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The Dreamfuel Show is a research expedition to uncover and unpack the mindsets of impactful tech founders and executives. On this show, we’re going to get real and talk about what was actually going on in their hearts and minds during the harrowing journeys that forged them and their companies! We’ll also speak with performance experts who will share the latest tips, tools, and tricks that can help us realize our own dreams, too.
As we like to say at Dreamfuel, every quarter is a hero’s journey. So be sure to hit follow to join us along the way.
David Mann [00:00:00]:
If they know we truly care about them, not only in their professional lives, but in their personal lives, all of that's going to come together to produce a company that people want to work at, a culture you want to be part of. And what does that produce? Great numbers. That's where we are on this journey. And we haven't perfected it, believe me, but we're certainly trying.
Kevin Bailey [00:00:21]:
Hey, it's Kevin, and I hope you're enjoying the show. I know it's tough out there right now for tech leaders, and we appreciate you taking the time to focus on your mental performance and well being. Speaking of time, did you know that 76% of tech leaders lose 20 or more hours of productivity a week due to stress, fatigue, and feeling overwhelmed? To win these hours back, leaders need to learn the mental performance skills that keep you in the zone, where research shows that executives are five times more productive. And that's where we come in. Dreamfuel's Octane Cohort is our flagship mental performance program built for tech leaders under pressure who want to achieve their most ambitious goals in less time, with less frustration. To learn more, go to dreamfuel.com octane or just click the link in the description to see if you qualify.
Kevin Bailey [00:01:05]:
All right, back to the show.
Kevin Bailey [00:01:08]:
Welcome to The Dreamfuel Show, everyone.
Kevin Bailey [00:01:09]:
I am really, really excited about today's guest, David Mann, friend of mine. David and I have known each other for about a year now and just a great guy and he's done a lot in his life, very storied career and just continues to build. Just to give you a quick background, he was a naval officer and leader for about 20 years, ultimately working in the White House liaison office staff of the Secretary of the Navy. Went from there to transitioning to private equity, which he's been in for over 20 years. He's currently managing partners at Spring Mill Venture Partners and Firefly Group. He's got his MBA from Harvard. He is the chairman of the board at the Entrepreneurial Operating System, otherwise known as EOS, an operating system for nearly a quarter million companies, probably more now. And he's on the board at SENT Ventures, which is a membership group for Catholic entrepreneurs that include successful tech founders like Jamie Baxter of Exodus 90 and Alex Jones of the Hallow Meditation app.
Kevin Bailey [00:02:05]:
So, David, welcome to the show.
David Mann [00:02:07]:
Hey, thanks, Kevin, for having me. I glad to be here.
Kevin Bailey [00:02:10]:
Awesome. Well, we had a great conversation leading up to this podcast. We talked a lot about values and values driven leadership. And you know, to really understand the topic of values driven leadership and your story I normally don't get deep into the backgrounds of people, but I think in your case, it's important to really start from you growing up and talking about where you came from and to understand where you are now. So I'd love you just to talk a little bit about your background and how you got into the positions you're in now and coming through from childhood into going into the Navy and being a naval officer and then up to now.
David Mann [00:02:47]:
Yeah, happy to. I guess I'd start by saying when we talked about this topic, I was a bit hesitant to do it. Like, hey, talking about faith and core values, just go out and do these things. The people who oftentimes talk about them, they're not necessarily doing them. So I want to be a doer of these things versus a talker of these things. What if I do something that screws up and like, oh, here's the guy who is always talking about faith. He's always this rub, because it's such an important part of my life. But there's always this, do I want to talk about this? And if I do, how does that come across? And if somebody says, I saw him do that, he's not all he talks about doing.
David Mann [00:03:23]:
So anyway, I don't like talking about myself, but I will. Hopefully it resonates with some folks who may have some similar experiences. I grew up in a small town in Southern Indiana. Blue collar family. My dad drove a bus for a living. My mom worked in the kitchen of a nursing home, which was a great background. But I went to this high school in Louisville, Kentucky, in all boys Catholic high school. It's a great school sports powerhouse.
