Provalytics CEO Advocates Health & Fitness for Business Success

The CEO of Provalytics spoke about the importance of prioritizing physical health in order to run a successful business. He discussed how investing in personal fitness can positively impact leadership abilities, mental clarity, and decision-making skills. The CEO also emphasized the need for companies to create a culture that values health and wellness in the workplace, and shared some of the initiatives that Provalytics has implemented to promote a healthy work-life balance for its employees.

We’re constantly trying to find that equilibrium in life where it feels like we’re doing a great job in our business and we’re doing a great job in our personal life.

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But why does it still feel unachievable?

In this episode, I talk to Provalytics CEO Jeff Greenfield about practices he’s put in place to ensure quality time with his family, intense focus on his business, and the type of wellbeing that allows you to sleep 12 hours straight.

James Johnson
Jeff, welcome to Future Fit Founder. When are we going back to?

Jeff Greenfield
We’re going back to early 2022 let’s say March, February, March, 2022.

James Johnson
That’s amazing. What’s happening for you in March, February 22?

Jeff Greenfield
I’m at a transition time in my life whereI had built a company up from 2008. I exited in 2019 and spent a year running around some startup ideas. Nothing really took off. And then I ended up taking a job at 55.  And I’d never worked for anyone else my entire life. So it was a whole new experience. I didn’t want to do it at first, but my wife said why don’t you try it?  You’re always used to building teams. This will flex a different muscle for you. So I thought, okay I’ll give it a shot. Why not? Right? And did that, enjoyed it. But I enjoyed it maybe a little too much because some of the things about it were so different from a startup.

Friday night would come normally when you have your own company, you’re working until nine, 10 o’clock at night. You work all day Saturday, all day Sunday. Maybe you’re doing other responsibilities and other things, but the reality is that you’re really hyper-focused on the business. Well, Friday night would roll around and, and I’d shut down my computer and I wouldn’t look again until Monday morning. And I was like this is wild. I had never relaxed so much in my life ever. So that was a great kind of takeaway for me. But what I didn’t like about the job is the number of meetings where I wasn’t doing something. And as a founder, you’re constantly doing things. You’re wearing multiple hats. And when you’re part of a very large team, you’ve got to kind of stay in your own lane.  And, I guess you could say I’m a bit of a crazy driver, which all of us founders are because you, you’re shifting constantly.

And so, spending greater than 50% of my time in meetings was driving me crazy. So when I left in, in earlier part of 2022, I knew I wanted to do something new, but I was a little concerned because I hadn’t started a company since 2008. So, that’s a long time. And it’s a completely different muscle that you have when you’re starting something from scratch versus when you’re scaling it up versus when you’re up to like 50 or 55 employees, completely different muscles. So those startup muscles hadn’t been utilized in a long time, and I was afraid that they were getting a little weak, if you will. And so, I went to start this, but, I definitely had my doubts… was this the right direction? Should I look for another job? Dare I say or should I look for other opportunities?

James Johnson
So 2008, you started your own business, you grew it successfully, you act, and then you are taking another job. And the elements of it that you’re loving, possibly too much , and now you’re doing your own thing again. But faced with this thought of, well, can I remember how to do this?

Jeff Greenfield
Because, the world has changed.  In 2008, things were completely different, especially in my business of advertising technology. It was the beginning of things. Facebook a new thing that had just started. Google was the most dominant player. There was no Amazon ads, there were no ads to buy on Walmart or Target. There’s CTV (connected television), the digitization of TV wasn’t even around now. The level of complications and the number of channels and things that have to be measured and accounted for, this is a whole new different world that we’re living in. So I definitely had had my doubts and I actually had a series of conversations with my wife, and I said to her, I feel like I’m starting from like zero.  And she said to me that’s not the case because I’ve been in this space since 2008, and I’m really starting from the point at which I left. And I’m going get to where I want to be so much faster because I know the business, I know the players. I know what the needs and the wants of the customers are. So all of those early discoveries that you have to go through when you’re building a product and building a business, I don’t have to go through.  I already know what they are. I haven’t lost touch with the industry. So that helped to set me straight. But I was definitely concerned.

James Johnson
Okay. So you’ve clearly got a very good advisor in your wife / coach . So that bedrock is in place. Does that fully address that thought of, I haven’t done this since 2008?

