#86 After the exit: growth, private equity and finding the point of it all with Beck Sydow

Host: Graham Stephen, CEO and co-founder, bizval

Guest: Beck Sydow, Founder and Leadership Coach, HumanKind Business Leaders, former CEO of StickerGiant

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to the bizval podcast. At bizval, we are passionate about empowering entrepreneurs the world over to understand and unlock the value in their business. We work with advisers and entrepreneurs to demystify the value creation process when building a business. At bizval, we know how tough it is to grow and run a business, which is exactly why we’ve made valuation simple to understand, accurate and affordable. Our unique blend of tech and touch ensures that you always receive the best service, authentic human engagement and data insights to ensure that you build a business that provides you with freedom and choice. In the bizval podcast, we showcase stories of real entrepreneurs and advisers, sharing lessons and inspiration from their journeys to make your journey just that little bit easier.

[00:00:51] Graham Stephen: Hello and welcome back to the bizval podcast. This is a show where we sit down with entrepreneurs, operators and advisers who are building real value out there in the world. I’m Graham Stephen, the CEO and co-founder of bizval, and our mission is simple. We want every business owner to know what their business is worth and what they can do today to make it worth more tomorrow. Today’s guest is somebody I’ve been itching to chat to for a while, and kind of epitomizes, I think, what a lot of our listeners are working towards. Beck took a role in a fast-growing business, ran it as CEO, sold it and came out the other side, and then did something less common. Stopped, looked hard at what the whole thing had cost them personally, emotionally, all of those things, and then built something, or is building something, different. Beck Sydow, I think I got the pronunciation right. Welcome to the bizval podcast.

[00:01:46] Beck Sydow: Thank you so much. It’s fun to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this podcast for a while, too, Graham.

[00:01:52] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. Well, look, rather than me reading out your CV, I’d like you just to take a minute to introduce yourself to our listeners. Who are you, and what do you spend your days on now?

[00:02:07] Beck Sydow: Yeah, I’ll just start really quickly. I started as a kid in college loading tractor trailers for UPS and worked my way up the corporate ladder to executive roles. I worked on the package side for a long time, about 13 years, and then transferred over to the LTL side, and I fell in love with business at UPS. That’s a big part of my story. Then UPS offered a management reduction package, their first voluntary one, back in the 90s, and I did a surprising thing and took it. I was taking buyout packages before people really even knew what that was. Now that’s a common thing.

I did everything I could do to not work for two and a half years. I worked for a paint contractor and a landscape contractor. I got a couple of consulting roles in call centers. But I didn’t know what an entrepreneur was back then, right? So I was scratching that entrepreneurial itch without knowing it. Then I decided to leave a really good job again, at UPS Freight, and chase a dream to move to Boulder, Colorado. I lived in Richmond, Virginia at the time, and I wanted to get a second master’s degree. I had always wanted to be a therapist, but I’m dyslexic, so I didn’t think I was smart enough to get a master’s degree. But I had formally got one at George Washington University, in organization and human development. That changed my whole life. I moved to Boulder, studied to be a therapist, was a licensed therapist in private practice, worked in public health and mental health community agencies, was a crisis clinician. And then I missed the business world. So I got certified as an executive coach, thinking, okay, maybe I can be a therapist and an executive coach. Still wasn’t it. So I went back to the business world and landed, this time, in small to medium-sized businesses, and started to discover really what that entrepreneurial spirit was, working in smaller businesses.

Fast forward, I worked for five years in a technology company. Really big part of my background. I helped close a business, a beautiful business. It made it to 10 million, and then it ran out of cash. I was one of the last two people to stay and close the business, knowing that heartache is a really important part of a journey, too. And then, more recently, I landed at a company that was on a unicorn ride and was growing fast, the darling of its industry, and got an opportunity to come in as COO and become CEO and then take that company through the acquisition. We sold to private equity. I’m sure we’ll talk about some of that. And now I do my own thing. I’m now a founder. I started a company in my garage. I’m sitting in my garage right now. So, quintessential Boulder thing to do, convert your garage into flexible space. I call this my workhouse.

I work with entrepreneurs who are faced with the business side. I call it people-hearted and business-minded, and they’re challenged with holding the tension between those two things. I’ve developed a map and a framework around people-hearted, business-minded leadership. And I believe there are two things running every company. I think strategic frameworks and systems run a company, and leaders’ nervous systems are the other thing running a company. Usually when I say that, people are like, “Oh yeah, that’s true.” But then what do we do with knowing that? I help leaders learn how to regulate their nervous system, to have a settled nervous system throughout the day, so that they have it when they’re trying to make the biggest decisions that are super challenging. So that’s the fast train of more than three decades of a career. If anything, it’s a nonlinear CV.