David Mann [00:03:49]:
But I always felt like, do I really fit in here? To help pay for my lunch, I would clean the lunch tables after my classmates. So they are eating their lunch and I'm cleaning the tables after them. And it always developed this chip on my shoulders. I have something to prove. I've got to prove to the world that I am somebody. And so that creates a drive and ambition. But the downside of that for me is self worth. Self esteem gets tied to accomplishment, the next award, the next recognition, what somebody says positively about me.
David Mann [00:04:24]:
And so I'm always chasing that on the treadmill, or at least I was chasing that next trophy, the next award that was about me putting myself first and living my life. Me.
Kevin Bailey [00:04:36]:
You made it into the, to the Navy Academy as a football player, right?
David Mann [00:04:40]:
Yeah. I got recruited for football to the Naval Academy, which our high school team won the state championship. I got recruited to the Naval Academy. I wasn't very good and had an injury, so I was on the team for about 30 seconds. It did help me get into the Naval Academy and set me on my path, which opened my eyes to a world that I didn't know even existed.
Kevin Bailey [00:04:58]:
Tell me about the Navy. I mean, obviously I want to get into your background in private equity, but I'd love to hear about how the Navy shaped you the four years there.
David Mann [00:05:07]:
It pulls people from all over the United States, people from every background. It's a leadership laboratory. You're learning how to lead. 247 is a leadership laboratory. And you're either you're learning to do this right, you make mistakes and you try again. All with the idea when you graduate, you're going to go out and be a Naval officer. And so that's what I did when I graduated from the Naval Academy. I went out to become a naval officer.
David Mann [00:05:31]:
I served on a nuclear guided missile cruiser for three years. And you're standing in front of your division, your troops for the first time. And here's these people, in some cases twice as old as you, been doing the job for forever. And here I am, this new 20 year old Ensign in the Navy and I have to lead these folks. People oftentimes think, oh, in the military you just bark out orders and people go and do them. Well, that might work once, but people are people and they like to be motivated and inspired just like anywhere else in the world. And if you're going to lead, well, you have to learn how to motivate, inspire and work with people who have more experience than you, who come from every walk of life. And that was a interesting challenge and that set me on my path and I couldn't have asked for a better first job in my career than that.
Kevin Bailey [00:06:16]:
Yeah, I'd love to talk about leadership in the trenches, so to speak. Obviously, a lot of the people listening to this podcast are leaders of companies, but normally lives aren't on the line. I guess in some cases they can be, but it's very rare. What is the difference when you're leading people on a nuclear submarine and literally at any moment, lives could easily be on the line and potentially take lives for obviously for needed reasons. But tell me about that kind of leadership. How do they teach you to lead in those kind of high stakes situations?
David Mann [00:06:45]:
I mean, the bar is obviously high because you have the life of these folks in your hands and you have to have conviction and core values about doing the right thing all the time, no matter who's watching. If Nobody's watching. You have to do the right thing. Because when we don't do the right thing and we take shortcuts in that environment, people can die. And so there's these core values that we talk about doing things with integrity that we talk about. You have to be living those, because if you don't and say nobody's going to notice, I'll take a shortcut here. That's when bad things happen out in that environment, when you're operating and you're trying to protect the world when you take those shortcuts. And those core values weren't true to who you are, it comes to fruition in a, in a negative way.
David Mann [00:07:31]:
And these troops who you're leading, they can see through the crap. These guys, a chief in the Navy who's been in the Navy 25 years, they've seen it all and they can see who's real and who's fake. And if you're fake and you're just, you're not really who you say you are. And you act like you, you pretend to care for these folks, but you truly don't. And it's about you. They've cut through that in a second and you're done. And so that was the biggest lesson for me, is you can't take shortcuts. You have to do it.
David Mann [00:07:59]:
Integrity, these core values have to mean something. And when you talk about you care for your people and you're going to lead these people, you better mean it.