Jeff Greenfield
No, it definitely does not. There’s still doubts because everyday I’m doing things that are to lead to a response to get potential customers or take current customers and get them to sign the contract and move things forward. And that you always get frustrated because as a founder, we’re very positive about things because this is like a baby. I know it’s going to grow up. I know it’s going to be great, it’s going to be incredibly successful. But then there’s those other voices in your head that say, you haven’t done this in a number of years.  So there’s always those seeds of doubt that are there that you have to overcome. And I don’t care how successful a founder is and how big the business is everyone has doubts there, those are always there and they never go away. Sometimes they get a lot louder. And the key is to try to keep them under control.

James Johnson
So it’s not when things are going, when you just start now, even when things are going really well, there’s still, there’s still the capacity for doubt.

Jeff Greenfield
Oh, of course. Because one of the other things is that when you start out with a new business, you’ve got probably 20 or 25 things that you could do. And so you start to look at each one of them, and eventually you go through a process where you say, okay, this one I’m going to go forward with. But those other ones, they don’t go away because there’s a part of you that liked it and you’ve just killed it. But those little parts of you are still inside of you. And those are the ones who are saying, Hey, you know, maybe this was a better idea. So anytime you, you hit a roadblock and you hit roadblocks every single day, I always say the only way out is through. You can’t really go around it. You have to just push through. But those doubts are always there without a doubt.

James Johnson
And it sounds like the doubts are there, but the ideas, it’s quite the idea that you start with all these ideas and it’s so true. I mean, when, as a founder, ever short of ideas, , but you don’t try and kill them, but they’re still lurking in the background somewhere. And the moment of sort of weakness or doubt or everything that kind of in the back going, what about me? Pick me , try me.

Jeff Greenfield
That’s exactly right. And sometimes you say, people always talk about, do you have a plan B? And it’s like, as a founder, no, there’s no plan B, I’m just going to going to push through and make it work. But in the back of your head, you still have this idea that you’re going to do when you get done with this, this one, when this one is a huge, incredible success, this is the next thing I’m going to do. Because you have to have an outlet for that kind of stuff. And it’s important to write down and also go back and evaluate yourself later on.

James Johnson
That’s really nice. So this idea that actually just get ’em out of your head and get ’em on paper and just kind of check in on them occasionally, but on your terms.

Jeff Greenfield
That exactly right. If you don’t, they’re going to keep grazing in your brain and come up. But this way you can go and check on them every now and then, make sure they’re okay, and then leave them there. But what’s fascinating is that with time, a lot of ideas that you come up with don’t look so good. Years ago I would tell my wife every idea that I had and I literally drove her crazy.  I would tell her 20, 30 ideas a day and she would be like, okay, these sound great.  I come back 20 minutes later with another idea, completely different. She’s like, well, what about that one? Well, now I like this one. So I drove her crazy. So that’s where I started writing things down because I figured I’d write them down and then when I read them, they tend to look a little different. And I had to edit myself a bit with her, so I didn’t drive her so crazy.

James Johnson
I can only imagine. So let’s say if you started your previous business in 2008 and then you worked somewhere else by the time it came round to starting your current business, there must have been a lot of ideas to choose from in your head, both in the books in your head as you’re going through. How did you narrow it down to the one you went with?

Jeff Greenfield
When I started the former company in 2008, I had a bunch of different gigs that I was working on. I thought this was going to be like a part-time thing. And then as I became more engrossed in it and started scaling the team, those other things I had to let go of, because this really was a full-time 24/7 effort. When I left there I felt mentally drained.  The product was built, I had accomplished what I needed to accomplish, and I felt like creatively I was kind of sapped. So having two and a half years, and part of that was at a job, it let me start thinking about things. And I think that’s an important thing is that you can’t force this stuff.  Because when I left there in 2019, I had a couple ideas, but I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. And what I ended up doing was I spent two or three months just relearning how to code PHP which I found to be very relaxing and enjoyable because when you’re doing computer coding, you want to get from point A to point B, you want the machine to do something, but you get to decide as the programmer how it gets there.  And there’s a a million different ways and sometimes the hardest work is not in the coding, it’s figuring out the path. And that I found to be very creative. And that kind of sparked me thinking about possibilities and ideas.

