How I Built My Small Business
Welcome to 'How I Built My Small Business,' where we dive deep into conversations with guests who've carved out their own path to success. But, we're not only about the creation of businesses. Alongside entrepreneurs, I also chat with experts offering perspectives that'll benefit anyone striving to lead, learn, or improve.
This podcast is both a creative outlet and a platform to share knowledge from incredible people. My guests open up about the raw, heartwarming details of their journeys, offering expertise, simplifying business know-how, sharing money-making ideas, and imparting life wisdom—all through the power of storytelling.
By listening to these interviews and stories, my hope is that you find even one little takeaway that sparks or inspires your path.
While most of my guests make $1 million to $20 million net profit a year, some make more and some make less, but there is a lesson worth learning in each one. I also bring in special guests from brokering and mergers, mindset and meditation, entertainment and marketing, among others. So, the line-up is diverse in niche, experience and perspective - and so, so fun.
Special episodes include:
No College, No Problem
Big business founders with a focus on helpful small business topics
Expertise in hyper-niche fields
The connecting piece is that every one of my guests has started their own business at some point in their journey.
Thank you for listening.
Season 2 drops January 21, 2025. Follow the show so you don't miss out!
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How I Built My Small Business
Ru Hill - The Rise of SURF SIMPLY RESORT in Costa Rica
Ru Hill is the founder of Surf Simply, a globally renowned boutique coaching resort in Costa Rica that has transformed the way people learn to surf. Unlike traditional surf schools, Surf Simply takes a science-based, technique-driven approach, breaking down the complexities of surfing into teachable, measurable skills. This method has attracted everyone from complete beginners to seasoned surfers looking to refine their craft.
Beyond the waves, Ru is a deep thinker on business, leadership, and intentional growth. His grassroots journey—from coaching out of the back of a car to running a world-class surf resort—offers invaluable lessons on entrepreneurship, scaling with purpose, and building a high-performing team without sacrificing company culture.
His resort has been featured more than once in the New York Times and if you want to check out what you’re missing, just watch any of the inspiring weekly videos you can find on the Surf Simply You Tube channel.
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Website: https://www.annemcginty.com/
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Welcome to how I Built my Small Business. I'm Anne McEntee, your host, and today we have Rue Hill on the show. Rue is the founder of Surf Simply, a globally renowned boutique coaching resort in Costa Rica that has transformed the way people learn to surf. Unlike traditional surf schools, surf Simply takes a science-based, technique-driven approach, breaking down the complexities of surfing into teachable, measurable skills. This method has attracted everyone, from complete beginners to seasoned surfers looking to refine their craft Beyond the waves. Roo is a deep thinker on business leadership and intentional growth. His grassroots journey from coaching out of the back of a car to running a world-class surf resort offers invaluable lessons on entrepreneurship, scaling with purpose and building a high-performing team without sacrificing company culture. His resort has been featured more than once in the New York Times, and if you want to check out what you're missing, just watch any of the inspiring weekly videos you can find on the Surf Simply YouTube channel. You can find a link through to his business in the episode's description channel. You can find a link through to his business in the episode's description.
Speaker 1:Before we get started, a quick favor. That means the world. Whenever someone writes in, I always ask how did you find the podcast? And overwhelmingly. The answer is the same. A friend, family member or loved one shared it with them. If you've enjoyed this episode, or any episode, could you do me a quick favor? Share it with just one person in your life who might love it too? If each of you did that, we'd instantly double our listenership overnight, allowing us to bring in even more incredible guests and continue producing content that inspires and empowers you. Just one episode to one person. I massively appreciate it. Roo. I'm so excited to have you here. Thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:It's really a pleasure to be here. I was just listening back actually to some of the conversations you've had recently and I really enjoyed them, so I'm looking forward to diving back into your back catalog after we speak today.
Speaker 1:Oh, that sounds great and I am so excited to hear your story. So, speaking of that, can you take us back as far as you'd like to go? You're from the UK and started a surf resort in Costa Rica. Where does this journey begin for you, and how did the idea for Surf Simply even come to life?
Speaker 2:So it's an interesting question because it's always quite tricky trying to compress like 30 years of professional development into a few minutes. But and I'm going to just shamelessly kind of do a flex and show off here I was invited a couple of weeks ago to go and speak at MIT Sloan about Surf Simply, which was really cool, and I was like super nervous before I went and it got me thinking all right, well, what parts of this project are actually interesting in a broader business sense? So I'll try and answer your question, as I did for those guys, by just talking about the things that I think are more broadly applicable, because obviously a lot of your audience aren't going to be super interested in surfing specifically. So I'll sort of like skirt around those parts. But I actually went to art college before I started surf simply and I had this one brilliant teacher and I think if anyone's lucky enough to have one great teacher in their life then you're in the luckiest 1% of people in the world and this art teacher that I had said to us you guys are just teenagers and you really have nothing interesting to say to the world as artists yet. So what I'm going to do is teach you how to be technicians with all these different materials, with paint, with a camera and so forth, so that when you've got something interesting to say then you can say it.
Speaker 2:So when I started teaching surfing a few years later and I started doing it because I loved surfing I grew up going to the beach with my grandparents when I was a kid and I loved like salty hair and sand dunes and just all of that. So I left London and I moved down to Cornwall, which is sort of the bit of England that sticks out into the Atlantic underneath Ireland where you get the big fall swells coming out of the North Atlantic, and I thought, well, I'll spend my summers teaching surfing there and my winters traveling around the world and surfing. So I was living in this little caravan by the beach to save money and I did that for seven or eight years. And while I was teaching surfing I was really interested in this idea of how you could take something as intangible and subjective as art and you could actually break it down into mechanisms and teach it. And I just saw a lot of parallels with the way that surfing was being taught or perhaps wasn't being taught, and I was kind of uniquely placed because I was doing all of these entry-level surf lessons that you may have done and you've certainly seen at beaches where entry-level surfers are sort of learning to wobble in on small waves. But I was also lucky enough to be doing some work with the British junior team and that kind of like elite level coaching is very different. You're on the beach sitting way back with a camera up in the sand dunes and the surfers out in the water on their own performing whatever drills they've been given and coming in every half hour for feedback and then going back in the water again. So there's this kind of coaching for like the beginner one percent and the elite one percent and there's really nothing for the 98 percent in between.