Kevin Bailey [00:08:07]:
Yeah, there's a lot of people that talk values. And I find as, as a mindset coach, there's not a lot of people that actually live them or embody them to where other people can feel you living those values. And I think that's what you alluded to in the beginning here. It's like, I do want to jump into faith a little bit in here. You are on the board of Send Ventures, and that means something. And I've learned a lot from you. I became Catholic about six years ago, and you've been a mentor to me a little bit in that regard. So I do want to get into that, but I think it'd be good to bridge into it.
Kevin Bailey [00:08:36]:
These leadership lessons that you learned in the Navy in these high stakes environments, how did you transition those into being founding these private equity companies? And I'd like to hear how it translates over.
David Mann [00:08:48]:
Yeah. I was on active duty in the Navy for six and a half years. Then I transitioned. I went back to business school to get my mba. I stayed in the Navy Reserves as you said, I did 20 years total. When I got out of the Navy and went to business school, I had a mentor tell me, he said, you're going to find this difference. He said people in the military would often sat. They'd be willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of others.
David Mann [00:09:11]:
In the private sector, oftentimes people will sacrifice others for the good of themselves. Like, oof. He said, there's this mentality, I've got to make money, and it's about me, and they're willing to throw. I was like, wow, that's an interesting mindset. So I was like, huh. That was a data point in my mind, and there's been exceptions to that, but I've seen that play out in the business world quite a bit. I had this mentality about trying to achieve the next goal and doing things for me. And I got into this business world early in my career.
David Mann [00:09:40]:
I was on the operating side of companies before I became an investor. And in the early side of my career, it was about, how do I make money? How do I make a name for myself? And I was falling into that trap, too. And it took some mistakes and some humbling experiences to pull me back and say, this isn't who I am and who I'm trying to be.
Kevin Bailey [00:10:01]:
Yeah, talk about that a little bit. You're a young man with a young family trying to start an investment company, which is no small feat. How did that press on on your values? And when did you say, enough is enough and try and bring yourself back to center?
David Mann [00:10:15]:
Yeah, when I was 32, I tried to raise my. I was raising my first venture fund with a couple of partners. I'd moved to a new city, Indianapolis, and had not raised a venture fund before. And so I had one small child and another small child or another one on the way, and I went without a salary for three years. And I'm like, am I doing the right thing? Or. At the beginning of that, I was just so afraid of failing that I'm not going to pull this off because I haven't failed at anything. I've got to make this happen. So I can't throw in the towel and say, okay, I tried this, and so I'd go, keep trying to.
David Mann [00:10:51]:
We got to raise this fund and go another year. And it was another year. And so we eventually scraped together a small fund. But I looked back now, that was just all about, was that the best thing for my family, or is that just me and my pride and ego trying to say, I cannot fail? Instead of doing the Right thing. For my family, it may have been better to say, hey, you tried this. It didn't work. Go get a job and support your family. Fortunately, I had a wife that was working and helping and doing well, but that was a tough time.
Kevin Bailey [00:11:18]:
What you're alluding to and from our previous conversation is that, yeah, your ego or the part of you that wanted to succeed at all costs started to step in at that point, but that you had to wrestle it back under control and bring your real core values back to the forefront. What did that look like?
David Mann [00:11:35]:
As I say, God wanted me on my knees, so he brought me there with pain and mistakes. That was a big challenge. You have different family challenges along the way. In your extended family, you can have a lot of crisis and things that occurred and I had all those. And then we get into these companies we're investing in and it was all about, as a venture capitalist, just like, hit the numbers. You got to hit the numbers. This is the people I'm learning from. Nobody jumps out of the bed.
David Mann [00:12:00]:
How do I get up every morning to go hit the numbers? Important, but most people aren't getting out of bed for that. And I'm like, how do we maybe think about doing this differently and put people first? We're going to have a culture of accountability, but people are truly first. And if we do that and built these great cultures with great people, the numbers will take care of themselves. And so it took me a while. I was on that journey for 10 years before I was like, yeah, this is, I'm not excited about this. I believe the people we're investing in, they're probably not excited about my approach. Neither of us are having fun. How do we do this differently? And so when I, when we started the Firefly Group, we thought about, how do we do this differently and truly have a people first culture, have our core values mean something? That's where it started.