When I left the job, I didn’t want to necessarily go back into my former field, which was measurement / advertising effectiveness.  I had been hearing about a bunch of other newer startups that were out there, and I was very excited. So I got demos of these companies with the idea that when I found one that was incredible, I was going to back it, maybe invest in it and help them out however I could because I’d been out of the space for about a year and a half. Well it turns out that in my time away, the industry had been rocked with all of these changes kind of an apocalypse of signals for digital advertising.  And out of the mist was a backwards look at measurement that didn’t account for things appropriately. And I felt like it was doing a bit of a disservice to marketers and brands.

I saw that an opportunity.  And there’s another pivot point that’s happening, which is Google Analytics, which everyone uses to measure their website traffic. You have to switch it over to a new version as of July of next year. And what that means for marketers is that there’s now going to be a new source of truth and it’s going to cause a lot of questioning.  So I saw this as a really good market opportunity where people are going to be scratching their heads. So the big players in the field are not looking at things properly, at least from my perspective and the biggest player in the field (Google), everyone has to now spend a lot of time and look at the data and it’s going to look different. So whenever people are questioning something that’s a necessity for their business, they look around and see, well, is there something else out there?

And so that to me, created an opportunity. And also, the way I wanted to build this business was to build it at my own speed. I wanted something that I could take the time to do. I could work with my first set of customers and treat them as partners because they’re going to help me understand what their wants and needs are, more so than what I even understand. And at a speed that I can also keep my relaxing skills that I took for my job on my weekends and not stress out too much. Because once you start hiring a team and building that up… to me, my team was always part of my family. I cared so much for my team. I remember one Valentine’s Day, my wife and I are out to dinner and, in my household, Valentine’s Day is like a religious holiday.  I mean, it’s a big deal. And we’re out dressed up to the nines and I get a text from one of my employees who has the same dog that you have, James and his dog was sick and he was at the emergency vet and they needed $600 in order to treat him, and he didn’t have the money. So I got up from the table, called them and gave them my credit card because I knew he would pay me back. I wasn’t worried about that. But I also knew that if his dog didn’t get healthy, his ability to continue to work, he was going to be constantly worried about his dog. And if there was something I could do to help, then that meant the world for me. So I was always on call 24/7 for my team. So I’m not anxious to get back there again. I’m enjoying the relaxing and the slow movement of building a startup. Those factors led me to say this feels like the right idea. I can leverage my experience, I can move at my own speed, and then when it gets to a point where I need to scale, then I have a decision that I have to make whether I want to do it again or not.

James Johnson
So actually, despite these doubts that you alluded to, actually, the previous experiences your wife identified allowed you to spot a market gap quite quickly. You were quite clear around the type of business you wanted to build initially, that you wanted to rather than shoot for scale. And it was about building something carefully with some key clients, partners, not building a team, really being focused on the quality of the work and quality of life. And take some of those, it would take some of the lessons you’ve learned around work life balance from, from from working that feels quite having that played back to you. Does that, how does that sound?

Jeff Greenfield
Yeah, you’re spot on in terms of that.  I remember one time when I was running my other company, I always had my phone on me anytime away. I was always working and I had made a decision that we were going to go away. I think it was for my birthday. We were going up to Maine and I let everyone know that my phone was going to be off for 48 hours. Now, everyone who needed me, they all had my wife’s phone number. So if there was an emergency, I would know about it. But I’ll never forget, I got in the car and as we’re getting on the highway, I grab my phone and I turn it off. This was terrifying for me. Absolutely terrifying.  But I turned my phone off and then throughout the two and a half hour drive up to Maine, I must have yawned a thousand times. My wife said that as soon as I turned that phone off, I started yawning like crazy. We went to this amazing little inn on the ocean, and that day when I went to sleep, I slept for 14 hours. And so I realized this concept that you have to have that balance and being able to, to shut off and know that things are going to be okay. I mean, this is where, as a founder, all of these tools are awesome, but they’re also somewhat bad as well too, because it’s so easy for you to be in touch with what’s going on, which means you don’t get to take a break. And we need those breaks. And that work life balance, the aspect of your overall health is incredibly important, especially when it comes to dealing with doubts that you have about your business.

James Johnson
See, that’s, and that’s a really interesting point. So what is it about, dealing with the doubts you have about your business and that combination with like, looking after yourself, how do those two play together?