Speaker 2:And I'm using the present tense now, but you know this was back in 2000 and well, 1999, I guess the year 2000 and so I became really interested in the project of trying to connect the dots, you know, from that beginner 1% to that elite 1%. And I was fortunate because the surf school I was working at, which started with three coaches and perhaps 30 people on a busy day, expanded to 28 coaches and about 600 people on a busy day, two hour lessons a day with 10 or 12 people. So over that decade I taught about 15 or 16,000 people. So with these just massive numbers I could do this sort of A B testing and tease out from all of the chaos of the ocean and different body shapes and personality types which coaching mechanisms actually worked, and from that we sort of came up with what we now call the Surf Simply Tree of Knowledge, which actually is a kind of a flow chart of skills that sits on the wall of the surf, simply resort, about 20 meters long and in big relief, and kind of forms the basis for our whole coaching methodology. The other thing that I was doing that I thought was kind of interesting was I was teaching coaches how to teach surfing and it became quite evident that anyone who was sort of capable enough to command a year round salary and could really do anything they wanted to was quite quickly going to leave a seasonal job. So I thought, well, if I want to create a center of surf coaching excellence, which is something I really wanted to do, then I need to be able to, you know, pay people year round so that you know the best and brightest can justify making surf coaching the principal project of their adult professional lives, you know. So that was how come I moved to Costa Rica. And then the rest of it, I mean, is the story of a business.
Speaker 2:I started teaching at the back of my car in Nosara in 2007, in the car park, and gradually moved to a shop space, borrowed some money and bought some casitas, some little sort of places to stay, and started transitioning into doing week long courses, built the team up, so with more coaches, and brought in, you know, massage therapists, gardeners, cooks, drivers, and built the whole thing up. And now fast forward to today, and I've resisted and will continue to resist the seductive sort of pull of people wanting to invest and to scale, and we've actually chosen to stay quite small. Our team is about 35 people. We have a maximum of 12 surfers a week and two non-surfers.
Speaker 2:We now are at a new facility which was custom built by this wonderful architectural firm called Gensler, who did Google's buildings and various other projects, by this wonderful architectural firm called Gensler, who did Google's buildings and various other projects, and we actually built this version of the resort that we're in now from the ground up, as I think it's probably the only sort of purpose built, high end, luxury residential surf coaching resort, if that's not too many adjectives, and we charge about $9,000 a week now, which is about three X what other people in the surf travel coaching world are charging Although it's, you know, it's not a lot compared to four seasons resorts and stuff like that, but in the world of surfing it's a lot, and we're booked out about a year in advance and we have a wait list every week of about 50 to a hundred people.
Speaker 2:So the business is doing very well. But, more importantly, it's got this really wonderful team of people that I really enjoy working with, who are all personally very invested in kind of making it incrementally better week on week, which is just a really fun project to be involved with, and it's the main reason why I've resisted the urge to like grow it and expand it. So there you go. That's a seven minute compression, as concise as I could do.
Speaker 1:I think that the way that you approach this is that you really were conscious about what you were trying to create, and I can see how your artistic background really played into your decision-making process. I am really curious to dig in a little bit more about your philosophy behind why not to scale which I totally understand and I really respect. But I'm just wondering a little bit more about what is the guidance that makes you so sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's not just a good question. It's, like this been the singly most important question in my adult professional life and the short answer is it's really fun trying to make this whole thing better, more fun, more appealing and exciting. The endorphins in my brain fire up a bit more than the thought of duplicating it, and once you've scaled something with the exception of sort of software services it's very difficult to reiterate them once they're at scale, if they're actual physical things in the real world, you know. So I really enjoy that project and I really enjoy the project of and this sounds kind of cheesy, but I don't know a way to say it that isn't cheesy you know, having all of the team personally really trying to improve their individual corner of the business, you know, and and standing back and have this kind of philosophy of management that you should be the person moving objects out of people's way so that they can get better at them, better at whatever, as they do Right and at. The analogy I really like is, rather than being a sort of a King Joffrey handing out orders, you should be more like Alfred to Batman, you know, you're sort of more like a butler who's making sure that the Batmobile is like full of gas and that the Batsuit is polished and ready to go, and then you know there to offer a little guidance when needed, over a cup of tea. But mostly you're trying to sort of stand back and let people be the best version of themselves. So I really enjoy that project a lot. Let people be the best version of themselves. So I really enjoy that project a lot and I've grown very fond of all of the people I work with and I love being part of this team of, you know, 30, 35 people.
Speaker 2:And then I was. I was kind of thinking about that on a very personal level and I was thinking, okay, well, how could somebody else in a different industry think about, like, what's the right way to put it? What are the right levers that someone should be thinking about needing to pull in their own professional life if they're asking themselves the same question? Because all the things I just talked about are very personal to me and very personal to this project and are quite subjective, and I came up with this kind of concept. And when I say I came up with it, this was actually what ended up being sort of the main thesis of the talk that I gave at MIT last week, so you can tell me what you think and please shoot it down.
Speaker 2:I came up with this idea of there being like four buckets that you kind of want to fill professionally. And and I like the idea of buckets because once they're full, if you keep pouring time and resources into them it's just a waste, they're just kind of flowing over the side right. So I came up with these four buckets. I'll bounce them off. You Tell me what you think. There may be a fifth or a sixth. I may change my mind in a year.
Speaker 2:They're certainly not written in stone, but this is where my thinking took me. So the first one was economic security. The next one was your health. The next one was your status, and not the kind of two dimensional status of who's got the flashiest car, but the kind of authentic respect of people who are close to you in your life and people whose opinions really matter to you. And then the last one, the most important one, is the quality of the relationships that you have with the people that you spend the most time with. I can expand on any of those, but how does that land with you that?
Speaker 1:you spend the most time with. I can expand on any of those, but how does that land with you? You sound like an evolved business owner. I don't know. There's a maturity to your approach. It's very heart centered and I think it can take people a lifetime to get there sometimes, especially in America. So you're in Costa Rica and you've got a UK background, so I don't know how that impacts the way that you are and the way that you think, but here in America it's like, as you were saying, it's quite seductive the idea of possibly growing, maybe franchising or popping up locations in other areas. But why Like really thinking about what will that bring you? What will that bring your community? I think the only bucket that I would maybe change the name of is the one status or status.
Speaker 2:maybe it sounded more like community to me or just like authenticity rather than status so I think that the word status or status sorry, that's my British isms coming out there my husband's from New Zealand.
