind of of what's important to you. But I do think that like the world will be better and it'd be a lot easier to go to work if your purpose and your passion aligned with what you got up and did for work every day.

And I don't care what job it is. And I, you know, you just talk to too many people that are unhappy with that situation. And so and I I'm not coming across as like too naive to realize people have to pay their mortgage and they have to provide for their family and so they have to do that. But there is some flexibility to take risk and to understand what motivates you and gets you up in the morning and then find an employer that appreciates that and tries to put you in a situation that leverages that. Because those are some of the best employees in my experience.

So

Luke Nehring:

I've the word that I've always used, Todd, instead of balance has been alignment. Because there have been times where my life, as far as, like, work, has definitely been out of balance. Like, it's it's tipping the scales as far as that's where I'm spending most of my time. Not only my time, but my energy.

Todd Gagne:

Your focus?

Luke Nehring:

Yeah. You only have so much of that. And so the focus for me has been on having conversations with family or colleagues or whoever and making sure that those efforts were aligned with what the priority was. And so for sometimes, like with my home, with my wife, we were both 100% aligned with me spending more time at the office because that's what we felt was best for our family. And so it's no different in the in the business environment.

It's the same conversation like, hey, Mr. Owner, you're gonna spend more time doing these things because that's what's best for the organization. But we know that it's not sustainable. And I think that's one of the challenges is these owners, these entrepreneurs are so successful at achieving things, but then you get to a point where you can't run a $3,000,000 business the way that you ran a $500,000 It's just not sustainable. So you can get short term gains and short term results being misaligned or out of balance to some extent.

But you can't have long term, long term sustainable, sustainable results. And you're going to be you're going to at some point, you're going to burn out. I think that's kind of what we're seeing is that a lot we've chased this dream of entrepreneurship at all costs. And we're starting to see kind of the repercussions of that maybe ten, twenty year pursuit. And I guess one of the things I'd bring up, Todd, is there's a book by Doctor.

Benjamin Bickman called Why We Get Sick, and he talks about insulin resistance and how that's like insulin affects every act, almost every function of the body. And so if there's too much and you've got this grown this insulin resistance, There are there are long term consequences to that. But the thing the thing here's the catch. They don't manifest immediately, so we don't think anything of it. Right.

We keep doing that, eating the things that we're eating and doing the things that we're doing or not doing. And the parallel that I would draw to that is, know, I'd ask, why do our organizations get sick? Why are organizations unhealthy? Why is there 69% of Americans today that would say they're disengaged in their work? Well, I would say that just as Doctor.

Bickman says, have an insulin resistance problem, that we have a leadership problem. And that leadership problem, by that I mean that the way owners have been running businesses is taking a toll. And so we've got to get back to, you know, back in, I guess it's almost fifty years ago that Stephen Covey published his book or was doing research for his seven habits of highly effective people. And he did research for his dissertation. He did research on two hundred years of success literature.

That first one hundred and fifty years was inside out character ethic driven. The last fifty years of that was outside in personality ethic driven. What would he say today? What would his book say today? And I think you're seeing it, you know, in his song, and talking about the speed of trust.

And there's a lot written about that. And just getting back to some of those, what, again, for me are the inside. That's why purpose is so important to me, because we need to lead from within. That's the only sustainable way to lead our lives and to lead businesses is from within. Otherwise, we're taking withdrawals from this emotional reservoir that we have and we can only give so much.

Right? And that's when we snap. That's when we act in ways that aren't consistent with who we are. And it takes a toll not only on the leaders, but then on those that are working with them.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah, I think that's good. I think we're kind of, I guess one of the things that I guess is maybe just more of a comment than asking for feedback. I see a lot of entrepreneurs define themselves by this as whether it's successful or not, right? Their balance isn't there and that maybe leads to kind of your alignment around work life balance. But it also creates an imbalance with your employees, right?

And so if you're building a business that's going to be worth money that basically can set you up for the rest of your life and your employees don't have that same motivation, you've got a mismatch, right? And so think we've had a couple of entrepreneurs that have really pushed hard on their employees and, you know, they don't have the same equity stake in the company, if any. They're basically punching the clock and so their motivations are different. But when you look at them, in a lot of cases, their lives are a little bit more one dimensional than than maybe some others. And again, I'm not here to criticize anybody from this, like it's it's what you decide you wanna do, but it can't be this big mismatch where it's like I need you to put in eighty hours a week for a forty hour work week for a job if you have better balance or a different balance.