[00:06:13] Graham Stephen: And we work across the world, and one of the things Americans love is to put you in boxes. You’ve got to be hyper-niche, you’ve got to be a super specialist. Coming from a country where that’s not the case, you’ve got to be able to do a lot of everything, because we have a really small market in South Africa. It’s quite refreshing, actually, because you have to think systematically, or systemically. You’ve got to think across domains. I’m really excited to dive in. I think we could probably have a two-hour podcast, so we unfortunately don’t have that amount of time, but we’re going to talk through your journey a little bit, right, from the early days before you even started working, through the exit, and what you’re doing now. So let’s go right back to the beginning, back even before you got into business. Where did you grow up, and what did you learn growing up? What did the adults around you teach you about work and about life, so to speak?

[00:07:10] Beck Sydow: Yeah, I love this part, right? Going all the way back. My parents are from West Virginia. They’ve both passed. My ancestors were in West Virginia. For a long time, I didn’t say that’s where I’m from, because I didn’t think it was metropolitan enough, so I’d say I grew up outside of Pittsburgh. But I grew up around entrepreneurial people, people that could make something out of nothing, literally. In the country, you’ve got to look around and figure out what you have to fix the problem that’s right in front of you. My grandfather was an entrepreneur. He was an auctioneer. He was a farmer. He bought land and livestock. He had a country grocery store, which is part of… you want to go on the website and hear how that’s included in my background. My dad was a fundamentalist evangelical minister, and so my wife calls him the Jesus entrepreneur, in a very respectful way. I watched my dad build a church, a startup church, and that also really informs how I view business. My dad had a heart for people, and that’s certainly something that informs me now, and my grandfather was more of that business guy, right? So that people-hearted and business-minded is in me from the very beginning.

As a kid, I’d do anything to make money. I was that kid. I would mow grass, babysit, clean houses, it didn’t matter. I had a savings account when I was young. My first job, my dad got me. He sold cars for a living, and around the corner was a little greasy spoon restaurant, and before I was even legal to work, the owner gave me a job. Then my second job was at a small county airport, and I learned to taxi airplanes and clean airplanes and fuel airplanes. That’s just a beautiful part of learning to be in the business world. I started a little side business then, cleaning airplanes at night. The owner would let me use the hangar. So I was always looking for ways to make money. For me, when I was young, money and freedom were definitely connected. Because I was really different from the people I grew up around from a religious standpoint, and I knew I was going to need to make money to be able to have a good life. So money and enterprise were connected to how I was thinking about how I was going to have a good life.

[00:09:50] Graham Stephen: Yeah. There’s so much in that backstory, and just to extract a few things from that, you didn’t grow up in New York City in the heart of corporate America. You grew up in a farming community. There’s a wonderful African saying, ‘n Boer maak ‘n plan, which basically means a farmer makes a plan. Whatever problem is thrown at you, you find a way to get that solution. Maybe that’s where your systems thinking started, growing up in that environment. And then the second piece, I guess it’s foundational, is dealing with the hand that’s in front of you. The second piece you touched on, I guess, is that sense of community and how important it is to build community around you. Building businesses is often about building community. And then the third part, whether you’re a purpose-driven business or not, you have to make money. In the business of business valuations, we always say if you’re not making money, unfortunately you’re not worth a huge amount. I think sometimes people idealistically think, well, I’m a purpose-driven or impact business, it’s not right to make money. Those things can all coexist. And I think that’s right. When you unpack that, there’s a lot in that. What a great introduction. You describe yourself now as a business geek, you talk about your Buddhist roots, you’ve got Christian roots, you’ve got all of that. But what I love about you, Beck, is you’re able to bring that together. Maybe that’s where the name of your current business comes from, is put humanity at the center. And it sounds like part of that was the way you were brought up. Part of that was just dealing with the hand that you were dealt. Tell me a bit about that.

[00:11:38] Beck Sydow: Yeah, I love the way you captured some of those entrepreneurial things, like dealing with the hand you’re dealt. That’s a really important part, right? A lot of people… I knew when I was a kid that I was dyslexic and queer, and growing up in the environment that I grew up in, it was challenging. Being dyslexic, growing up in school systems in the 60s and 70s, going to college in the 80s, nobody knew what that was, right? I dealt with the hand that I was given.

Any entrepreneur, there’s a problem, you’ll solve a problem. I tell people openly, I cheated my way through high school and college. That was the way I figured out how to solve the problem. But I have two master’s degrees and I never cheated once. So I think there’s a way that if you see problems and you allow them to mature, and not stay stuck in the early way you might have solved them, that’s also important. And a lot of people would tell me, “Gosh, your parents are really difficult. Are they going to disown you?” or “Why are you still connected to them?” My dad and I saw the problem. We were very different, but we managed throughout our lives to deal with the hand we were dealt. I got to be with him when he died. I was there when my mom died. And I wouldn’t trade any of that. Very alive and well in those lessons is this sense of being people-hearted and business-minded, and understanding we’re holding tension between two things that inherently have tension around them, right?