Speaker 2:He says status too yeah, I think it almost makes you cringe slightly to hear of it being included in that list. And and I think we all like to think that we sort of don't play those status games. And let me offer like a counter, let me offer a pushback right, a counter argument. So there's that very surface level kind of two dimensional status game which we all think about. When we think about status, right, who's maybe got the biggest salary or the nicest car, or you know the best job title or whatever, right? Or even in a social group or in a sports team, who's the captain, who's the better player? There's a very like surface level status. And if we take the example of, let's say, a Wall Street trader who, somewhere in the middle of their life, has this sort of crisis of existentialism and decides to leave all of their material possessions and go to Tibet and study mindfulness in a monastery, right, you could on some level say, well, they've walked away from all of those status games and now they've let go of all of that. But I would put it to you that actually it really will matter to them what the other monks in that monastery think about them and even how they think about themselves, and status will have not been given up. It just will have changed from one minute it was about how nice the car was. Now it's about how present one can be and how aware of one's own maelstrom of thoughts one is able to be and how articulate one can be when one talks about that experience. You know, and I see it all the time down in Nosara and Costa Rica, where Nosara is a little bit of a hub for a lot of incredibly successful people for a whole load of reasons, but we get lots of sort of type A Silicon Valley, palo Alto, New York, finance type people coming down here and sort of stepping away from, you know, the American elite game. And then they come down and they start surfing and actually you can see that the status within the community is just as important to them.
Speaker 2:But status, I think, doesn't have to be a negative thing. It can be, for example and this is something that I try to do in Surf Simply that I make it very clear that I give status to people. I'll talk deferentially and openly give praise to people who not only are hardworking and constantly trying to be better at whatever their particular professional area is, but also people that are really thoughtful and supportive to other members of the team, making it like if you behave in this way, you get props from, you know, the boss, the person who's at sort of you know, arguably at the top of the status pyramid within that little community, and so that behavior becomes okay in this group. This is how we behave, this is what gets you status. This is what gets you respect and admiration and genuine affection from people around you. So I'm sort of expanding the use of the word status and I've stolen some of this from a brilliant book by an author and I'd like to say, friend of mine, but he probably doesn't think as fondly as me and I think of him, just that he doesn't know me that well, but we've exchanged a few chats. But a guy called Will Storr wrote a brilliant book called the Status Game and I read it and it really struck me a lot.
Speaker 2:And I think, bringing it back to small businesses, I think that as business owners, we think a lot about things like salary and perhaps time off and perks, and I certainly think about that too. I think you want your team to think of you as fighting to pay them as much as they can, fighting to give them as much time off as you can give them, as the business can allow, so they feel like you're their champion and you're in their corner fighting for them. And we do that as business owners. But it obviously costs us time and resources. But the one thing I think we don't think about enough and here I'm stealing from will store almost word for word as humans, we need status like oxygen, because we've evolved for 150 000000 years in these hunter gatherer groups and if you had low status and you were ostracized from the group, it was a death sentence. And if you had high status, you had access to resources and it was the chance to live longer and pass on your genes. So it's really like deep, deep wired into us. And as a business owner with a team of you know 30 years I have you can give status to people really easily and it costs you nothing. And you can also rob people of status by being thoughtless and unkind and that will just throttle someone's enthusiasm, for you know dedicating themselves to your business, and I think as small business owners, we need to be really thoughtful of that. Have I talked for too long? I'm going to give you two quick examples, of course, okay. So here's an example of how I like to give status to people right.
Speaker 2:Every week we make a video about called last week at surf simply, and we put up on youtube and it's lots of shots of people surfing and around the resort and we have three people with cameras trying to capture the whole thing. I actually swim out every morning with my camera myself it's one of my favorite things, I do so and then at the end of the week, pepe, our videographer. He interviews any of the guests that are happy to be interviewed and they talk a little bit about the week. We made this movie. We put it on YouTube. It usually gets like a thousand 1500 views, which doesn't sound like a lot, but actually the ROI is great because even if like 1% of those people come and stay with us and perhaps bring a spouse or kids or come back a few times, you know they're spending $50,000 or more, so the ROI is actually really good.
Speaker 2:Anyway, even if the only people who saw the video were the families of the people who worked at Surf Simply, I think it would still be a fantastic ROI because it means all of that team when they go back to their home, whether it's here in Osara or in San Jose or in another country, and their family and their friends are like oh, we saw what you do, you know, and we read about Surf Simply in the New York Times and we saw it on CNN and we saw it on the BBC. And then we we saw who you're teaching last week and we saw that footage of you making food or you know teachings that we saw it all. And like you're giving your team status within their people, within their family, their friends. The people are important in their lives and I think that that kind of status is is really healthy. I think that when we think about status games, we want to think like is the status game we're playing healthy or not healthy? And I think, on a personal level, it's good to think about playing multiple status games. You don't have all your eggs in one basket, otherwise you can start to get sort of a bit freaked out when you feel like you're going to lose status in some area and you become too precious with it.
Speaker 2:I think, on the flip side, where a lot of business owners get it wrong is it's so easy to just cut someone off in a meeting.
Speaker 2:Talk down to them, dismiss something that said, you know which all signals to everyone else in the room I don't really care about what this person thinks about me and I'm much higher status than them, and just that kind of thoughtlessness. We don't realize how much damage it can do. And then you're sort of scratching your head like, oh, why does so-and-so want a pay rise in order to be motivated? Well, you could have given them status in that meeting. That may have meant much more to them than an extra sort of percentage on their end of year paycheck. You know, we're texting people late at night just because you're the owner and you've now got an idea and you want to text at 11 o'clock at night while it's fresh in your head, and people are like, oh, this person really doesn't care about my life. You know it's another way of just saying, hey look, I'm more powerful than you, don't forget, just before you go to bed. So I think that's the kind of way I think about status and its importance.
Speaker 1:In the context in which you're explaining it, I think it does make a lot of sense. It sounds like a mixture of culture, respect, authenticity, sort of like intrinsic reward, not monetary real connection.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can't claim to have authored a lot of those ideas. You know, sometimes you read a book and you've sort of a lot of it. You've been intuitively thinking and it's like finally someone has articulated what you kind of felt to be true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, A hundred percent? Yes, definitely. I wonder, too, how much surfing itself, and just the, the sport, the meditative nature of it, being at one with the water, being in the water I wonder how much of that also just plays into your overall sort of business structure and philosophy behind leadership, because I think what you've figured out is something that should be taught in business school. I think that there are a lot of businesses now that are coming out and they don't have that alignment of like happy team. You know they might have the economic stability as you were mentioning. Yeah, what does surfing mean to you in your personal life and just the way that you operate? Is this where this all stems from? Or is this childhood Like what made you understand these key, necessary components of running a sustainable, really thriving and like team, happy business?
