The Compass Within: How Core Values Shape Leadership, Culture & Investment Decisions with Robert Glazer – EP 260

Justin Donald: What's up, Bob? Good to have you back on the show.

Robert Glazer: Hey, Justin. Good to see you.

Justin Donald: Well, a lot has happened since we did our last episode, and I'm excited to dig into it. I just want to encourage everyone to go back and listen to the original podcast episode that we did to get a framework and understanding for what Bob is up to. But you've done a lot since then. You've had a business exit. You have built a $35 million global business, recognized by the who's who, right? Fortune, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Boston Globe, Glassdoor. I think you even won the No. 2 Small Business CEO in America by Glassdoor. You've written four books. You're a No. 1 Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author.

I mean, we could go on and on. You've been on Dr. Oz. I mean, not many people can say that. And some big companies have used your methodology, right? So, these frameworks that we're going to go through today, Airbnb, Adidas, Uber, eBay, Target, I mean, the list goes on. So, we don't really have to dive into like how amazing you are. I want to get into the frameworks with you because you’ve done some cool stuff.

Robert Glazer: Yeah. Lower the bar for me, though, next time a little bit.

Justin Donald: Bar set high. You can handle it.

Robert Glazer: Yeah. So, the main company I built was a company called Acceleration Partners. We have a private equity partner now. I'm still chairman of that business. But as I was building that business and deciding what kind of business I wanted to work in, I looked at a lot of the norms around culture or how people leave the organization. I was like, “I don't want to do this. This doesn't make sense.” And so, while building that business, we kind of iterated on a bunch of things. We were remote like so far before COVID that I used to hide it from our clients and say we were distributed, because, I mean, we had like 200 people remote before COVID, and people were like, "What do you mean?” Like, I remember being in forums and YPO groups, and people are like, “I don't understand.”

Justin Donald: How do you do it?

Robert Glazer: Yeah. How do these people work? Are they doing anything? Like, people couldn't conceive of this. And so, we kind of hit it, and then it became an asset. But as I built the business, I really got passionate about writing and sharing a lot of those frameworks and the things that kind of we had figured out and trying to figure out how to have a business that's growing and that people are growing at the same time.

Justin Donald: Well, and I want to point out like you and I are friends. We've been in a bunch of masterminds together. We're in Selfless Givers together. We're in MMT together, MastermindTalks. So, I know you. I see you in person, how you operate, like what you're talking about, the frameworks, the processes, the culture at scale. This is real. And what's incredible to me is that you've built that, but you're also this prolific writer with Friday Forward, which is like a huge newsletter that has grown and grown and grown. So, we'll have to dig into that today. But I mean, you used to write for Inc. and Forbes, Entrepreneur, and LinkedIn. I don’t know how you have time for everything.

Robert Glazer: Back when those, I've moved it all to Substack, our friend, John Hall. That market has sort of collapsed. We are friends except when we're on the pickleball court. And then, Justin, you just take it - there's no friends on your pickleball court with you. If you want to see Justin get serious, play pickleball with him. He's very good. He calls it footballs and stuff.

Justin Donald: The football major comes out. Yeah. Well, in defense, I love to play competitively. You really handed it to us and did a great job in that tournament.

Robert Glazer: Yeah. Look, so for me, the culture comes from values. In fact, my kind of core value and why is like find a better way and share it. And so, that's generally motivating to me. And so, actually, if you look at my writing and a lot of this stuff, that's what I've done. I've tried to tinker with something like see if I can make it better, and then if it works, be like, "Oh, this is great. Like, how can I share it with people?” Because I get more enjoyment out of seeing that kind of copied. We had a very unique program. My TED Talk was on kind of Rethinking Two Weeks' Notice and being like this whole two weeks’ notice thing just doesn't make a lot of sense. Like, how could we change it?