But what we end up doing is leaning too far one way or the other, because we’re not holding the tension long enough to see, wow, when we hold that tension there’s insight and wisdom and discernment. Our human nature is just, let’s go one way or the other. Let’s do extra for people, right? Or let’s double down on the business. The truth is, they don’t just have the ability to live together to run a great business. They have to, and you have to be able to learn how to hold that tension to see your way through. Usually there’s some commonality. We just don’t look for it the right way.

[00:13:57] Graham Stephen: Yeah. There’s a wonderful poem by Rudyard Kipling called “If,” and there’s a line in there which I’m not sure you’ve read. It says, if you can walk with kings nor lose the common touch. It’s this whole series of trade-offs, and I think unfortunately in today’s world it’s like, well, either you’re a billionaire or you’re not. The reality is these things coexist, and it is possible for seemingly paradoxical things to exist and both be true at the same time. I think that’s something too many people in life realize too late. They go through life with a grudge or unforgiveness or whatever. And yes, it’s a business conversation, but it’s the same in terms of dealing with clients, with a difficult client or a difficult opportunity. You have to realize there are two perspectives, and then the truth probably sits somewhere in between.

[00:14:52] Beck Sydow: Right. And the reality is we all are drawn… we’re naturally more business-minded, my language, right? Or we’re naturally more people-hearted. And we don’t make that okay. We vilify each other, like, “Oh, this person’s always looking at the spreadsheet,” or “Oh, this person’s always…” Early in my career, people would say, “Ah, Beck is the people-hearted one,” or “the people director,” is what they would say. [laughter] And it was true, but it pissed me off. But it gave me fire in my belly to develop my business acumen, right? So that I could be seen as having both. It’s why I say I’m a business geek. And I have Buddhist roots. I’m totally in love with the human condition and who we are as humans, and I’m totally in love with business. So I come to conversations and work with clients often with a really different perspective. Nobody’s wrong. But we need to figure out where the commonalities are between the more business-minded people on the leadership team and the more people-hearted, because we don’t want to argue about that. We want to figure out what’s true. And when we’re arguing, we’re in fear, right? Which is that nervous system dysregulation. What I help people see is how do you move toward possibility, and see that you’re in fear, and then move toward something that’s more possible. That’s actually perspective-taking, seeing that other people could see this from a different angle and have really valuable input.

[00:16:30] Graham Stephen: I absolutely love that, and you kind of preempted the question. You started from being seen as human-centered first, and the business stuff came a little bit later. You’ve always been a business geek, but perhaps, if you trace that back, the dyslexia, the challenges that creates for learning, perhaps you had to go deeper and look at business from a different angle and figure it out. They often say the best teachers are not the smartest ones in the room. They’re the ones who’ve actually had to grapple with problems and figure it out. And I think you’re living proof of that. You’ve worked it out for yourself in a way that makes sense, and then the realization is, oh, lots of other people are struggling with this and they think about it in the same way, I’m guessing. I think that is what’s so powerful, and we’ll come to that a little bit later in terms of what you’re doing now, Beck. So let’s go and talk a little bit about your career. We’ve spoken about your upbringing, some of your philosophy, some of the challenges you had to deal with, but let’s go back to those early, unglamorous days, whether you’re cleaning aircraft. Take us through the shape of the first 20 years of your career. You said UPS, I think it was, or one of them, taught you to love business. Tell us about that.

[00:17:50] Beck Sydow: Yeah. I have a natural inclination to work with my hands, and that’s a real gift. I have a lot of spatial acuity. I can look at a situation and figure out how pieces fit together, physically and theoretically, and those were all gifts for me. So my first job at UPS, I loaded tractor trailers. I couldn’t have fallen into a better place to get a first real job. It’s a whole long story. It was the early 80s, and UPS looked around and figured out they didn’t have any minorities, people of color. They didn’t have any women in their business. So they were actively looking to add more diversity to the workplace. My best friend and I just happened to be connected on the university campus with sports. So, okay, women that can load tractor trailers must be on the sports teams. [laughter] That’s kind of how being athletically inclined led to getting a job where I was physically capable of loading tractor trailers. I would load two to four tractor trailers every night, full, top to bottom. And I loved it. I was good at it, right? I was really good at it.

Then I got into management at UPS. The first management I got into was part-time management. Lots of leaders struggle when they have to lead the people that used to be on a team with them. I’ve done that a number of times. So I came out of loading tractor trailers to be the supervisor. [laughter] You have to figure out how to do things. So, business-mindedly, and relationally, I started seeing the combination of how to get more work done through other people, how to motivate people, how to know what the numbers are, how to encourage the team. All of that was in my early learnings.

[00:20:04] Graham Stephen: And you had to learn that you couldn’t go and pop it into ChatGPT and say, put together…

[00:20:09] Beck Sydow: There’s only one way to learn, right? No. And you learned a lot by doing things the right way and doing things the wrong way, right? I was really fortunate to have good people on my team and some good leadership that gave me a shot at learning. I was pretty headstrong when I was younger. As we say in the country, I had to step on a rake a few times to learn the lesson the hard way. But I would get the lesson, right?