Jeff Greenfield
Well, if you’re not taking care of yourself, if you’re not healthy physically and mentally, it’s easy for those doubts to kind of jump in.  It’s just a natural thing when you’re strong, think about it, it’s kind of like a cold, when you’re eating, right.  You’re sleeping properly, you’re doing all the things that you should be doing, you’re taking time to relax. The chances of you getting sick, yes, can you get sick, but you have done everything in your power to ensure that it won’t happen. So I always kind of look at your body as it’s a gas tank when it comes to food and alcohol. And if you were to put water in your gas tank, none of us would be surprised if your car wouldn’t run.  It’s not made to run on water. And yet we’re constantly putting stuff into our body that we know is not good for it. We don’t eat enough vegetables, we eat food that’s not great. We consume too much alcohol, especially when we’re stressed out. All of those things make your engine kind of sluggish. Now, what’s incredible about the human body, unlike a car engine, is that we can do so much damage to our body and there’s all these filtration systems in it, but as you get older, your ability to filter out all that stuff and function is not there. So that’s one aspect is is having a healthy diet. The other aspect is sleep. Sleep is probably one of the most important things. And I know a lot of founders that don’t sleep a lot at all.
They’ll sleep like five hours. And there was a time where sleeping for a short period of time at night, hat was a sign that you were strong. But the reality is that’s a sign that you’re weak. And now I think people are starting to understand that there’s a lot of movements with, some of the mattresses that have the cool water that go through them. I’ve got one of them. And sleeping in a very cool environment is very relaxing, helps you go into a deeper sleep. So making certain that you get that seven to eight and sometimes 12 hours of sleep that you need. I think one of the other things that is important as well is that ideas and solutions for your business, they don’t always happen when you’re awake.
And once you start to eat better and sleep better, you’re going to notice that you’re going to dream more often. And it used to bother me that my wife and daughter used to talk about their dreams every day. And I was like, I don’t feel like I’m dreaming, but what it was is that I just wasn’t paying attention to them. So now I keep a notebook at my side table, and I’ll wake up at like three or four o’clock in the morning after a dream and I’ll write it down just like I write those other ideas down just so I have them to refer back to. Because it’s fascinating when you write down a dream and then you go back and you look at it and you’re able to find some meaning in it. And that’s the same place where business ideas come from.  It’s the same place where creativity comes from. It’s that other part of you, your unconscious mind that is always there, always watching, but it’s important to pay attention to that. I think the other thing that’s important as well is that, there’s no way that you can function throughout the day by working nine to five. You know, back before, in traditional work, people come to work at nine, they would go and they would leave and take an hour lunch to kind of chill down a little bit. And then on the way home from work, they’re driving home where they’re relaxing, they’re getting into that home zone. And now with people working remote, it’s very difficult to kind of power down, if you will. So I take an hour every day in the middle part of my day to do what I call a power down, which is I’ll go in, I’ll lay down on a couch or lay down on my bed, I’ll shut my eyes, cover myself with a blanket and just go and I’ll find that within like a couple of minutes, I’m, I’m zoned out.  I’m not sleeping, but my mind is relaxing and unwinding. And, when I wake up from that, I’m recharged, I’m ready to take on the rest of the afternoon. And I took that from years ago in my first business. I would work in the morning from like eight to 11, go out and have lunch, and then work again from four to seven. And after I would have lunch, I would go and I’d lay down and I’d go to sleep for a couple hours, wake up, take a shower again, like it was a new day. So I’ve kind of borrowed from that with that power down. So eating right, powering down, making certain you’re sleeping enough and, and writing down these ideas that come to you, especially in dreams are so important.

James Johnson
So here there’s two things. One is this idea that we equip ourselves better as founders by being in a better state. So that’s a natural things going to go wrong, all this stuff. But actually if we’re feeling better, we’re going to be much strongest deal with it. And second is the idea of just leaving space for ourselves for our creativity, for our recovery. And it’s not just a case of charge, charge, charge, charge, charge. Is that right?

Jeff Greenfield
You’re absolutely right. I always say to folks that your calendar should never be more than 50% full. Because you need time to recharge, you need time to relax. You sometimes need time just to think a little bit about a call or an email. You can’t move forward at lightning speed. And this idea that you can multitask, it doesn’t work. Now as a founder, you have to wear multiple hats. But it’s really important that when you put on that hat that you’re all in on that hat versus trying to do that and three other things at the same time. Because what ends up happening is you go back and you evaluate the quality of the work and you’re going to get disappointed. It’s not going to be up to what you want it to be and what you would expect.

James Johnson
So nice. It’s acknowledging there are lots of hats, but it’s been quite disciplined about when you are wearing one hat, wear that one hat.