We had some success with that. And it was really cool when people would come up to me and say, “I saw you speak on this,” or, “I saw the TEDx Talk and I did this.” And like, I don't know, I've given up that politicians or our government are going to make anything better, right? I think it's up to businesses and business leaders to improve the state of society. And to me, like, I think leaders have a huge opportunity to do that. So, I've had a passion around that, and most of the stuff that I do like kind of aligns to my values. Look, our culture, I did an onboarding today. I still do the cultural onboardings for our company. It's not for everyone. To me, like my answer is always like think of… Your kids are younger. You haven't looked at universities yet.

But when you look at universities, you might have a kid who wants a 50,000-person city school, right? That's one value proposition. Then there's some 10,000-student, small, suburb, almost on a farm, like very different value propositions, appealing to different kids, different people, and frankly, someone at the big school would probably hate the little school, and vice versa. I think companies just do such a bad job of trying to virtue signal and be everything to everyone, versus be like, "Look, here's what we value. Here's who's a good fit here.” Look, our agency is fast-paced. One of our things is our core values is own it. We need people that want to make the decisions and run with it and answer the client thing.

Like, if your values include all perspectives and tread carefully, that's great. And it might be great for like a nuclear plant. It's just not great for a digital marketing agency. And I just see a lot of people, look, people may like me, not like me, accuse me of things. I try to be consistent with what I think and what I say, and what I do. It doesn't mean it's for everyone. But I think it's really exhausting to think one thing, say another thing, and then impossibly do another.

Justin Donald: Well, I think you're onto something here because, I mean, I remember the Zappos founder, he would even pay people to leave, right? Like, take this money or work with us. And I think that's another great way to identify, are you a culture fit or not? Does the money trump the culture and the opportunity? I love being super transparent and being, I mean, you have to have clarity in what your culture is.

Robert Glazer: You have to first know yourself and know yourself even as a team leader to be like, "Here's why you would love working for me, and here's why you should hate it,” and it should be two sides of the same coin. Do you know the Zappos interview van story, too? I mean, there are so many great Zappos stories.

Justin Donald: No.

Robert Glazer: So, yeah, they would pay $10,000 or whatever for people to quit after eight weeks if they knew it wasn't right for them, because that's usually the point where the company knows, and then they put it off for six months. But they would have a van pick up a whole bunch of interviewees from the Vegas airport, drive them back to the interview, and the bus driver of that van would be someone on the HR team. And they would listen to these people talk and interact. And then they'd get to the thing, and they'd be like, "Here's your flight home. We're actually not going to be interviewing you today,” because they would just listen for 30 or 40 minutes on how someone talked or interacted or what they did to other people. They had a lot of great stories.

Justin Donald: That's awesome. I do remember hearing that, and I think that's brilliant. I think there was a story of J.C. Penney who, in the early days, would want to do lunch with prospective hires, and he'd always have them drive. He'd somehow finagled it that they had to drive because he wanted to see what their car looked like, how orderly it was, was it a mess, because he felt like that would translate into the way that they did business and work with companies.

Robert Glazer: I know a sales leader who used to have his assistant go out and look into the people's cars as he was interviewing them because he just felt like organization, what was key? And a lot of times, I've even heard people want that drive because they're like, "Are they overly conservative? Are they pushing the edge but break the law, or do they just blow through red lights?” My idea years ago was actually, and I was vetoed from my team, an HR team, but then I actually because we always did a meal with a candidate, and then I actually heard another CEO had done this years later, and I was so annoyed at them. But it was basically to ask the waitress to bring the candidate the wrong meal or the waiter.

Similarly, you have three responses, right? You have the eat the wrong thing and don't say anything, be kind of like an outward a-hole, or say like, “I'm so sorry, but I ordered the fish,” right, or whatever it is. And it would tell you something.

Justin Donald: Yeah, I like that a lot too. And your frameworks, they really work because you're on vacation right now. I think you're at your New Hampshire home, getting time to yourself while your company's still out there crushing it, which I think is great.

Robert Glazer: So, there is no success without succession, right?