Then, to get into full-time management at UPS, you had to drive a package car and qualify as a driver for 90 days. And you had to risk it all. If I hadn’t been able to qualify, and fortunately I did, I wouldn’t have had a job. So I went on the road as a delivery driver. Again, you need to be physically capable to do that. Now that’s not the case, right? But back in the day, and there was no GPS back then. [laughter]

[00:21:10] Graham Stephen: Did you take any wrong turns along the way?

[00:21:17] Beck Sydow: No, there were no scan codes. You didn’t have a manifest on a pad that said, “It’s top left on the right next to that package.” It was just packages packed front to back, and you dug in it all day to get it delivered. So a lot of my skills, of being able to be oriented that way, really worked. I qualified as a driver and then decided to work through a peak season. So I was a driver for nine months. I wanted to earn the street cred of having driven through a peak season. I didn’t want to be that person that did my 90 days and then got into leadership. I wanted people to respect me, right? So I drove through a peak season, and after that I went into sales. It wasn’t the job I was hoping for. I was hoping to get into HR. My best friend had gone through the same process. She went into HR, but I landed in sales and then ultimately in contact center, in the call center, which used to be where they would send people as their ditch. Like, “Ah, these people aren’t any good at sales. We’ll send them to the call center.” So when I called my friends and said, “I’m getting transferred to the call center,” everybody was like, “Who’d you piss off?” That’s not a good role. And I fell in love with call center management. It was all of the pieces of people and business. I really started to learn how to do scheduling, right? In contact centers there’s this thing called Erlang C. How many people do you need available to answer 80% of calls in 90 seconds? That really started to appeal to my business mindset. I got an opportunity to go to Utah and open UPS’s first consolidated call center, which was a big feather in my cap, right? Then I got promoted to be the manager there and really started learning more about being business-minded, combined with people-hearted.

That’s when the opportunity came that said, “You could take a buyout.” I threw the paperwork for my buyout in the trash. I had a plan. I would retire at 45. I would have hypothecated stock enough that I wouldn’t have a worry in the world. And then I found out they weren’t taking leadership people to the new consolidated centers. I was like, “I’ll go to Utah. I’ll go to Texas, just tell me where you want me to go.” And my boss was like, “They’re not taking any UPS leadership people to these sites.” They’d outsource them. I was crestfallen. I was heartbroken. So I went through this real deep process around: do I really want to get up and put a suit on every day and run the midnight hub? That’s what I kept running through. Do I really want to do that? And the answer kept coming back, no. So I called HR. I was like, “Hey, I happened to lose the paperwork for my buyout. Could you send it to me again?” [laughter] And they did. And I decided to leave.

It’s an important part of my career and personal story. People really thought that I was struggling with mental health, like, “Are you okay?” And my dad, his only lens to put this through was a religious lens. He told me I was out of God’s will for my life because I was leaving my good job. Like, why would you do that? You’re out of God’s will for your life. It made no sense to me how he had connected those things.

After he told me that, two weeks later, I got a call, and my dad was in the hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He’d had three heart attacks. They didn’t know if he was going to live. So I flew to Pennsylvania. He had open heart surgery. He did live. He was a heart patient for 25 years of his life. And it really was a big deal, because I thought that he’d had these heart attacks because of this choice I’d made. Of course, there was maybe some stress on him, but it was physiological for sure. I told him, after he healed and got home, that I was still going to leave UPS. And there was something about… I teach people how to think about their own human dignity. It was one of the moments in my earlier life where I started to understand what it was to know how to hold myself in my own human dignity, and how transformational that is, even for other people. And he accepted it. He said, “Okay.” That whole “out of God’s will for your life” would show up other times. But I was able to stand in my own integrity, my own dignity, to say, “I know this is what’s right for me.” What he couldn’t square, but I was willing to hold the tension on, was, “Well, what are you going to do next?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” So that was one of the biggest risks I took in my life. And of course, fast forward, it all worked out. But I entered into this outside of working for a big corporation, having achieved success I could never have imagined as a kid, but knowing something wasn’t quite right. I walked away from it, and thankfully it all worked out.