Kevin Bailey [00:12:47]:
This is a great topic. I work with a handful of investors. I mindset coach, mental performance coach a handful of investors. We partner with investors and from my understanding is a lot of investors. Their return is like their only number on their baseball card, so to speak. It's their era. And that number they live and die by, it's the number that stack ranks them in their orgs and it's incredibly stressful. So when you talk about your companies hitting their numbers, that translates over to your return number.
Kevin Bailey [00:13:16]:
I'm really curious. Tactically, you said building people first cultures, what does that look like and what does that mean? How did you transcend that number a little bit, your number in the investment.
David Mann [00:13:26]:
World, the returns allows you to raise your next fund, right? And so if you don't, if you don't have good returns, it gets harder to raise that next fund. But for us, we take a long term view. We're not trying to buy a company and flip it in three to five years. We'll hold companies for 10 years or more. Good companies are hard to find and we want to invest in people. Because what gets me out of bed every day, what gets Firefly Team out of bed every day, is how do we impact lives through business? And so how can we go in there and fill people up? When I came up through business, everybody was expected at 5 o'clock, you're drained of your energy or go home and you have nothing left and you plop down on the couch. Like, how about if we thought about this differently and go in every day and fill our people up with something so that they go home and their spouse and kids actually want to be around them and they get home and their kids don't have to say, I wonder what mood mom or dad's in today. I wonder if they had a good day or bad day.
David Mann [00:14:20]:
They can start to have a better trend and these husbands and wives can have a better relationship. The families can be more whole. If we do that, we're going to create better workers, they're going to create better returns if they know we truly care about them. Not only in their professional lives, what they can produce for me, but in their personal lives that I want to see you have a great family, I want to see you raise great kids. All of that's going to come together to produce a company that people want to work at, a culture you want to be part of. And what does that produce? Great numbers. And so that's where we are on this journey. And we haven't perfected it.
David Mann [00:14:58]:
Believe me, we're certainly trying.
Kevin Bailey [00:15:01]:
I love that mindset. Let's go onto the ground floor and talk a little bit about one of your holdings. Inevitably, when I work with entrepreneurs, at some point entrepreneurial operating system gets brought up. Either they're thinking about bringing into their company or they're utilizing it. I want to take a moment to talk about that holding of yours. You guys acquired EOS ways back and it's been growing amazingly under Firefly Group and you are the chairman of the board there. So let's talk about how you're doing this at EOS and obviously having great returns with them. They're growing Incredibly well, first and foremost.
David Mann [00:15:32]:
Is it comes down to the team we have there. I don't take any of the credit. We have a great, great team who's done a wonderful job. And just as a backstory on EOS, we were using EOS ourselves at Firefly and they seeing the success of it and it said, wow, I wonder what's behind this. So that's what got us interested. And somebody we tried to get, we saw the book Traction and it was written by Gino Wickman and we said, can we find somebody who would introduce us to Gino Wickman? And we found somebody who made an introduction to him and we got him on the phone. Took about a month to get him on the phone, but we got him on the phone. We had a short 20 minute phone call and we, I didn't know, I said, hey Gino, is this just a book or is there company behind it? He goes yeah, there's a company behind us doing pretty well.
David Mann [00:16:15]:
And I said, do you think you'd ever want to sell it? He's like no, like, oh, okay. He called his back six months later and said, I think I'm going to sell the company. And I got 12 criteria for the next buyer and only one of those is price. A lot of people may say that, but he truly meant it. And so we were able to go through this pro. He goes, I hired a banker. And like okay, well let's get in this process. And we were fortunate to become the partner and join them on the next phase of the journey.
David Mann [00:16:42]:
And that was in May of 2000. So it was a great journey. We had about 170 EOS implementers in the community now I think we just crossed 850 at this point around the world and we have 250, 60,000 companies now running on EOS. So it's been a great story but I'll tell one more story, Kevin, about core values. After we closed the investment in EOS, I was asked to stand up in front of their community with their internal team plus the implementer community of about 200 to introduce Firefly and talk about what we stood for. And I got up and says, hey, here's who Firefly is. We're super excited to be part of this escape. Some highlights on what we're doing.