Justin Donald: That’s right. Well, one of the things I think would be helpful for entrepreneurs that are listening to this, and really anyone that has a role where they're creating culture and really trying to develop leadership and retention in their organization, like, how can these individuals learn about scaling culture intentionally? What can they do?

Robert Glazer: Yeah. So, we'll talk about both. The new book is about personal core values, but we can talk about company core values, and I really was not a believer. Like, I walked into companies years ago. I saw all this crap on the wall. I don't know what rating we have here, so we'll go with crap. And I was like, "This stuff is just garbage.” And then I really started to see some extraordinary companies like Southwest and other companies, and YPO members. I'm like, "Oh, these guys have core values,” but like they're hiring on them. They're in their performance reviews. They have these core value awards. I have a friend who gives a baton. There's a baton ceremony from the core value of the month person to the next, and they get these prizes, and then there's this huge painted parking spot called The Demo Here right in front of the building.

And I help a lot of companies fix and augment their core values. I'm like, "Look, we can do all this work, but at the end of the day, if you don't operationalize these, it doesn't matter.” So, core values in the company are sort of the foundation of the culture, and they're, what are the behaviors that you're rewarding? And most people, their culture can be different from what's on the wall because when Enron was basically in the midst of their criminal enterprise, they have core values like respect and trust, and empathy. But like that is not what got you promoted at Enron, right? We are all little children at the end of the day, and we respond to atta boy or atta girl, or slap on the wrist.

And so, again, if a company rewards hours, but it has a value of working smart, that's not lined up. So, when you see a company really like take three or four values, say, look, these are the behaviors that are most important. Garry Ridge, who completely turned around WD-40 over 10 years and grew it 10x from 20% approval to 95% approval, when they redid the company and their core values, he said, "Anyone who makes any decision aligned with one or more of the core values is always safe here.” So, that's someone who actually believes in those things as a decision-making rubric. And so, personal core values are different, which is a topic of the compass within because they're about you, not about sort of the collective behaviors, but they follow the same sort of rule.

Again, is it clear? Can I use it as a decision? Most important thing is decision making, either business decision-making or permit this. And in the book, I talk about the big three. So, your community, your partner, and your chosen vocation, or what you do. If those decisions aren't aligned with values, they have very little chance of working. And we get that a little bit in the company. I know we get that with our partner, although I think we confuse, do we have the same hobbies, and do we have the same values, which is different? But a lot of times, we forget about the community piece. Like, if you're in a community that doesn't value and reward the things that are important to you, that's really hard.

Justin Donald: Yeah. And it's interesting because thinking from the lens of an investor, these are some of the things that I look for when I vet companies. What’s the culture like? What's the leadership like? But it's also at a fundamental level, what we kind of want to help instill in our Lifestyle Investor Mastermind members, where what we do is we say, “Hey, we want you to build your investment criteria.” Your investment criteria is really important because it helps make the decision-making process easy. It makes it easier to say no. It makes it tougher to say yes. So, when you say yes, it’s a better investment opportunity. So, I do like this idea of creating, and by the way, the investment criteria can most certainly be based on personal values, and it should be based on personal values.

Robert Glazer: It’s probably very dotted line, right? I can imagine there are some people who more like have a VC mindset where the size, the opportunity, the bit like that's really their number one thing. For me and for some, it's the trust, it's the people. I think I've told you before, I have almost correlated all of my investments with the quality and the frequency of the reporting because, to me, that goes to the integrity of the person and do they show up and talk about what's working and what's not working. So, yeah, I think there are a lot of different criteria. Look, would that work? Probably the 1-out-of-10 guy who just chases the trillion-dollar things and nails it. Yeah. But I wouldn't feel comfortable. I don't want to lose money nine out of 10 times. It doesn't sit with me in the same way.

Justin Donald: Yeah. And it's funny because you and I have had very explicit, distinct conversations around financial reporting and third-party audited financial reporting. And that's really been kind of a game-changer for me in my investment criteria. Number one, is there quarterly reporting? Does it happen every quarter? Number two, are these financials audited by a reputable third party? These are really important.