Jeff Greenfield
Yeah. And you have to be in that mindset. And it’s very tough as well because for a lot of us, let’s say you’re scaling a team and you’re the CEO, but they need help in account management. Well, you’re not the CEO right now. You have to take that hat off and get in the mindset of account management, because if you want to help them, you have to think like them. You have to be them. And so you have to take yourself back to the early days of the company and rely on the foundations that you’ve established. Usually what ends up happening is when there’s problems in the business, it’s because there’s been so many new people that have come in and the foundations aren’t being followed that you set. So you have to kind of go back and remember what are those foundational ideas and concepts because those that you start are what builds a company when you have really strong ideas about how you want your business to run. And as new people come on board, they’re either not onboarded properly. So you have to take the CEO hat off and go back to your foundations so that you can help them.

James Johnson
So it feels, Jeff, like you’ve got a very clear idea around looking after yourself, creating that space. A lot of the pods I talked to my clients around from sort of being future fit. And you’re coming at this with a lot of experience, but you still have these doubts. When you start, what do you think’s going on there?

Jeff Greenfield
I think it’s part of what all founders fear, which is the fear of failure. You don’t want to fail because you’re all in on something. And that’s a natural fear that we all all have. And again, it’s those voices or a singular voice in your head that says, Hey, maybe you should do something that’s a little safer that’s a little more guaranteed, like the job.   But I’ll go back to that. The thing I did like about the job is that I got to see the inside of how big businesses run that I’ve always seen from the outside. And I saw it firsthand where most people, half the time, the decisions they made were in the best interest of the company.  And the other half of the time they were in their own best interest to ensure that they kept their job. And I found that a lot of people would build moats around themselves. And I started feeling that way. I started feeling like, this is so good that I want to build a moat around this. And I’m like, what am I doing? This is because to me, from a creativity place, that’s death. Because now it’s all about, maintaining where you’re at, and you’re in stasis, which is not good. Founders are like sharks. We have to always keep moving in order to breathe. So the failure aspect is always there. It’s always looming because we’re taking huge risk. And even though there is a risk, there is a risk that the partners you work with won’t like the product.  The folks you’re working with decide, Hey, I don’t want to work with you anymore. I want to work with someone else. And there’s always the human aspect of it. Every relationship, there’s different personalities. So there’s like, you know, the personalities can clash and then that can kill it right there. And also, I’m bootstrapping this instead of raising money and I’m moving at a slower pace than I would if, if I had raised money. And the disadvantage is the speed, because in a startup, you always, you know, you get the money so that you can move at a faster, faster speed and gain some market share. And this, so there’s a risk there. So there’s a lot of risk in order for me to maintain my, my work-life balance, or I should say my sanity in that case. And so that, to me, maintaining that work-life balance is, is my primary thing that has to be there in order for this to be a success. Otherwise, it, it won’t be successful because at the end of the day, I won’t be healthy enough to enjoy it.xxxx

James Johnson
Hmm. I talked to my clients a lot about, I actually quite, I don’t particularly like the phrase worklife balance cause I feel it sets you up to fail. It’s kind of kind like work life integration, just how, how, how you make the two work together. And actually the irony is I think when we get told, oh, well you think, I mean, I said myself earlier, like, it feels very sequential. Like you sort out your work and then you exit or you do whatever, and then you sort out your personal life. That feels very logical,

Jeff Greenfield
Right?

James Johnson
But actually ignoring your personal life, ignoring yourself actually makes you less likely to achieve your work objective. And so making sure the two work together, like you can go have Valentine’s Day with your wife and go traveling. She’s clearly a big part of what you do. Same thing, my wife is, my family’s everything. If your work goal, if they don’t work together, it’s not going to, it’s, it’s not going to work. Cause it’ll, you’ll break on the journey as as, as what, as what I see a lot. Does, does that resonate?