[00:26:50] Graham Stephen: It’s fascinating. Just hearing that story is so powerful. We all have this inner voice, but as an entrepreneur, and as people, sometimes we become so entrapped with fear. That’s the one thing about successful entrepreneurs: they learn to lean, and I’m using, you know, what do you call it, probably a cliche, but they learn to lean into the fear, not ignore it, understand it. One of the best definitions I heard was that fear is false evidence appearing real. And actually understanding how to deal with that. Some other parts of that story: there was no job too small. You were prepared to learn, you were prepared to go through it. Nowadays people want to hack to the top. And that journey of experiencing different things, learning, working with peers, those are all parts of the learning and the journey. It’s just remarkable. There’s only so much you can cover in 10 minutes, but for sure, just talking through that, I really want people to hear that message, that the instant success that you see is usually 20 years of hard work and learning and things along the way. And very true, learning how to apply that. So I really appreciate you being vulnerable, Beck, and sharing some of that story. One thing I want to talk about quickly, and we’re half an hour in, maybe we’re going to need to have a follow-up conversation, [laughter] is your mentors along the way. You and your dad had a relationship that probably went through ups and downs, seeking to try and understand each other, but who were some of the other mentors you had? Is anybody who stands out for you along this journey that you’d like to single out, either in name or in description of what they did and what they meant for you?

[00:28:47] Beck Sydow: Yeah, for sure. My dad is my biggest mentor. My mom, too. She was a school teacher. But one of my mentors was one of the worst bosses I ever had. After I left UPS, I made my way back to transportation. The company name was Overnight Transportation, which became UPS Freight after I left. My boss there knew nothing about contact centers, and I came with a lot of knowledge about contact centers. He was a really smart guy, but he was a numbers guy. He was business-minded through and through, died in the wool, right? If you’d said “people-hearted” in front of him, he’d have been like, “Oh.” He would have just played that down.

But there’s just something about me that if you’re a difficult character, often I’m looking for, and now I’m trained specifically to do this, what’s the wisdom here? If I can see into your humanity, if I’m not trying to make you wrong, and look, I’m not always perfect, I do try to make people wrong sometimes, and hopefully I catch myself. That was part of those moments when I knew I needed to raise my business acumen. So I would go to his office. I had a weekly one-on-one with him. This is the early 90s, and he had a big corner office with a view of the river in Richmond. I didn’t have a shitty office. I had a pretty nice office, too. I would go down to his office, and I was always really prepared. Long before I even knew you should have an agenda in a one-on-one, I had an agenda. And he, business-mindedly, and freight is a cost-conscious business, right? Cutting not dollars but cents makes a lot of difference. So I started building a staffing model, and he didn’t believe it. I had to teach him a lot of things. I would go down and talk with him about decisions, and he would be like, “No, no.” He would just say no. And I would say, “Okay, let me go back to my team and let’s run numbers again, and I’ll come back next week.” And he’d be like, “Okay.” So I’d come back next week. Walking back to my office, I would talk it through with myself. Either it was the wrong time, my timing was off, or I didn’t have the data or the rationale that I needed. Or I didn’t have what I needed to convince him.

So I’d go back to my team. I had one guy on my team who was the analyst. We would rework numbers. We’d redo how the numbers were presented. Now, again, you can hide a lot in percentages and numbers, so we did it all really above board. I might have to go back a number of times, but in time I could help him see where I was coming from, right? And so I learned a lot about how to present numbers, how to present concepts, over time. We’re always cutting people, right? So, “Okay, well, we have to cut people, so you’ve got a bunch of people, we’ll just cut five in your area. Everybody else has got to cut a lot deeper.” And I was like, “Okay, well, we’ll run five through the model.” I could show him how service level would degrade over time. It wouldn’t hurt right away, but we had the system built so that we could show it. And then he would say, “Oh, keep your people.” [laughter] He would be so frustrated. “Keep your people.” He’d push the paper back. He was just super cranky and crotchety, and I’d be like, “Okay, well, thanks so much.” So I think in my career, that’s one example.

The other example is, while I was at UPS Freight, I started to figure out I’d achieved a lot, but the outer display of achievements didn’t feel the same inside. So, the long story short, I found a meditation teacher that I started working with, and I started figuring out what that thing was I was feeling. What’s the distance between all of this external stuff I’ve been able to accomplish and this gap, this hole inside? My meditation teacher started helping me figure out how to be in my body, how to understand what’s going on in my body. A lot of things I teach people today. But I think the one thing she said to me early was, we create most of our suffering by wishing things are different.

[00:33:48] Graham Stephen: So the hand dealt, right?

[00:33:48] Beck Sydow: That’s the common way, the down-home way, to describe a Buddhist perspective. We get into difficulty by wishing things were something other than they are, the past, or what we hope for the present. And that really changed a lot of things for me. I could stay in touch with not being people-hearted externally, but actually turning some of the care that I have for people to learn how to take care of myself, right? What does that even mean? I talk with people about it. She helped me learn how to be my own best friend, right? So those are the two big mentors in my life.