Speaker 2:Well, I think that there's. There's certainly a lot of life lessons that one can draw from surfing, and I'm sure that there's a wonderful coffee table book that could be put together Maybe I'll even put it together one day with lots of kind of stoic lessons that one can draw from how much you have to put in and how inconsistent the feedback is. And I think that the inconsistency of the environment with surfing and the ensuing frustration is one of the most important things you can draw from surfing, as opposed to most other sports, cause I think you know all sports like, dedicating yourself to an athletic pursuit is just so important. It teaches you so much and it gives you self-esteem and it teaches you how to pick yourself up when you fail, and it teaches you how much more you can do than you thought you could like. When you think you're at your limit, you're usually about a third of the way there, you know.
Speaker 2:But surfing, I think, is unique in so far as the environment changes so much. The ocean is such a big, uncontrollable variable. I think that it would be analogous to if you were being taught to play tennis, but sometimes a tennis ball was coming at you and sometimes it was a watermelon, and sometimes, instead of holding a tennis racket, you're suddenly holding a spoon, and sometimes the net is there and sometimes it's not, you know, or it's.
Speaker 2:That's kind of what learning to surf is like you know, for example, if you really want to learn how to get barreled, you know which is one of my favorite things in the world, probably the most fun thing you can do on the planet. You know you might not have the opportunity to put into a barrel for 18 months. You know, if you compare that to tennis and you're just like, well, you can't have a ball for 18 months. Just, there aren't any. So you know, that's that's kind of what learning to surf is like. To surf is like, and so I think there is something in the process of learning to surf that forces you to have to let go of I'm in charge and I want to do it my way because you just it makes you realize how much is out of your control, and I think certainly there is a good lesson in there in business, insofar as I think entrepreneurs are generally tend to credit themselves with their successes and blame other factors for their failures, and I think the reality is that people like to say how much of it's luck and how much of it is hard work. Right, that's the common question people talk about in business, and, at the risk of getting slightly philosophical for a moment, I would say it's 100% luck and it's 100% hard work. Like both things are true at the same time, and what I mean by that is, you know, I'm incredibly lucky to have been born at a time where, you know, if I'd been born 10 years later, I think it would have been really hard for surf simply to create the kind of brand awareness that we did, because there's so much noise on the internet. If I was born 10 years earlier, the internet wasn't around and we couldn't have created that brand awareness. I mean so lucky just to have been born when I was born. But I was also lucky to have been born with a brain that, when I stood on the beach and was doing these surf lessons, was interested in the project of trying to connect these dots together in terms of a coaching methodology. I could have not been born with a brain that was interested in doing that, you know.
Speaker 2:So in that way, I mean it's all. It's all luck, right, but it's also you have to work incredibly hard. You know I've worked harder, as hard as anyone that I've ever met for like 20 years in order to build this business, and so I think it's important to acknowledge it's all luck because it allows you to be much more compassionate towards people that are less lucky than you and have a lot more humility around what might seem to be, on the surface, your successes, especially when everyone around you is telling you you know? Oh, you're so great. You're such a kind of an entrepreneurial genius, you know, and it's so easy to get caught up in your own. If you're someone who most of your friends are on your payroll, you can pretty much guarantee that unless you put some guardrails in place for yourself, you're probably going to turn into an asshole. So I think remembering it's luck and that you need to have humility, I think is important. So I think, whether you choose to look at it all in terms of luck or in terms of hard work, it's just a scale question. You know, sometimes it's appropriate to look at your professional life through one lens and sometimes it's appropriate to look at it through another lens. I think that what really brought home to me the importance of you know we were talking about status and people and how they feel and how you make your team feel as an employer, and I I actually had an awful experience, but one that I'm very grateful I had, which was about 10 years ago when I was with my dad through the last months of him having cancer and then dying, and it was.
Speaker 2:I was 34, I'm 46 now and and I remember my dad at 34 and I had this very visceral feeling of like, oh, I remember him at my age and now this is like the end and I, you know, I've lived one to 34 and I've seen 34 to the finish line. I was like wow, that's really the whole thing and it there's no way of saying that. That communicates to someone who hasn't had that feeling, and I think most people have some version of that kind of epiphany at some point. But it really does hit you and for me, it caused me to go all right. What's really important? Do I want to like, scale this thing and be fabulously wealthy and have that kind of status, or you know, what is it that's important to me?
Speaker 2:And the thing that I feel is important to me and I think there's good science to back this up is actually the quality of the relationships that I have with the people I spend the most time with and I'm single, I don't have kids. I'm very close with my nieces and my sister and their family, but the people I actually spend the most time with are the people I work with and I have some friends outside of work, but realistically that those are the people I spend the most time with, and I think that's true for a lot of people. And I just thought I want to make my relationships with them and their relationships with each other explicitly the goal of the business. And of course, it has to be profitable, otherwise it's a hobby, not a business. But like this is selfishly what I want out of my life. This is this is what I'm going to cash my success chips in for. This is what's worth standing up from the table and walking out of the casino for.
Speaker 2:And so I've, you know, looked at a lot of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman and Richard Wiseman and all of these kinds of people to try and understand how you can make a teamwork Well. I think everyone really enjoys it. You know I really enjoy my relationships with them. You'd have to ask them how they feel about me. But you know I feel like very lucky to work in an environment where people genuinely really enjoy coming to work and working with each other and no amount of zeros on my net worth. So here I am already with the thing that any amount of money I would want to spend on if I had it All right, sorry, that was very clumsily phrased. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:I mean this is so inspirational. And I lost my dad three years ago. It was right as COVID-19 was starting and it was just sudden, right. I talked to him. Seven hours later he was gone and I think, like what you mentioned with when your dad passed, it is so transformative and it really does unlock this part of you. That's like what is important and it is so beautiful that you've figured that out for yourself and that you're also able to quiet the noise of society that is probably trying to tell you that you should be doing X, y, z, but you're like no, because this is what is value to me, this is what, this is where I get the most rewards. So it's so inspirational.
Speaker 2:Can I put the question back to you If you don't mind, if you feel comfortable talking about it? What? What did you feel like were the things that were really important in your life after going through that yourself?
Speaker 1:So I would say, before my dad died I was very motivated by money and when my dad died I reflected so much on his life as an immigrant, as a doctor, as someone who spent hours of his life on the side compiling old medical equipment from hospitals that were just going to throw it away into a landfill and he was sending it over to the Philippines because it had a second life there.