Jeff Greenfield
It totally does. And I, I talked to a founder yesterday who’s built an incredibly successful company. He’s raised a lot of money. And we reconnected because we hadn’t talked in like 12 years, maybe 14, 14 years now. And I was one of his first 20 customers when he started the company, and it’s now massive. So we talked about the growth that he’s been through, and I asked him about how, because they were hybrid before, but he would go into the office every day. But since Covid, they’re a hundred percent remote. And I asked him, how is that working in terms of integrating his, his home and his work life? And he, he said, it’s, it, it’s so much better. Because when he was at the office and it was a Friday night and he knew he should leave by five o’clock, but he had work to do, he would stay there till seven, eight o’clock at night and miss bedtime for the kids.
And when he is working from his home office, regardless of what’s going on at five 15, he, he shuts down his computer, he’s there for bedtime, he can hang out with his young kids and then if there’s something that would’ve kept them, he can then go back later on and work on it. So there’s no stress. And so this way, because he’s working remote, it enables him to, to spend that time with his kids that he wouldn’t normally get. So it, it, it, you’re right. It’s, it, it’s really about integrating it. And I, and I think for some, like, like this friend of mine, the, the remote is helping him. For a lot of others it’s having that addiction and having it right there it can, can make it very difficult for someone like me. It, it is very difficult. I mean, I have it in a, my computer’s in a different room, but most of what I do is on my phone.
So it’s very tough to, to not check things. And I actually, I had to take Slack off of my phone because I found I was checking it constantly. It became the thing, I’m sitting on the toilet and I’m checking my phone to, to look at Slack and I’m like, what am I doing? Okay, there, there’s, there’s nothing here that is more important than what I’m doing right now, . So I, and, and, and so I, I, I realized okay, I cannot trust myself, so take it off the phone. So I took it off the phone and it has cut my stress level down dramatically. So I, I know with my personality, I’m if it’s available for me. And that’s why in, in the instance of the story I told you earlier, I had actually turned my phone off. Cause cuz I, I can’t trust myself.

James Johnson
I think it, there’s one of the habits that I think we all like email, LinkedIn, slack. There are so many ways that we can get pulled into the business and that take us out of, out of whatever we’re meant to be focusing on that. And it’s some, someone will come with a good solution at some stage. Cause I, I have the same thing as you. I delete periodically, I delete email off my phone and it comes back on. I delete LinkedIn off my phone, it comes back on. I, I, I really like people who try and say, oh, I, I won’t look at my phone before a certain time in the morning. I think these are all really good habits, just really hard to stick to

Jeff Greenfield
It. Well, and the tough thing is that most of these were designed to addict us. I mean, we know that they, all of these programs with the exception of email, have been really gamified. And so they, they were designed to, to get our brains to constantly look at them. And it’s almost impossible. If you look at your phone and you see LinkedIn has got 25 notifications and, and there’s that whole, what do they call it? The brain reward Cascade theory. And, you know, and, and this, these are, you know, the, you know, clicking on that 25 number is like, you know, getting a shot of dopamine. It’s, it’s, it’s like, it’s like a hit on the crack pipe if you will. Hmm. so I turned off all my notifications except for text. Those are the only sounds that I hear. I actually have my phone, the sound always turned off, so it just vibrates. But I look at my phone when I looked at LinkedIn and my email, it doesn’t show me how many. So I actually have to take that extra step to click it to see which I do more frequently than I should . But if the number was there, it would probably be 10 x what it is. You know, ,

James Johnson
I, I went to a, a really interesting talk for about 15 years ago talk, talked about designing for laziness. Yeah. And the idea was to design your life for your house ever. So that the example gave couple is set example, like if you have any chocolate biscuits, put them on the top shelf so they’re not easy to get to and put like healthy snacks on the counter. Easy to get to. They suggested you had a tv, actually unplug your TV and put it in a cupboard . And then if you want to watch tv, and you had to basically put it on, put it on the wall and then plug it in. And that made it, I mean, now with Netflix and iPads and everything, and it’s all, it’s all gone. But,

Jeff Greenfield
Well with the, with the food example that you gave, what I found is that it doesn’t matter where the snacks are in the house, I will eat them, so will my wife. So we found that the best thing is not to have them in the house. Those is like no snacks in the house. And when, like the holidays come around for like Thanksgiving and people bring us pies and things like that, we will cut a slice that night and then it goes right in the bin. We get rid of it because it, my wife always taught me, she’s like, there’s no difference whether it’s in the trash or your stomach. So just throw it out. And so again, I can’t trust myself, you know, if there’s nice brownies in the house or chocolate or cookies, like the black and white cookies, I, I mean, they’re going to be gone. So I might as well just not have them in the house. That way I’m not tempted. I mean, if I want them, I can get, I’m making it more difficult. I have to get in the car and drive to the store.