[00:34:25] Graham Stephen: That’s so important. You talked about a few things there. One is that often those who challenge us the most are the ones we learn from the most. And also learning to speak the language of other people. In this case, it wasn’t Spanish or French or something. It was the language of numbers. Putting yourself in the shoes of the other person, and then learning through that process, I think is such a powerful tool. I can see we’re definitely going to need to have a follow-up. What I’d like to do is go a little bit off piece from the original script. I just want to ask you two more questions, and I’m going to let you just talk through them, because I think the way you tell the story is more powerful than any of the questions I can ask. The first question is about the journey you went through with StickerGiant, selling it to private equity. Outwardly everyone says, “Oh, that’s a success story. That’s what we need to talk about.” We’re talking about exited founders. I want you just to share, in your words, the journey from being part of building it to exiting it, and what that taught you. Once we’ve dealt with that, I’d like to spend a few minutes on how you now view success and how you’re helping others through that journey. So we’ll just focus on those two questions, and then we’ll bring it to a close, and if we get feedback from our listeners, I’m sure we’ll dive in and we can have another couple of sessions with you. I’m sure we can make the time. So let’s go to StickerGiant. Come in. It’s the sort of rocket ship, roller coaster business. You’re on a mission to Mars or wherever. Tell us about that journey and what it taught you.

[00:36:14] Beck Sydow: Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you, it wasn’t a roller coaster. It was the unicorn rocket ship, right? So, the rocket straight to the moon. [laughter] I had no idea. When I was looking at the job there, I had StickerGiant’s website up, and my wife came into my office in the house and I was like, “Come over here and look at this.” And she’s like, “What are we looking at?” And I’m like, “Is this a company that has a COO job?” And she’s like, “Well, what is this?” I’m like, “What’s a sticker and label company out in Longmont?” She’s like, “Do you want to work there?” And I was like, [laughter] “I think I do.” And I had no idea. I had worked with one entrepreneurial company, a startup, then I went to tech for a while, but there was just something, right? And it’s the thread of my whole life. There was something there. We say in the entrepreneurial world, is there a there there? I could feel something and I just couldn’t even put it into words. So it was a long interview process, over eight months. Fortunately, I knew a couple of people that knew the founder, the owner. I think that probably helped me. I’m not 100% sure. But I got the job, and I knew it was going to be really challenging on a lot of levels.

I use Organizational ReWilding. That’d be a fun other story. I’ll just mention that I was employee number 47. That meant that StickerGiant had become, through the stages of growth, what is called the professional stage, and they were growing really fast. What I didn’t have language for then, that I know now, is that because of the fast growth, there had amassed a lot of organizational debt. Now, of course, we think of financial debt. That was not the case there. It had been running very successfully financially for quite some time. Tech debt, for sure. When we talk about businesses, people talk about tech debt, but the organizational debt meant there was no way to know what the stages of growth were, and to really precisely know, oh, we’ve skipped some steps here, right? I could feel that, and I know it more now. And I really didn’t know what I’d gotten into. So, talk about the hand you’re dealt, rolling up your sleeves. I started spending time in operations and learning folks. I had to do some really hard things early around coming to endings with people that had been with the company for some time.

Look, here’s the truth. People won’t tell you, but I say often, growth breaks things, right? While you’re having a fun time watching that top line soar, growth breaks things. And it breaks things when you don’t know the stages of growth. So things had started breaking, and then I was actually involved in breaking some things that were no longer what the company needed. So that was really hard. Now, new person, there’s always going to be loyalty toward a founder and an owner. Just accept it. If you’re working in an environment with a founder-owner, know that there’s loyalty there. So I had to earn my own street cred, right? And we were still growing, and I really started understanding the operations, understanding what was needed, and we continued to grow. I got involved in the industry, started learning. I learned about the machines. I talked to the machine providers. We’re talking million-dollar machines, half a million to over a million dollar machines. And I fell in love with the industry. That’s the other thing: if you’re not in love with what you’re doing… I fell in love with the people. As hard as it was to make some hard decisions around that, I just fell in love with the people. I fell in love with the culture. I contributed to how the culture continued to grow, right? So we had a there there. The owner had a beautiful baby. We talk about beautiful babies in business, and I just was the person that showed up that had enough knowledge and ability for that beautiful baby to get handed to me like a precious thing.

The other thing I really was able to do is build relationships, and not always easily, right? Founders can be challenging, but I never wanted the founder I worked for to feel like I was trying to do something to him or his company, right? And that I was a good partner. I wouldn’t be perfect, but I wanted to do it with a lot of integrity, and I could hold a lot of tension, right? So StickerGiant is where I really learned to bring my training as a therapist, my training as a mindful awareness meditation teacher, to be able to hold a lot of tension between the founder and people, and me and the company, and ultimately, the story goes, me through the acquisition, right? Being the person that sat in a room eight times with private equity, with investment bankers, to say, “Here’s what is for sale,” and it’s not mine. They would sometimes talk to me like it was my company. I was like, this is not my company. I don’t own it. I’m here to present it, but I don’t own it.