David Mann [00:17:26]:
And I said I'm happy to take any questions from the audience. And I was getting some head nods and some smiles. I'm like this is going pretty well. And then a middle aged woman stood up and said, hey David, I like what you said about people and culture. So what are Firefly's core values? And I looked at her like a deer in the headlights and could not name one. So because of my failure that day, Firefly went back to the drawing board and said, we talk about these core values, are they just going to be something pretty that we hang on the wall when you walk in, or is this truly who we are? Because if they're truly who we are, we shouldn't have to memorize them. They just should come out of us. And so we took a whole new approach to how our core values, and thank goodness we did.
David Mann [00:18:09]:
And that question changed the trajectory of, of how we think about Fireflies core values, what they mean to us and how we're living them out. But it was a tough moment.
Kevin Bailey [00:18:20]:
Yeah, no question. That's. That had to shake you up a little bit. You talked about abundance being a core value of EOS and the entrepreneurial operating system and that team. Explain that a little bit.
David Mann [00:18:34]:
So at EOS, it's always this abundance mindset versus the scarcity mindset. We're always a help first mentality. And if you talk to an EOS implementer, I think it's the rare occasion that you don't find somebody who's about help first. And it's not about how can I make money off of you, it's how can I help you? And it's sincere and genuine. And that's the community that this attracts. It's the kind of people who are attracted to this community and what they're trying to do is people who truly want to help your business be better. If you go to the EOS website, there's lots of free resources out there because we want people to get what they need. If they want to have an implementer, we have great implementers for them.
David Mann [00:19:11]:
But maybe they're not in the point in their business where they're ready for an implementer. If you're a six person organization, you may feel like, I'm not quite ready for that implementer, but we still want to help that organization as well. So it's that give first, help first, and then we'll see where that takes us. But that's the mindset.
Kevin Bailey [00:19:28]:
Do you think that that mindset really embodies what you were talking about before, about being an investor who puts people first instead of the numbers?
David Mann [00:19:37]:
I feel like that's one of the key reasons Gino and the team and there were other bidders for EOS. We weren't the only bidder. It was an up and coming company. And I think that it resonated with them. And I think they saw back to what I said about the time in the Navy. People can see through phoniness, right? Are you. Is this truly who you are or is this what you're trying to put on for this meeting? And I think they saw it was genuine. Not that we're perfect, but that we were trying to do this the right way and we were trying to do it differently than perhaps other investors do it.
Kevin Bailey [00:20:09]:
On the note of abundance, I did want to talk a little bit about faith. You made a comment to me in our prep for this and you said, Christianity really is an abundance mindset or helps a person embody an abundance mindset. I'd love to hear a little bit about what you meant by that.
David Mann [00:20:27]:
If you truly embrace the Christian faith, in my case the Catholic faith, you can't help but get outside of yourself and focused on others. We have two commandments, right? Love God above all things and love others as yourself. And if I'm going to love others as myself, it can't be about me. If I'm going to go out there and be a light to other people, I've got to be able to give. Always looking for how I can give to them, how it can be helpful to them, which is great because it takes the focus off of myself and my next goal and what I want to accomplish. And it starts to tear down that idea that my worth and self esteem needs to be tied to all my accomplishments and it can be focused on what truly matters. And that's helping other people and helping them on. On their faith journey.
David Mann [00:21:14]:
Because someone asked me one time, he said, what are you doing that's going to matter in 10,000 years? Well, there's only one thing I know of that's going to matter in 10,000 years and is that if I made it into heaven or not. And so all these other things are minuscule in relationship to that. And also, who did I hope on their journey to get to heaven as well? What, did I help anybody else get there or did I do the opposite and pull them in the wrong direction, like whatever bad things I might do? And don't think I'm some puritanical here, I have to fight my own battles every day on how I live my life because I can easily fall into sin.