James Johnson
, fair way to say it. I, I get, I’ll get, go out the house and g the bin

Jeff Greenfield
. That’s right. Yeah. No, I haven’t, I haven’t done that except for maybe in college. But I haven’t done that as an adult. Definitely not.

James Johnson
But I, I think what’s really nice about this is like you, you’re carrying this with like, so you’ve got these doubts in the business, you’ve got these habits, but it’s just acknowledging like there are situations where we can’t trust ourselves. Whether that’s small things like eating a bag of biscuits or whether it’s a bigger thing, like listening to ideas that are sitting in the back of our head. There are things that we can do by sound things to help us, like leave invitation out, have good habits, bright ideas down. There’s lots of practical things we’ve talked about. But that with all those things, it’s still okay to go, okay, maybe we can’t trust ourselves. And that’s noble

Jeff Greenfield
It, it, it’s totally normal. Cuz at the end of the day, you know, as a founder, these, these ideas, they come in and, and you know it like the back of your hand that it’s going to work. But you can’t forget one important thing. W we’re human. And, and there’s, you know, wherever there’s good, there’s going to be bad. So when things work out really well, there’s always a balance in life that yin and yang, if you will. So always, always be looking always be prepared, but also understand that, you know, you’re going to get to your goal, but the way you get there may not be the way you anticipated. It may be a zigzaggy type course. And not to be too hard on yourself about it and understand we’re, we’re human. At the end of the day, we’re, we’re going to make mistakes. And just like, it’s, it’s okay to have doubts. That’s a, that’s a human quality.

James Johnson
Hmm. I really like that. It’s, it’s

Jeff Greenfield
That we’re not infallible. We’re not perfect. And you know, even if you, but, and, and here’s, here’s the greatest thing about that is that if you’re a founder and you have an idea and you execute on it and everything works and you have this massive exit, I would argue that from a financial sense, that may be great. But for you as a person, it’s, it’s not great because we only learn by making mistakes. We only learn by failing a little bit. And it’s our failures and it’s our mistakes that we make that, that make us stronger and make us better overall humans, if you will. So you, you wanna, you wanna fail? I, I’ve all of, all of my failures, you know, I, I always say to my wife that, you know, if, if God or someone came down and said, Jeff, I can, I can make those failures go away and it, it will be as though they never happened. I would say, well, but I would lose the knowledge that I gained with that. And so I, I I, I love my mistakes. They’re, they’re part of me. And they make me who I am today. And it, it makes, it makes living life so much more enjoyable because every time you fail a little bit, every time you make a mistake, your perspective and your view on other people and, and other businesses has, has been expanded and shaped. And that’s, that’s a wonderful thing.

James Johnson
Actually. It was one of the driving forces he’s podcast actually was just that you always in the press or when you go to conferences or you go speak, it’s always a narrative of success. And it’s always a narrative. Oh, I set up to do this. I did these three things and hey, presto, I’ve done this. And even though we know that’s not how it worked, and they set out to do why? And so it went horribly wrong. We end up like, that’s not the narrow people tell telling these things. And so I think having a space where people can actually really hear what’s gone wrong and what’s going right allows us to realize that we’re all, we’re all the same. We’re all human. There’s no such thing as this kind of uber mench founder story. There are some, there are some founders who say, get incredibly lucky and just everything works, but they’re not very many of them. And actually we’re better, we’re better off for this journey as, as humans and, and for future businesses as well. We, we, cause it’s repeatable,

Jeff Greenfield
Right? And, and, you know, you can’t take it with you. We’re all, we’re all here to get along with each other and, and kind of make our way in life. And it, it’s been proven time and time again that having more stuff it does isn’t a road to happiness. I, I think, I think the road to happiness is, is you know, having a, gaining a good understanding of yourself and, and you know, being able to, to love when you messed up because of the lessons that you learned. And, and, you know, is that going to lead to a successful business following that? Maybe, maybe not. But I think following that leads to a more successful and happy human at the end of the day. And that’s, that’s really what this is about for me at least.

James Johnson
It’s about what’s going to lead to a successful founder, even more than as more successful business. So I think that’s, that’s great. Thank you so much.

Jeff Greenfield
My pleasure, James. It’s been a pleasure.

James Johnson
As you heard today, coaching opens up a whole range of insights and areas to explore. If you have a potential moment to revisit and the podcast or just want to learn more about coaching, book in for a 30 minute chat with [email protected].