Speaker 1:So he earned a reward from the Red Cross and, when he wasn't even on the clock, would go and do rotations to see his patients because he had so much compassion. And I look back and since that moment when he died, the first five days I sort of had this transcendence experience where I tapped into. I don't know, maybe it was deep grief and a flooding of hormones in the body or something, but it also may have just been that I was able to, like, sense things I couldn't before and I could quote, unquote, sort of hear him guiding me to be more compassionate, find something to do that's more heart centered, stop thinking about the money so much and, as you're saying, with your buckets, it's like kind of the stuff that you just mentioned.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1:And it was crazy that it took such a vast and deep hole of grief to unlock this in me. And I have spoken to friends who've lost people the same way recently and they kind of thought I was a little bit nuts with the way that I spoke about the grief and what it had done for me until they went through it. And then they were contacting me and saying I had no idea you were so right. These things have been happening and like they're exploring the meaning of life, finding purpose, finding fulfillment, community connection and not making the goal, as you're saying, zeros.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that very much mirrors my experience also, and I think of a lot of people, and you know the way that I think about it is, rather than thinking, okay, one minute I'm looking for the you know all of the zeros, and then the next minute I'm sort of looking for something more nurturing to. You know, my I don't know, use whatever language one feels comfortable with, but your sort of mental wellbeing or whatever your emotional wellbeing, and it's kind of an either or thing, and I actually sort of, just because I've got the sort of brain that's that pulls at loose threads, I was like, well, actually, why did I want the zeros to begin with, rather than saying like that was not the right idea? Now I'm going to point the ship in this direction, but actually rewinding right back to the sort of the beginning, you know, cause no one, no one really would care about having you know however many dollars in your bank account if the dollars had no value out in the real world, right? So, just as a thought experiment, so, so obviously it's not actually the dollars, it's what you can do with the dollars. Then one needs to ask yourself, well, what do you want to do with the dollars?
Speaker 2:And you know, I think there's a few sort of low hanging fruits in terms of just wisdom that one can find on podcasts. Hopefully, like this one, things, like you know, experiences are more valuable than buying goods. You know, and I think that the one piece of advice that I find the most useful is one of the best things you can spend money on when you've got an excess of economic security is to pay people to do the things that you don't want to do, so you can spend time doing the things that you do want to do. And especially, you know, as I get older, I become very aware that I've got more money in less time, and so the trade-offs become different, like the, the equations are different. So, you know, rewinding back to, let's imagine, the most ferocious entrepreneurial capitalist that you can possibly think of, I don't believe that that person doesn't want to be happy as much as a human can be happy. You know, which is, let's say, if you can be happy 30% of the time you're doing really, really well, you know.
Speaker 2:So I think that a lot of people get so in the habit of trying to accumulate success mostly in the form of money, but also in the form of prestige and that sort of two-dimensional shallow status we talked about. And then they get to a point where they've filled the bucket up, right, and now they could be trading the chips in to fill up one of the other buckets, but they forgot why they started filling the bucket in the first place. And they're really good at filling the bucket, they're really good at making money, they're really good at playing that game and they forgot why they started. So they just keep kind of playing the game and they grind on and on.
Speaker 2:And the analogy I like is sort of like a, you know, a poker player that's so good at poker that they're sitting alone in the casino at two o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 2:You know, winning more and more and more money, but not really thinking about, you know, the life that could be lived out there in the big wide world.
Speaker 2:So rather than thinking of it in terms of like I'm giving something up and exchanging it for something else I like to think of like you know, filling your buckets in terms of your status, your quality of your relationships, your, your health, and then your economic security too relationships, your, your health, and then your economic security too.
Speaker 2:You can fill all of those and be the most secular, non-spiritual, selfish, ferocious capitalist ever, but just have a healthy, science-based view about the fact that those are the buckets that if, if you want to like, be mentally well and feel good about life most of the time, or at least a third of the time, then you need to fill those buckets up, because you've inherited this homo sapien brain that evolved in these hunter-gatherer groups of about 150 people for 150,000 years, and so you can choose the meaning of your own life in the same way that you can choose what you eat. But you have inherited this brain which will fundamentally do well if you give it a certain diet and won't if you give it, you know, cheesecake all the time. Right, does that analogy kind of? I'm seeing some philosophical backflips there, but does that make sense?
Speaker 1:It does and it aligns with a lot of the thought processes that I've had, just from traveling to, maybe, places that don't have as much and then seeing extreme wealth through the clients that I used to work with and the dichotomy between the two. It's been a topic that I've really thought a lot about and I agree with what you're saying. It's like at some point, enough is enough and how can I make something better or like improve someone's life or give back or do something more meaningful?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know and I'm not meaning to say that economic security isn't important, but it's a kind of a curve and as your salary goes up I think the happiness that you get from your salary sort of levels off and it's you get diminishing returns at some point.
Speaker 2:And there was that study a few years ago which kind of drew this line at $70,000, which I think is not quite actually what the data showed in the particular study, although that's what the headline said. It's different depending on what city you live in and whether you have kids and all kinds of other variables. But certainly you know, if you go from $10,000 a year income to $100,000 a year income, there's a good chance you'll be 10 times happier. But you're not going to be 10 times happier going to a million dollars. And if you're not happy at a million dollars, you're not going to be happy with $10 million. So figuring out where you are on that curve and figuring out whether you are still filling up your economic security bucket or whether now you've filled it and everything is just running over the side and is a waste of time and energy, I think that's the useful question to ask oneself.