And I guess maybe this is where this kind of pivots to, it seems like just knowing you, you've had this good work life alignment and I feel like you go at both of those hard, right? You go at work hard but you also are super passionate about your faith, about exercising, about your relationship with your kids, your wife. All of those things are important and I think that's admirable and so I'm curious about how you think about that balance going like, I need success in all of these.

Luke Nehring:

Yeah, I mean, ultimately, my success in the marketplace definitely has an effect on my success at home, right? Mean Sure. I've gotta provide.

Todd Gagne:

Gotta provide.

Luke Nehring:

Being that provider. But so just having this belief that that is my role and responsibility. So if I draw a business parallel to just that, you've got to understand what your role is in your own life. And so I have a very strong belief that it is my responsibility to be a provider. And so I'm gonna do certain things, education, to do that.

But at the same time, think, I don't know, Todd, here's a question. How many times have you told a key business partner or a key professional, hey. I'll be there for lunch at this time, and and then you show up late to that?

Todd Gagne:

Too many, unfortunately.

Luke Nehring:

Okay. So for me, at one point in my life, I thought, you know, I tell people in my business relationships, hey, if I'm there, I'll be there at that time, and then I show up at that time. And then I started to reflect on at home. I'm like, how many times I told my wife, like, hey, I'll be home at 05:00, and then it's 06:30, and I'm just now going home. And so Yeah.

Sometimes I think that while we both understand that the professional pursuits are vital, right? That's how you pay the mortgage, that's how you pay the bills. But to provide the same accountability to those people that you love the most, really, that are most meaningful to you, is important. Otherwise, I think you just grow apart without even knowing it. Because now your passion becomes greater those personal relationships.

So that's just for me, to maintain this perspective. I guess at an individual daily level, I kind of did these things without really knowing it. But in my personal life, you know, we, and in my faith, we try to have, I guess people refer to it as meditation, but you know, consistently we're saying prayers, and we're consistently taking time to study scriptures. And unbeknownst to me, like I see this now out in the world, like, hey, take time to meditate, take time to reflect, right? And without knowing it, these habits that were taught to me, even before I even knew it, just growing up as a kid, and like I mentioned, a conservative home, those were very foundational elements to help me stay balanced and aligned, and not to get too far down one path.

Todd Gagne:

So maybe I'd like, I'm probably putting some words in your mouth, but I think one of the things that I think about in your story is some authenticity of who you are at home and who you are at work, and there's no difference, right? I think that's good. I think that's you're being true to yourself and whether, you know, like you used the example of meeting commitments, right? If I tell you I'm going to be there, I'm going to be there. And it doesn't matter if it's home or if it's work, there is no higher importance on either one of them.

They're equal. And I'm going to be that individual wherever I go. And I think, you know, I think it takes adults some time to get there in some cases. I think it's a maturity process for a lot of us. But I do think that that's the ultimate goal is to make sure that you're authentic, you're honest, and you stick to the convictions and the morals that you have regardless of the situations you're in.

Luke Nehring:

Back to that, Todd. We have this I don't know how to I don't know how to term it, but we we believe that tomorrow's always gonna come.

Todd Gagne:

Tomorrow's not a guarantee.

Luke Nehring:

At this point, for you and I, it has, right? Like, we're here today. But we might not be tomorrow. And so I think we and there's such great prosperity throughout, not only in our individual communities, but throughout that we don't act with urgency like we should. So we all have said that, like, how do you act with, like, if we knew we were gonna die within a week or something, how would we act today?

Well, the goal is that we wouldn't act any different, right? Right. That we would be trying to do our best work regardless of where we're at in our life. So, and then just these basic, it's these simple things that are not simplistic to do, it's that, but we all know that creating systems and routines in businesses help us to scale, right? That they help us to achieve more by doing less, or get more done in less time.

But in our personal life, we seem to struggle with that. And so how do you make sure you do that? Like, why don't we do what we know? That's something that's been on my mind lately, something that I struggle with. Like, I generally know what I need to do from a diet and exercise standpoint.