[00:42:09] Graham Stephen: Yeah. I’m just fascinated how sometimes things take a certain angle. I thought when we started chatting today we’d be talking about the exit and the technicality of that, but I actually want to almost stop the conversation on StickerGiant there, because I think what you’ve touched on is so much more important. Two things. Your journey gave you the skills and the tools, unbeknownst to you along the way, to actually deal with that situation. This unique set of learnings, experience, people, dealing with the nitty-gritty. And it gave you the emotional resilience and the skill set to actually deal with it, and that gets so forgotten often. We deal with business valuations and numbers, but if you asked me, 80% of the time the big blockers are not the numbers. It’s the owner’s emotional state. It’s this tension around, I built this thing, should I let it go? I guess it’s like being a parent. Sometimes your kids are going to have to leave the house. I’m certainly not going to be doing my kids’ laundry when they’re 35 years old. And I think that’s almost more important. We don’t talk about it enough, Beck, and I think you’ve just brought that to life. This conversation went down that path because that’s the stuff that’s really important. And I guess being in that position, you also exhibited the humility to present somebody else’s business. You were invested in it as though it was your own, but you recognized that this was the founder’s journey, and that it impacted every single employee’s journey and future journeys, being able to hold all those things together. Look, I’m not sure a founder would have been able to do that on their own. So you were kind of on the inside driving it as CEO, and I think there’s a lot to be said for that.

[00:44:04] Beck Sydow: Yeah. Let me say one more thing before we move off this topic. What I know from being trained as a therapist is that as humans, our human condition is we project on other people, right? It’s part of what we all do. And then we’re too embarrassed or ashamed to even talk about it. But people project on leaders, on business owners. Employees project, customers project, other founders project on other founders, right? And especially when you do something that high-profile, like selling a company, people project on you. People projected on me for sure, and still do. “Oh, you got to do…” And I just say upfront, hey, I just got to go on a unicorn ride. It was so unusual, and there were so many great things about it, and there were so many things that broke me, too. So when I say growth breaks things, I’m not trying to say growth breaks things out there. Growth eventually broke me, right? That’s the humanity of the thing. But we’re all projecting on each other. People have projected on me about what should have happened at StickerGiant and selling to PE. And I’m like, you know what? What happened at StickerGiant… I’m just now starting to talk about it, four years later, much more openly, because I understand it and have done enough of my work on it. What happened at StickerGiant was the destination. You can say it should have been this or it could have done that. It’s like, what happened is what happened. It was the hand dealt, right? So let’s talk about that, rather than saying something different should have happened. I’m not interested in that conversation, actually.

[00:46:01] Graham Stephen: Yeah. We’re coming back to this hand dealt, making the decision, doing what’s best with what’s in front of you at the time. You can’t live with regrets, right? You can process it, you can understand why and what, but at a point that’s no longer helpful. You need to move forward and say, that’s right, how’s that going to impact my future decisions, and how is it going to impact my here and now? Beck, I want to give you just a few more minutes, and I do apologize, because there’s just so much content here. But I want to talk a little bit about HumanKind Business Leaders. That’s what you’re busy with now. For anybody listening in today who’s thinking, wow, I’ve really resonated with this in just two or three minutes, tell us a little bit about what you’re doing now, who picks up the phone to you. You talk about this framework of people-hearted, business-minded. So just practically, what are you trying to achieve, and why should somebody pick up the phone to you? Who should pick up the phone to you? Let’s just wrap up with that, and then we can bring it to a close.

[00:47:08] Beck Sydow: Yeah, the phone, the Calendly request to meet. Sorry, I’m Gen X, so I still pick up the phone.

[00:47:19] Graham Stephen: No, no, it’s fine. [laughter]

[00:47:25] Beck Sydow: It’s entrepreneurs, typically, right? I do work with a lot of founders and business owners, and I work with their teams often, too. I understand founders from a lens that not many people do, and that’s a big statement, because a lot of people work with founders, right? But I look at founders, again, people project on founders. My view of founders is: what would we do in the world if we didn’t have them? I wouldn’t have a job, first of all. But we all project this thing on founders, like they’re this and they’re that. My take on it is, what are we going to do to help our founders that have the guts, that have the risk tolerance, that have the ingenious ideas to literally put something into the world that could change the world, or make the world better, or create good jobs, whatever it is? Who’s going to help them do what they do well, without making okay some of the stuff that they do, and help them learn how to be fully human in a human way? How do we teach them to be people-hearted and business-minded, because most of them are doubled down on business-minded. Most of them have very high control needs. Most of them have very low trust. Now, I’m not saying all of them, but that’s what I select. Very high control needs and very low trust. So that’s what I do. That creates an environment where stuff struggles. Stuff gets stuck, it won’t move. Tensions build that are unhealthy. Friction starts to create problems in the business. That’s saying, we could use some help. Co-founders. Founders with their teams, where there’s now more tension than ever around, we’ve got to make the numbers, and what’s starting to fray now is the relationships. People are trying to outsource to a chatbot, right? Or not a chatbot, but an AI bot they’ve built themselves, to help them be more human.