Speaker 1:It is a really great analogy and I could talk about these things forever. I would love to ask you some of the questions about just the actual beginning of the business and what it was like starting out of your car and then eventually building. Like how did you really make that happen? I mean, how much capital did it take for you to eventually acquire the land and get plans and build and hire staff and brand and then launch? And how did you get the resources?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm really comfortable talking about the figures. Actually, I think it's really important that people talk about figures more. I think that people quite often feel uncomfortable talking about it, but I think it's important so that people can get a sense of where they are on the playing field. So I actually came to Costa Rica in 2007 with about seven thousand dollars that I'd saved up and I bought a 1992 Suzuki Sidekick which nearly bankrupt me getting it fixed and three surfboards and I had about a thousand dollars left in cash and I was literally just pulled up on the beach with a sign sat in my car and I would do lessons at eight and at ten and at two and then sometimes at four o'clock and I would go back to my little shack that I was renting and then I was trying to build a website in the evenings off this old laptop that used to overheat and I used to have to shut it off every half hour and put it in the fridge to cool it down and take it out again. The one thing that was unusual to me I guess unusual compared to other businesses that were starting up, because obviously there's lots of people doing surf lessons was that this kind of very systemized methodology, which I had not at the time actually drawn up as a graphic but was just a system I was using to teach with, really resonated with, even back then, these kind of like quite type a personalities that were coming down to Nosara and, very, very quickly, a bunch of people at Google and then at Facebook and this is 2007. So it's like no one's heard of Facebook back then, right, I think it was even called the Facebook then and I guess some internal memo went round. That's like no one's heard of Facebook back then, right, I think it was even called the Facebook then, and I guess some internal memo went round that's like hey, if you want to surf, like there's this guy in Nosara called Ruhel who's like really good, and a few people said that they'd heard of me through, you know, work chats there and anyway. So I was really really busy. So, very quickly, within like a month or two of having opened the door of my car, I already had this like backlog of like at the time, tens of people wanting to do lessons. I'd way more demand, and that's it's actually been true from within like a month of opening in 2007, right up to, like you know, right now in the bookings were about booked out about a year or so in advance and I, you know, I put that down to the fact that I spent, you know, the best part of a decade figuring out how to do this with, like you know, 15, 16,000 people.
Speaker 2:So I talked to a lot of younger people who were thinking about starting businesses and they quite often just want to sort of skip over. You know, the 10,000 hours thing is very much a rule of thumb, like the Anders Ericsson's research wasn't really what Malcolm Gladwell actually said it was, but I mean it's kind of irrelevant. The point is you do really have to put a lot of time in to become really good at what you do. You know, if that's a key part of your business which I think it honestly is in 90% of businesses, it's very hard to find a way of growing a business where you don't have some area of expertise. That being said, I think that people often say well, I can't start a business because I don't know enough about this.
Speaker 2:And really most people can become experts at most things with just the application of enough time and curiosity. So, um, you know, mostly you don't have to be a genius to be good at most things you just have to apply yourself. So anyway, I was very fortunate because when I was at school I was very dyslexic and I have ADHD.
Speaker 1:I do too, as you might have been able to infer from our conversation.
Speaker 2:And so I, you know, academically I did very poorly. So when I started teaching surfing with the exception of art, which I never really thought was going to be a career I really had no other options. So I was never like, oh, I'm teaching surfing, but maybe I should go and finish that law degree or whatever. It was just like I'm doing this, this is what I'm doing with my life, and there's no, there's no plan B, and I don't have the option of doing anything else. So I might as well just do this, and I feel like that was actually kind of an amazing gift to have had, like that was actually kind of an amazing gift to have had.
Speaker 2:You know, as I said, I was very lucky to have met some really smart people from from the tech industry who mentored me into how to create an online presence. So I was really fortunate to have learned from some really smart people and, honestly, a lot of what I've done I think that's made surf simply successful has been really smart people who otherwise I would never be able to get in a room with, coming and wanting to learn how to surf and then becoming, you know, friends or acquaintances with them such that we can have conversations where I've learned a lot from them. So learning from my customers, in a most literal sense, has been the secret weapon, I think, if anything.
Speaker 1:What an incredible business and life you have that you've set up for yourself. So, okay, you had seven grand, you bought the car you only had like a thousand left and you're teaching lessons. How long did it take for you to save up enough capital so that you could then create a resort?
Speaker 2:Oh right, yes, Sorry, that's the ADHD kicking in. So, yeah, I was very fortunate insofar as I had the opportunity to borrow about 200,000 pounds from an English bank right which was guaranteed by some family members. So I wasn't given any money, but I was able to borrow it, you know, which was something a lot of people don't have access to, and I was incredibly lucky, and that was early 2008. And I used that to buy these four casitas. And then, of course, the 2008 crash happened, which, for me, was amazing from a business point of view, because all of these finance people got laid off. They came down to Nosara with their severance packages and wanted to learn how to surf and, at the same time, I was earning dollars and the pound crashed against the dollar after the 2008 housing crisis. So nearly a third of my mortgage my 200,000 pound mortgage nearly a third of it paid off in a month, just when the crash happened.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:Which was amazing.
Speaker 1:There's that luck.
Speaker 2:There's that, so I've been incalculably lucky, and I think everyone has, if you stop and think about it. But anyway, we stayed in that facility for a while, but it was a little far back from the beach and as we wanted to get more and more high end and I really did always want to be small and high end rather than big you know, I'd seen how that surf school I worked at in Cornwall affected the beach and the community and I saw what it was to have a growth business with a finite resource, which is to say, space in the water, and I just there. That can be made to economics more broadly, but anyway, when we decided to build a new version of the resort which is the version we're currently, in which you can see all the flashy photos of on Instagram and on our website that was in 2016. And I had quite a lot of people who had got to know me through the business offer to invest and it was really really like seductive wanting to take all this money that was being offered, and I said no, but what I will do, if it's okay with you, investor, is borrow the money and pay you a really good rate of interest, but ultimately I will pay you back and retain ownership of this whole business so that I can choose not to grow it. Because I think in the US we have this.
Speaker 2:As Scott Galloway said it really well, we've decided that we put shareholders first, customers second and employees third, and that's that's what we've all decided, and I'm not saying that that's wrong. But I do think it doesn't have to be like that. If you don't want to do it like that like I don't think there's anything wrong with growth, I just don't think you have to grow. You can just choose. Choose to do it a different way. It shouldn't be the default. It should be a decision you make proactively. So anyway, I borrowed money and I borrowed about two and a half million dollars. I sold the old resort for about a million, so I had about just over 3 million to build what is the current resort and that borrowing. We've got about a million left to pay off on it, so that should be paid off by about 2029, about when I hit 50. And then that will feel really good.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. You just made it happen. And how savvy that you knew you wanted to retain ownership.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I will say, actually I did give ownership away to five members of the team that have been with me a long time, so it wasn't that I wanted to hold all the equity myself. I just didn't want to give it away to people who were specifically investing with growth and maximizing profitability in mind.
Speaker 1:It's more of a cooperative.
Speaker 2:Exactly yeah.
Speaker 1:Super cool. So what has been the hardest thing that you've had to deal with?