And I'm pretty consistent at doing that. Well, one of the keys is because I've got what I call accountability partners. Now, retirement, right? So I did debt management for a while, and one of the statistics back then, this was back in like late 90s, early 2000s, only like five to ten percent of people 65 age and older retired. Well, ask any 20 year old if they want to retire, what are they going to tell

Todd Gagne:

Heck yes.

Luke Nehring:

Of course. But why don't we? It's simple things, right? We don't set aside enough over a certain amount of time, so

Todd Gagne:

Long period of time.

Luke Nehring:

It's the same thing in business, is that you don't if you have a strong culture, it's because you've done those little things daily, or weekly, or monthly, or yearly to ensure that that culture, not only to create it, but then, but to sustain it. And so accountability partners, whether it's been in my personal life for mountain biking, or on the business side have been key. And that's a mistake that I think entrepreneurs make is that they try to go alone. And don't get me wrong, most of them hit levels of achievement and success. The average individual doesn't.

The question then is at what cost? What's the end result, and the ripple effect to those employees? I guess I'll just mention, when I left L3 Communications, the defense contractor in 2017, were two things that were very clear to me. Well, one thing that was very clear to me, and that was that I wanted to have control of my own work experience. I wanted to make that work experience the best it could possibly be for myself and for as many other people as possible.

And to do that, I concluded they either need to start a business or partner someone that shared my vision and values. And I was fortunate to be able to do both.

Todd Gagne:

That's good. I'd like to come back to like actually, I'd tell a story about life is short. I had a good friend, his name is Raul, and I worked with him at Concur for twenty years or something like that, eighteen years. And he passed away in an Atlanta hotel on work time. And I had to call his wife, who I knew, and basically explain to her what had happened.

And it was just an eye opener to like, tomorrow's not a guarantee. And I think I really questioned, am I doing the things that I really feel passionate about or am I just comfortable in what I'm doing? And honestly, I really questioned whether I should continue to work at Concur. And I basically made a plan to get out because I was like, you know, the company had gotten big. We had been acquired by SAP.

I wasn't enjoying the work as much. But, you know, it paid well. You know, I had an expense account. I had all sorts of things. But it wasn't the thing that got me up.

And I thought, you know, like the passing of Raul and all the work that he had done and all the experiences that we had shared, I think it was just a wake up call that's saying, Tomorrow is not a guarantee. Are you going to be proud of the things you're doing every single day? And is this what you're supposed to be doing? And the answer for me at that point was no. And so it was one that was an inflection point that changed my life.

I was very clear with this widow that you know, like there is something good coming out of this. I'm sorry for the loss we all have. But it was a reminder that you know, like, live life like it's the last day because it's there's no guarantee. Okay. Not from there.

1. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.

You're like, yep. I know that.

Luke Nehring:

Yep.

Todd Gagne:

Yep. Yep. It's a good it's a it's a good match. Yeah. Yeah.

So we're kind of running up on time, but like, Luke, if you had to go backwards, and maybe some of the things you just talked about with purpose and stuff are your top three, but like, if there were top three things that you would talk to owners, founders about to really kind of think about what would they be? Like you know your experience is pretty varied. I think you have a core center to kind of what you're doing. And so what translates to people that you think are really good takeaways from this discussion? Okay.

Yep.

Luke Nehring:

Yep.

Todd Gagne:

Don't you, I was like, sometimes I think about that as like superpower, like what is your superpower, right? Because I think you do, like you said before, you have a unique set of skills and if you could do something different than somebody else, you usually, that's, for me, that's something that gets me out of bed, right? If I can find that opportunity, generally that's doing it. So I don't know if you'd agree, it's like everybody's got kind of a superpower. It's just figuring out what it is.

Yep. Yep. That's a good one.

Luke Nehring:

Yep.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. Those are good. Those are all really good ones. And so, Luke, I really appreciate the conversation and sharing of your wisdom and experiences. If people want to get ahold of you or work with you, what's the best way to do that?

Okay. Okay. Well, good. Well, thank you very much, Luke. I appreciate you taking the time and this has been a fun conversation.

Luke Nehring:

Good.