Kevin Bailey [00:21:57]:
Hey, it's Kevin and I hope you're enjoying the show. I know what's tough out there right now for tech leaders, and we appreciate you taking the time to focus on your mental performance and well being. Speaking of time, did you know that 76% of tech leaders lose 20 or more hours of productivity a week due to stress, fatigue, and feeling overwhelmed? To win these hours back, leaders need to learn the mental performance skills that keep you in the zone, where research shows that executives are five times more productive. And that's where we come in. Dreamfuel's Octane Cohort is our flagship mental performance program built for tech leaders under pressure who want to achieve their most ambitious goals in less time and with less frustration. To learn more, go to dreamfuel.com octane or just click the link in the description to see if you qualify.
Kevin Bailey [00:22:41]:
All right, back to the show. I want to get back to that because I know you have a routine. What really struck me is, and you just kind of said it, but it's an abundance mindset, assumes we're going to be taken care of, assumes there's plenty of resources, assumes there's never a lack, assumes that we're good. It assumes that there's just plenty for everyone. And to embody an abundance mindset, like, strictly from a mindset standpoint, taking kind of faith out of the equation for a second, you have to assume you're good. And the only way you could truly put others first without being phony is to assume you're good. And in the Christian faith, we believe that God has taken care of us. We believe that we can let go and assume.
Kevin Bailey [00:23:26]:
I, I can't remember the Bible version until he talks about, you know, the birds and he takes care of them. And we're asked to just assume that God has us and that we can put our energies toward taking care of others. And that's what struck me about it, is it does sound like inherently an abundance mindset. Again, if you were just teaching an abundance mindset with, without bringing faith into it, that the Christian faith does call us to that.
David Mann [00:23:48]:
Yeah. And I never want to diminish what someone's just struggling to eat a meal every day and put a roof over their head. Those are real struggles and we need to be trying to reach out and help those people. But for me, if I surrender my life to God, which I'm trying to do every day, and I have to remind myself, oh, you surrendered your life to God. It's his will. All the great saints, they suffered. They had lots of suffering. And so if I suffer, that must be God's will and where he wants me at that time.
David Mann [00:24:15]:
And so it's not about, hey, what about me? And I Need more. There's lots of learning and growth and suffering. I look back on my life, the only time I've truly grown and developed is in suffering. When things are good, I'm like, look at me, everything's good, good. And the, the prayer life gets a little softer and I'm doing. And then you get pulled back in. And so I'm trying to keep that routine where it, it keeps me going and I don't fall into those traps as much as I used to.
Kevin Bailey [00:24:43]:
This reminds me of a, of a hack that I do when I'm running. I'm normally not competing in running. I'm normally just running hard on the nickel plate trail out by our house. Whenever I get to the point where I'm fatigued enough, where I feel like I don't want to go any further, I always look for the person who passes me or is faster than me and I root for them. Instead of being like, ah, I wish I was faster or, you know, I wish I could beat this guy or something like that, I just root for him. And it takes me out of myself and puts me into cheering this person on, thinking about them and just almost like magic. I stop worrying about how I'm feeling, I stop thinking about how fatigued I am and all that stuff, and I just, I just crush it.
David Mann [00:25:19]:
It's this idea of gratitude, right? If we can get outside of ourselves and think about what we're grateful for, we can't be grateful. And in this funk, at the same time, you can't be thinking about your pain and be cheering on this other person at the same time, right? So we have that choice. It's making that choice every day. And sometimes I have to consciously tell myself, david, you're making this choice because we can be sucked down into a vortex that's unhealthy. At least I can.
Kevin Bailey [00:25:45]:
Oh, all of us, I mean, we're human. And I think that's the hard part about faith, is that it tries to call us to be a little different than that, to call on our highest values. And people talk about being a good Christian, so to speak. Or even again, if you take faith out of it and you just want to be a good person. You and I have both established routines to kind of help call us back to that version of ourselves that we want to be. I'd love to hear a little bit about your daily routine and some of the, like, the reminders you set up and how you start your day to call you toward this values driven version of yourself.