Speaker 2:You know it's funny that the hard things are usually very unsexy and unglamorous. They're usually like details, you know, and it's, and sometimes it's building things. Like you know, the ceiling in the back of house kitchen suddenly fell down, or the the grease trap is in the wrong place and now we've got to dig up the car park to move it. Or, you know, really like not exciting. Sometimes these things go wrong and they're like there's no lesson to be learned here. I just, I just need to fix it.
Speaker 2:And some days, some weeks, there's, like you know, layer upon layer upon layer, and then some days you're just like it's there's too many small logistical problems and I'm, I feel totally overwhelmed and like every business owner has felt that feeling and I just like everyone you know I'm painting this rosy picture, but of course there's been like times like that where I felt like I'm at the edge of a nervous breakdown, trying to just solve lots of small problems. And it was really interesting listening to your conversation and I'm so sorry I've forgotten his name, but the guy who was talking about brokering businesses and Lauren Vandergrift.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. It was really interesting listening to his conversation because he said something to you about you know, rather than thinking about walking away from your business, think about empowering other people to solve problems. Yeah, those problems that came at me. I was like, well, actually I'm not going to walk away from this, I'm so happy with this big picture, but I just feel overwhelmed. I'm going to concentrate on trying to empower people to solve problems so it becomes manageable long term, and I'm really pleased that I did it that way. And when I heard him say it I was like, yeah, quite often I think small business owners want to sell because they're overwhelmed, but actually if they empower other people to solve problems and find the right people, then they don't want to sell because suddenly they start really loving it again.
Speaker 2:You know, the hardest thing for me, like every business owner, has been when I've made bad hires, when I've employed people that didn't work out, and you fall over yourself trying to make it work, trying to solve whatever they say the problem is, and then you realize all it's always a different problem. So maybe what they're saying is the problem isn't the problem, and at some point you're like I just need to get rid of this person. Like. My responsibility to the rest of the team is to fire this person. That's part of my job and I think people who talk about businesses in the way that I've talked about mine very often don't want to talk about firing people, because they like to pretend that they're able to inspire everyone to be the best version of themselves.
Speaker 2:But sometimes you have to fire people and I think you need to like fire people quickly and hire them slowly is the old cliche. I think that when you fire people, you need to make sure that they leave with as much economic security as you can give them and that they leave with dignity and that everyone else who stays behind can see that you gave them as much dignity as possible when they left. Again like thinking about what kind of status you're giving them within, especially a small community like the beach community I live in here. You know, when you fire someone, quite often like when you leave a bad relationship, you're like why didn't I do that two years ago?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's because you believe in them and you want to give them a chance, and so, then, that probably blindsides you for a little bit longer than it than it should. Well, so, okay, you're a team of 35 now, and what's your operational season?
Speaker 2:So that's interesting. So that traditionally the busy season in Costa Rica is the US winter, sort of like Thanksgiving, until Easter more or less. And that's partly because it's the dry season down here, so it doesn't really rain at all during those months, and also it's partly because obviously it's nice to escape the cold and come down to the sunshine, but actually the waves here in Nosara there's more swell, so the waves are generally a bit bigger from June to September during the summer months.
Speaker 1:Oh, so you get a long season.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so although it's called the wet season, coming from England, it's actually very often less rainy in the wet season here than it is in a summer in England. It can rain all day, every day, for like months, you know. So we're actually equally busy all the way through the year, and part of that is because we've tried to keep the focus on technical surf coaching and we're like, if you come along and it's cloudy and raining, you're still going to have a fun and productive week.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're going to be in the water anyway.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've kind of, as a point of marketing positioning, we've tried to detach ourselves from sunshine, you know. So the way we actually operate is we're open for eight weeks and then we close for two weeks and everyone gets two weeks break. And then we're open for eight weeks and then close for two weeks, and we do that all the way through the year, and then we close september, october's, when it's quite rainy here. So we close sort of the first week of september to the end of october for six weeks. So the whole team gets these breaks all together like 16 weeks paid vacation every year.
Speaker 2:And what feels really nice from my point of view is they often go away on vacation together. Actually, the two metrics that I really like to use to measure how well things are going is one, how long people have stayed with the business right. So like our average employee has been with us for more than eight years, which feels good. The other is is how often people choose to go on vacation with people that they work with when they're not working. I feel like, just quietly, I keep a little unofficial tab of that in my head. That makes me feel good.
Speaker 1:That is amazing. You have set this up so well. I mean, I don't really see any more efficiencies or improvements that you could make. Are there any that you think are left to be done?
Speaker 2:Oh well, I mean, like I was sort of alluding to before, I think, what makes surf simply really good and you know, I'm talking about it in very glowing terms because I'm very proud of it and it's been my life's work, so I hope you'll thank you for indulging me but what I think makes it really good is not any one thing. You know this, this tree of knowledge surf coaching methodology was certainly a unique selling point. But you know this, this tree of knowledge surf coaching methodology was certainly a unique selling point. But you know, like when people sort of say, well, what's the secret, it's like, you know, this morning everyone was out surfing and we were like, if we can get another 800 mil lens further down the beach, then we can capture all the ways sideways so that when we're doing the video feedback later in the morning we've got two angles on someone's foot position rather than one angle. It's like, okay, that's quite an expensive lens. So like, let's figure out when we can get that in our media budget. Or you know, if know, if we switch the mattresses over, then the guests are going to have less sore backs when they're paddling out after they've been paddling the day before. Or can we bring in another massage therapist and do two massages per week for the guests instead of one. You know just all these little, tiny, little improvements week on week and the whole thing keeps moving forward slowly and keeps getting better. And there's so much cool stuff. I hate to sound like everyone on every other podcast, but there's so much cool stuff that can be done in terms of using AI for video coaching, particularly with less experienced coaches.
Speaker 2:I had an hour long conversation with chat GBT about how artificial intelligence might be able to help with surf coaching and it was so interesting ChatGBT was saying to me well, you know, I will be able, when I can render video footage, to be able to spot patterns of how people move and which patterns they're consistently getting wrong in terms of biomechanics.
Speaker 2:So, being able to upload, you know, we we have like five terabytes of footage a week right From our five cameras on the surface. If we could upload all of that, have ai, sort it into who's who and then look for like body movement patterns that are consistently being done by a surfer, and then we can isolate, okay, well, which thing is the most consistent mistake and therefore the first thing we want to address, and then you know, being able to use ar and vr headsets to like, put people inside a wave. And where should you be looking? Can we see where your eyes are? I mean, there's, there's so much that can be done in terms of improving the coaching experience, even if nothing else, so there's no, there's no shortage of things to keep having fun playing with.