I think there are ways that I teach leaders how to regulate their nervous system that are so simple that it actually makes it hard for them to practice. It’s just so simple, the things I teach. But once they start practicing them, and I saw this this past week, a founder said something in a meeting I was in, to his team, where he was trying to logically explain why he thought a decision that he wanted to make was right, until he actually got to the place where I could see a little of emotion start to happen. Then he told the authentic truth about what was emotional in the decision for him. He wasn’t crying. It wasn’t like that. It was just a little hint. Maybe a little tear in the eye, not that he’d be right, but just that little bit of emotion. And then he said the thing most true about this, and then we all took a breath out and said, “Of course we want to make sure that that’s part of what we’re doing here,” right? Those are the folks that are reaching out.

So, people-hearted and business-minded leadership. I have a map that helps people know where they are on this map. You move around all the time, so you can find where you are, you know where you’re at, you know what you’re feeling, you can navigate toward a different place. It’s a map. Most people enjoy that. Then home base practices for leaders is the companion piece of work that I do, helping leaders know how to regulate their nervous system. And then I have a simple way that I describe trust, and I use it as an interactive process, because we’re moving around on this triangle, so that you know where your default setting is, and then you know where everybody on the team is, and so now you have a language for trust in meetings, when you’re preparing for meetings. That’s where I do my best work, where there’s tension, where things are starting to get to an impasse because the business needs this but we can’t articulate it well, so then things get really tight. It’s not always around acquisition. It’s not always around big growth. There’s just a lot of tension in businesses right now, and I really have a way of normalizing that and figuring out what’s the path forward now.

[00:52:19] Graham Stephen: I absolutely love that. I’m going to paraphrase this: what you do is you allow real growth to happen. And I’m deliberately using the word growth. It’s not just growth of the top line. It’s growth of the founder, the teams. It’s that systems view of pulling it all together. You’ve been there, you’ve done that, you’ve dealt with hard things. And that’s something so many people, business owners, entrepreneurs, avoid. They talk about wanting growth to happen, but then when they’re confronted with the reality of what it takes to have that happen, they need a guide, or they need somebody to just nudge them along that way. So I think the work you’re doing is phenomenal, Beck, and I really do hope after this episode that people reach out to you and engage you. I’d personally love to invite you to be on the show again. We just scratched the surface on so much. But before we wrap up, there’s something we do with all our guests. We have a rapid-fire section. It’s literally you’ve got 10 seconds to answer the question. I’m only going to ask you three questions. So the first one is: one book that every business leader should read.

[00:53:27] Beck Sydow: You should read the Stages of Growth book for your position in Organizational ReWilding. You should carry it around. It should be a book that you have notes written in. Wherever you are, in whatever stage of the seven stages, buy that book, read it, understand what the research says you should be doing at that stage of growth in your business.

[00:53:51] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. Who’s the author of that? Do you know offhand?

[00:53:57] Beck Sydow: It’s Matthew Pohl. He’s the intellectual property owner of all of the Stages of Growth now. And the company is… you can find it on Amazon. The ReWild Group is the publisher.

[00:54:09] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. Okay. Second question. Ten minutes of stillness or ten more minutes of work?

[00:54:23] Beck Sydow: Choose between?

[00:54:23] Graham Stephen: Yeah, that’s the question.

[00:54:29] Beck Sydow: Stillness. We are consuming to the point where we’re so full in every aspect of consumption. That space and stillness is where we find new energy, new ideas. We’ve known it forever. Stillness, 100%.

[00:54:48] Graham Stephen: Love it. And then the last question is, to take a little bit from the Small Giants community, finish this sentence: bigger is better only when…

[00:54:59] Beck Sydow: You can stay humble.

[00:55:07] Graham Stephen: I love that. I think Steve Jobs… no, sorry, there was something else, but it’s something about staying humble. Humility is a superpower, right? The world today, everybody is shouting off the rooftops, whether it’s social media or whatever. And that ability to stay humble and stay grounded is something, I guess as humanity, we sometimes feel we’ve lost sight of. It’s seen as weakness. It’s seen as something else. So I think that’s such a powerful truth to take out of today’s conversation. Beck, the pronunciation again, Sydow. [laughter] Thank you for your time today, and for your honesty, your authenticity. It’s just wonderful to chat to somebody who’s so real and so down to earth. For anyone listening, we are recording on Labor Day morning, so thank you for taking out your time on a very rare public holiday in the United States. We really appreciate you. We appreciate your insights. If anybody wants to get hold of you, what’s the best way to reach out to you?

[00:56:14] Beck Sydow: Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn a good bit, so it’s easy to find me with my unique name, Beck Sydow, and then HumanKind Business Leaders is the company website.

[00:56:25] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. For those of you listening, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please send it to somebody who needs to hear this message. If you didn’t, don’t tell anyone. But thanks for being here, and we’ll chat to you again soon.

[00:56:43] Beck Sydow: Thank you, Graham.