David Mann [00:26:18]:
I'm A routine guy. If I get out of my routine, bad things can happen. As I say I could be the guy if I got out of my routine, could never leave the house, watch eight hours of TV a day and gain £15 in a week. I need to stick to my routine. I'm a 5:15 wake up before I get out of bed. I say certain prayers for my family, for our companies at Firefly, our companies. And then I make the sign of the cross before I get out of bed. And then as soon as I get out of bed I drop to my knees and a quick prayer and then I go into this quiet room I have and I'll sit down there and I'll think of three things I'm grateful for from the day before.
David Mann [00:26:57]:
And then after that I'll do some visualization for the day of how Christ is going to play a role in my life and then visualizing three different things I want to be successful on and picture them in my mind. After that I do a little bit of breathing techniques, not at your level, but some breathing techniques. And then I will do a series of prayers and then I'll go and do my workout and sometimes I'll listen to some scripture readings and then when I leave for the office I'm doing the rosary while I'm driving to the office and that sets my day off. So I'm at my after being up at 5:15, I'm typically at my desk by 8am depending on the day. So that kicks me off for me the right foot. If I don't do that routine I feel like my day's a little off. And then I'll have alarms go off throughout the day. I have an alarm that goes off at 9:58am I have an alarm that goes off at noon, I have an alarm that goes off at 2:58pm and mid morning I have this alarm that goes off just to pull me back in and resettle right at lunchtime and then mid afternoon to pull me back in and resettle.
David Mann [00:28:05]:
So that's some of the things that work for me. I do some other things on some other days but it's a typical, typical day.
Kevin Bailey [00:28:12]:
So you create a real strong pulse in the morning to kind of put you in an abundance mindset and puts you in a flow state where you're going to be more productive. So those time, that time you spend warming up is kind of like warming up for a game and then as you're playing the game kind of maybe, you know, at halftime and other, other, you know, Maybe at each quarter you give yourself a reminder of what's important to you.
David Mann [00:28:32]:
Absolutely, yeah. And I have those alarm play a certain song that puts me in a certain mindset. So that alarm that goes off, I normally cut it off, but it's okay. It's pulling me back in. You could do these if you have. If you're faith based or not. These are great tools, I think, to help you get resettled. What do I need to be focusing on at this moment? Because we can have distractions throughout the day, particularly with all the devices we have going on and modes of communication that people have now.
David Mann [00:28:58]:
We can be pulled in lots of directions.
Kevin Bailey [00:29:00]:
I love it. As we start to wrap the show up, I wanted to talk about a topic that you brought up that's very important to me. And it's something I see in a lot of leaders that we work with as we're trying to help them with, is it takes a certain amount of ego, maybe almost verging on arrogance sometimes to start a company, be like, I know better. We can do this better. And then the tricky part is that arrogance only gets you so far. And then you have to learn how to be a humble leader and be a great listener and learn that the great ideas probably come from other people outside of you and your organization if you really want to be successful. So I want to give you a minute to talk a little bit about humility first. Leadership and what that means to you and why it's more effective than the leaders we hold up on a pedestal sometimes that are.
Kevin Bailey [00:29:47]:
That are arrogant. Why are humble leaders better leaders?
David Mann [00:29:50]:
One of the greatest joys I have is working with entrepreneurs because there's some of the most optimistic people in the world. And that doesn't have to be arrogance, right? Optimism and arrogance don't have to be the same, but you do have to have a belief in yourself. And we talk about it at our firm, Firefly. A humble confidence. We're confident, but we're humble too, that we don't have all the answers. As I grow older, I learn even more that I don't have all the answers. And the people who are always talking aren't necessarily listening and learning. This is another EOS saying, you're not a great leader until you've produced a leader who produces a leader.
David Mann [00:30:28]:
Let me explain what that means. So oftentimes you'll see, oh, they were a great leader. When they left, the place just fell apart. If you're truly a great leader, you're setting this up so when you leave the Place doesn't fall apart because as a great leader, it wasn't about you and your ego and what you did. It was about the organization and the people and you were building something that lasted beyond you and you left. And it didn't fall apart because you were a leader who created a leader, who created another leader. And by doing that, that's true humility because you're not making it about you and about this is what I've done and it's making it about us and how we're successful long beyond me. That's how I see that playing out.