Speaker 1:I think give us a couple of years and it'll be pretty mind blowing. So, just looking back at your whole journey, is there anything that you wish that you had known before you started?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this is something that is is uncomfortable to admit. Whenever you start a business and stick your head above the parapet, right, you're always going to have some percentage of people who love what you do, some percentage of people who are kind of ambivalent about what you're doing and some percentage of people who really despise you for no reason that you can put your finger on. And you know I've got that, like everyone else, and I think I've let it affect me way too much. You know, and I'm sure that again other business owners can relate to that feeling of you start your coffee shop or whatever your software services company and someone's really kind of coming at you, not because they know you or anything about you, but you've stuck your head up in the marketplace at a certain time and you're presenting in a certain way and they don't like that for whatever reason.
Speaker 2:That for whatever reason and I spent a lot of time and energy trying to like, make that 1% of people like me, you know, because I felt so uncomfortable not being liked and as I get older I've just realized like some people are just not going to like you and that's part of just part of the noise and you shouldn't let it keep you awake at two o'clock in the morning, and I and I know that in my logical moments. But you know, when you wake up in the middle of the night and you're staring at the ceiling, those kinds of things can really upset you. And I and I wish that a younger version of me had known to just like let yourself be less affected by that stuff and be okay with a few people not liking you, assuming that you've, you know, genuinely made a good faith effort to do everything right and make sure that any dislike they have isn't justified. You know.
Speaker 1:Every industry there's always going to be someone, and I think you probably experience it a little more in the UK with the tall poppy thing, which I know is also an issue in New Zealand and Australia just the hacking down of, like anybody who is rising, but it takes so much strength. I mean it's easier said than done to not care what other people say.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know, since 2020, a third of all of our net profits at Surf Simply have gone back into community projects here in Nassara. And telling you that now is the first time I've actually said that publicly. It doesn't say it on our website. Maybe it's a British cultural thing, I don't know.
Speaker 2:But I was always kind of brought up wrongly to think that when you're doing charity work or something like that, you should do it for its own sake and you shouldn't publicize it. Right, and actually I now disagree with that. I think you should publicize it because it prompts other people to do it too. Right? You know, if I put that on our website which I know I should do and I probably will, you know, I hope other businesses in Osara would be like oh wow, we should step up and help too. So I know it'd be a good thing. But again, going back to what I wish I had told younger me, I wish I'd felt more comfortable saying hey, like we're doing all of this really good stuff in the community. But I always had this like cultural, maybe hangover of just feeling super like, like an ick factor about talking about that stuff out loud. As I said, I'm saying it to you right now. This is the first time I've ever talked publicly about it.
Speaker 1:You should definitely tell people about what you're doing. It's kind of the heart of the business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, now I know.
Speaker 1:A third of profits is significant.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, it's really fun. We have a kids club that we run that does free surf lessons for the local kids, and we've just started an intern program so that kids from the local schools who want to become surf coaches can come and do work experience at Surf. Simply, we're starting an elite coaching program for local surfers who want to go and compete so, and then we work with a women's health charity nearby as well and a local schools project and a reforestation project. So yeah, but again you asked me what I should have done differently and I wish I'd spent the last 10 years talking more comfortably about that, but it still makes me feel super uncomfortable saying it to you right now, like in this conversation, that is so fascinating to me that it is, though because I feel like that is what, a lot of times, people really want to know about too, when they're looking at a business is like are they giving back in any way?
Speaker 1:And if they are, how? Because it's very revealing about whoever is behind the business.
Speaker 2:Well, after I spoke at MIT, someone said to me why didn't you mention anything about that? Because they asked me about it afterwards. And I said I felt uncomfortable talking about it. And then, when we had this conversation scheduled, I promised myself that I would say it if it came up. So you'll know this is you're like, this is life therapy happening right now, and you'll know if there's a page up on the website that I really followed through on what I said I would do.
Speaker 1:I hope you do. It has honestly been so fun to have you on here and I love the way that you think about business and life and I think you have a very grounded approach. I really appreciate you taking the time to share it with us.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed our conversation and thank you for letting me, sort of self-indulgently, wrap it off on my ADHD thought trails. I've had a really good time talking to you.
Speaker 1:Discipline now leads to greater opportunities down the road. Spot market gaps and connect the dots. Rue identified a lack of coaching for the middle 98%, not just beginners or elites. Mapping out solutions for an unmet need could be the foundation of your business. Scaling with intention matters, choosing to stay smaller, refining internal efficiencies and priorit services, off-season training or strategic partnerships. Resourcefulness fuels success. As mentioned, rue started teaching from the back of a car, proof that a grassroots approach fueled by determination can build something big.
Speaker 1:Be a leader who removes obstacles. Support your team by clearing the path for them to grow, improve and contribute meaningfully to the business. Create an environment where employees feel valued. Do your people see you as someone who fights to pay them well and prioritize their well-being? A thoughtless, unkind employer will throttle enthusiasm and loyalty. Rethink the traditional business hierarchy. The American model often puts shareholders first, customers second and employees third. But you can design your business differently.
Speaker 1:Be intentional about what you're creating, whether in business or life. Consciously define what you want and how you'll get there. Seek wisdom from those ahead of you. Get in rooms with people who are smarter than you and absorb what they know. Get in rooms with people who are smarter than you and absorb what they know. Dedication outperforms raw talent. You don't have to be a genius, you just need time, curiosity and consistent effort to become great at something.
Speaker 1:Let go of the noise. No matter what you do, there's always going to be a percentage of people who just don't like you. But that's just part of the noise. Don't let it take up space in your mind and find ways to be less affected by that noise. A close loss can shift your perspective. When someone you love passes earlier than expected, it forces you to ask what truly matters to me. What do I value most in my life?
Speaker 1:Check your buckets Professionally. Rue mentions filling four core buckets economic security, health status or status, which I interpreted to be authenticity, and community status, which I interpreted to be authenticity, and community and quality relationships with those closest to you. If your buckets are full, stop pouring more in and redirect your energy where it's needed. Athletic pursuits teach business lessons. Surfing teaches adaptability, because the ocean is an uncontrollable variable. The same applies to business. Firing with dignity matters. When parting ways with employees, ensure they leave with respect. And some book recommendations from Rue the Status Game by Will Storr and Behavioral Economics Books by Daniel Kahneman and Richard Wiseman. That's it for today. I release episodes once a week, so come back and check it out. Have a great day.