Robert Glazer: Not Bernie Madoff's accountants. Yeah.

Justin Donald: Right. Now, before we dive any more, I’ve got to ask you about this because we talked about this when we were in San Diego a couple of months back. So, share what you can share. I realize you can't share everything, but you have had a partial exit with your company, and there's the roadmap to what the rest of it looks like. I would love to know, I'm sure our listeners would love to know some of the ins and the outs related to that transaction, whatever you can share.

Robert Glazer: Sure. Yeah. I actually had two different things. One was sort of a wholly owned subsidiary that I sold, that I helped start, but wasn't running actively. And the other was the core company, where we brought in a private equity partner to help kind of grow the business. And we've done four acquisitions. And as part of that, I turned over the day-to-day to my number two, and I've been involved. I was always clear about what I was good at. I liked the R&D and the new, and the idea. And I had a president who ran the day-to-day and a lot of the team, and at some point realized, “Hey, like that's the CEO role for this business,” right, at some point.

And so, every time the business doubled, you get to decide like, “Do I want to still be the CEO?” And if you want to, and you haven't done that before, you’ve got to learn a whole bunch of new stuff. And it kind of got to a size and opportunity where people were excited, and there was a lot of stuff, but I didn't want to be managing people all day. That's just not what I like to do. I'm the R&D department. And so, a couple of things happened. I think COVID happened, and it was really scary for a couple of months. And then our industry ended up doing pretty well, and there was a lot of interest. I looked at COVID, and I think I must have had like, I think, for years, I had like a $2 million equity line that was sort of on my house or personally guaranteed by me, just as insurance that I didn't use business line that was backed currently by me.

And the business grew. And at that point, the revenue was really high. I was kind of like, and you're reinvesting everything as you grow, as you know the difference between P&L and cash. And it's kind of like if your rich uncle gave you his house and he died, and you are like, "Wow, I'm in this $20 million house,” but the boiler's breaking and the stuff's breaking. And I got it for free, but it's a lot of expenses to keep this going. And because there was so much reinvestment and so COVID happened, I'm like, "Wow, this $2 million used to be like 18 months of payroll,” right? And maybe it's not even like two months of payroll now. And I was like, "Wow, this feels just too big for my britches.”

And so, I could either stop growing and start harvesting. But I had a team that wanted to grow, and this just felt like a perfect solution where it didn't all have to be on me and looking at me in sort of that risk. And COVID was scary because, again, I was like, “God, I would have to decide between my family and these other people and this $2 million.” Look, I've said this a lot. I think there are perspectives that are misunderstood. And we had like five or 10 years of the zero interest rate, where you could get out of almost anything with new money. I mean, now you're back to more regularly. Businesses fail. They go under. I've seen a lot of business owners sell their business and give employees money or equity that maybe they weren't like not entitled to, but not in the cap table on. Like, they decided to do extra.

I've never seen a business go under and employees come around and give the owner some money. So, it sounds like a high-class problem, but when you've reinvested so much in your business, it's 99% of your net worth, and it's really big, it gets scary. And so, it was just a good solution. And what I had actually done was a couple of years before had sort of written a one-pager that said, "If this ever kind of partnership or opportunity becomes available…” And some of it was quantitative, but most of it was qualitative about my role and the culture, and what they valued, and how we could shift the business. And so, when that happened and when that opportunity came, the one thing I did, that a lot of people don't do, is I didn't move the needle. I was like, "You know what, this is exactly what I said I was looking for, and we found a great partner.” And five years later, they've still been a great partner.

Justin Donald: That's awesome. And so, were you able to map out what the next step is for you? Do you have an earnout? Are you just staying on long-term? Is there a plan where they're going to buy more of it?