David Mann [00:31:14]:
I think sometimes people confuse humility with weakness and those are far apart. Not the same and bolsterous either. The strong confident. We got to distinguish between you can be humble and super confident, but this is how you're trying to lead because you know that's in the best interest. It's putting other people first. It's not about you, it's not about your ego. And so that's the approach I'm trying to take, trying to get better at. So it's not about me and not about what I've done, but about how is it about you and what we're doing as a collective unit.
Kevin Bailey [00:31:48]:
I love that concept. It reminds me of level 10 leadership, having a company that outlives you. A real leader is able to train a leader who then trains other great leaders. That's a really good ideal to live by as a leader. I love that. I'll. I'm going to think more about that. To end here, I want to talk about something cool you guys do at Firefly Group, which is you guys do these amazing retreats with your port coast leaders.
Kevin Bailey [00:32:10]:
I know you guys climb mountains, you're going to go do Navy SEAL training in Virginia Beach. Talk a little bit about these retreats and the impact they have on helping you guys usher these leaders into becoming better leaders.
David Mann [00:32:21]:
Yeah, we try to get our community together at least once a quarter. But one big in person event a year when we can do it, trying to get everybody's schedules lined can be challenged. But from my experience in going through the Naval Academy when things are super hard, that you can't do them alone. Like I could not get through certain things at the Naval Academy if I only relied on myself. So we want to put our leaders, we want to take them on a leadership retreat and the culmination of that being some kind of physical endeavor. We don't force everybody to do this, but most people want to do it. And that physical endeavor has to be such a challenge that you couldn't just do it on your own. So a couple of examples you raised.
David Mann [00:33:04]:
We hiked Mount Whitney, which is the tallest mountain in the contiguous 48 states, and that was a real challenge. We did that in one day and then we did a rim to rim hike of the Grand Canyon in one day. And so you take a group of people, let's say a dozen or so, 15 people, all fitness levels, all ages, and you're getting them ready for this event to come together when it matters most. So we give people a six month training program oftentimes and you have an accountability partner along the way and you're checking in with that accountability partner so that we know when you get there, you're going to be ready to actually be able to accomplish what we set out to do. As you might imagine, there's many people who said, oh, I'd never do anything like that. And then they said, well, maybe I will do something like that. And then they actually sign up to do it and complete it. When we look back in 10 years, no matter all the successes at Firefly, sales, acceleration, EOS or any of our other dealers wholesale, they're probably not going to remember, hey, remember in Q2 of 20,000 to 2022 we had a great quarter, but do you remember when we hiked the frickin Grand Canyon?
Kevin Bailey [00:34:14]:
Such a great way to get leaders out of their companies and do something hard together and learn mental skills, learn different leadership tools outside of the office. I think it's a fantastic. I wish more investors were doing that.
David Mann [00:34:27]:
We're going to continue to try to find interesting things for people to do and we'll see where it leads us. But so far it's created some interesting memories, I think.
Kevin Bailey [00:34:37]:
Well, David, it was wonderful to have you on The Dreamfuel Show. Such great lessons learned over such a long career that continues to build. If people want to connect with you, I assume they connect with you on LinkedIn. David Mann email is a great place.
David Mann [00:34:48]:
But LinkedIn is a perfect spot.
Kevin Bailey [00:34:49]:
If you want to connect with David, connect them on LinkedIn. Again, thank you so much for being on the show and sharing your insights. David.
David Mann [00:34:54]:
Yeah, really appreciate having me. Kevin.
Kevin Bailey [00:34:58]:
Hey everyone, Hope you enjoyed The Dreamfuel Show. If you'd like to continue listening to more episodes, subscribe to Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be here every other week. And if you want to learn more about Dreamfuel's Octane program for tech leaders, go to dreamfuel.com/octane or just click the link in the description.