Robert Glazer: Yeah. I mean, the plan is, and typically in these things, and private equity doesn't do a lot of earnouts. The structure is you roll your equity in, and everyone has the same incentive. And, look, this is sometimes they say one thing, but everyone has the same equity, right? There's no preference. There's no, we can do well, and you can't do well. And you plan on being together for five or seven years. I think, for a while, there was a lot of more fours. I think it's going to be more sevens now because it's been a complicated couple of years with a lot fewer deals and less growth. But they're smart in structuring something that everyone is incentivized to do the same thing. And we bought four companies, and then all those owners roll in their equity, and the same thing. And so, everyone's all tied together.

Justin Donald: Everyone’s all in.

Robert Glazer: Yeah. And some people say that, but one of the things that's not understood, and look, I'm speaking on an M&A panel next week. It's kind of a pay-forward thing. You’ve got to understand the deal terms because a lot of times there's what's called a pick or preferred equity. And so, even though you're rolling over equity, it's common. I mean, that should be expected for incentive equity or for the management team, right? Investors should get a return before management gets free equity, like that's understood. But if you're rolling over real dollars into a deal and that sits behind a security that's earning 8% or 10% a year, as you understand that, that compounds, right? So, after four or five or six years, that's 70%, 80%.

That means like if you do sell a deal and it doubles the business, the investor can make 100% and you can make 20%. So, those things get ugly sometimes. Or they could say, "Look, we want to sell.” And you're like, "Look, you're going to double your money, and I'm going to make $0.20, like I don't want to do that.” So, that goes away when everyone has the exact same security.

Justin Donald: Yeah. We've had a ton of people in our mastermind that have had exits, probably closer to 50 to 75 at this point. So, what are some of the other dangers you see in this type of PE partnership? In your case, it worked really well. I happen to know a lot of people where it did not work well.

Robert Glazer: Yeah. It's a great question. I was very clear, as I said with my one-pager, we had three firms that were interested. I liked them all. Actually, they all did early work before we did a process, and they were ahead of it, and we decided to kind of go with one of those three. We didn't figure who was the highest bidder. We’ll sharpen your pencils, but we said, “Hey, if you can do this, like we would prefer to go with you.” Look, I did more due diligence on our investors, and I think this is where it all falls down. I asked for something like 15 references from all different contexts.

Like, "Give me a deal that you didn't do and a deal that you did, and a deal where they turned you down, and a deal where the founder left,” and they gave them all to me the next day. I called them all, and I just couldn't find anyone, including someone who had just had their whole business blown up in the first year, who would say anything bad, they were a bad partner. And I was really focused on when did they tell you to do something that you didn't want to do or they didn't? And, look, I would joke with them and say, “Hey, I'm getting married, and so I want to call to ask you about the bride because it's kind of like an arranged marriage.”

But, look, professional firms do a lot of due diligence. I'm shocked how little people have an MO, right? If they're re-traders, they're re-traders, which is someone that I just… There's a deal that's part of a company I’m with. They got outbid. The founder was so pissed, and I was like, "Just wait. Half the people out there are re-traders. I think this deal will be back because they told them what they wanted to hear in the LOI.” And sure enough, six weeks later, that deal fell apart. There's people who have operating partners, and they want to throw them in there and take them over. Our investors did not have any operating partners or a bench of people. Like their business model, to them, worst-case scenario is to replace the CEO, and that's more common in sort of micro-cap or mid-market.

Large equity, if eight former CEO operating partners sitting there, like you can learn all of this stuff. I just don't think people ask around, and it's kind of like you can't do a good deal with a bad person. Someone was just telling me about their kind of horrible PE partnership. And as more of they learned, they're like, this is their MO. This is their track record. It's just people start seeing the numbers. I wasn't getting out, right? This was going to be a partner for five years. Usually, people do these earnouts and these agencies, and they're begging to get out after like 18 months because they're so miserable. And I told them I was going to step down as CEO, and I was going to go from five days to three days to one. So, this needed to be someone I wanted to be in a relationship with.

Justin Donald: Yeah. I think that level of due diligence has to be a much deeper dive if you know you're in partnership for much longer periods.

Robert Glazer: Yeah, if you're out at day one, it doesn't matter, right?

Justin Donald: It doesn’t matter. It's like highest bidder, whoever's going to close, you know?

Robert Glazer: But then also don't complain that they destroyed your company or the people or otherwise. Like, I get a lot of this too. If you're selling your company, you're selling your company. I've talked to buyers like, "We want to sell and we want the money, but then we want you to keep this and keep that.” I'm like you don't get to do that. I don't know. I'm giving this speech on Monday. They just don't sell their business because they don't talk to people that have been on the road ahead. They assume they're the unicorn. I always say there's market-clearing principles and valuations, and you probably want to know what those are, right? And not assume that you're more likely to be the average than the unicorn.

Justin Donald: Yeah. Well, your newest book is different than all the other books that you've written because this one's a parable. Your other ones, even like your last one, I think, was Friday Forward, which was kind of like a play on your newsletter, and I'm still blown away that you could build your newsletter up to 200,000 plus readers in over 60 countries. But that book was built a lot on your writings over a long stretch of time. And so, it's really interesting to see this pivot moving in the parable route. So, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, and even some of the big messages and takeaways you want readers to get.

Robert Glazer: Yeah. So, when I wrote the book, Elevate, which has been kind of my most popular book by far, I talked about this concept of spiritual capacity and building your capacity, and it was spiritual, intellectual, physical, emotional, and it started kind of with understanding who you are, what you value, your strengths, figuring out your core values that that was just a massive unlock for me. And people would read the book, and they would say, “Great. Like, how do I do that?” And I point them to some lists and some resources, and I'm like, "There's not an easy way for me to help you figure out your core values.” And I felt a little bit like Simon Sinek did, where he wrote this book about discover your why, and everyone loved it. And then it was like, now go find your why. And it's like that's really hard. It's not easy to do.

So, at the time, I took a lot of what I had figured out. I turned it into a curriculum at our company, and we trained like 10 classes of leaders each on figuring out their personal core values. So, like, “Hey, you're going to lead from these things, whether you know it or not.” And saw all kinds of breakthroughs and awesome things happen. And so, I took that curriculum after we had done it four or five times. I turned it into a course. About 2,000 people have taken the course, and I get all these notes that, "This is awesome. This helped change my life and my leadership.” And I'm like, "Great.” Now, I want to get this to more people.

And because a lot of people just won't go into a course, right? They just don't like… Certain people are course people. And so, I want to do a book, but I'm not sure that people will read a book on core values. I'm not sure it'd be interesting. I'm not sure I'd walk by, and if it was called like On Values on the shelf, I would pick it up. I'm a huge fan of Bob Burg and The Go-Giver and Patrick Lencioni. It's like the most famous book on operational management is a parable. And so, I was like, "Actually, this might work,” like kind of Lencioni where if I had characters. I took all this framework and I showed it, and I have sort of a protagonist who's going through some struggles, meets a kind of mentor by chance, a Socratic mentor, and the mentor takes them through this whole process so readers can kind of watch it.

And then Jamie in the book is having some real questions about his fiancée, his community, and his job. And he ends up changing two out of three of those things in the end after figuring out his core values. And then kind of like Lencioni, at the end, there's a last chapter, and it says, "All right, you saw it. Now, let me explain to you exactly what you saw and how to do it.” So, it takes that discovery framework about how to make actionable core values. It talks about these big three: your community, your partner, and your vocation. And it just kind of delivers it in a fun way because it's hard to get people to do the work.

Like, 98% of people haven't done it and don't want to do it, and I'm trying to make it fun. Because when they start doing it, and they even answer these six questions that I have in the book, and I'll kind of give them at the end, they're like, "Oh, these are some pretty significant trends in my life about things that I do well and don't do well, and people I like and people that drive me crazy.” Like I said, particularly in leadership, we are all leading from these values. It's just a question of whether it's an awareness and a strength, and there's a lot of childhood stuff that is dragged into these things. There's stuff we're overcompensating for. And I always say the difference between me, and I'm not a therapist, is I'm not trying to go back and fix it and talk to yourself and whatever.

But like you got to understand that this stuff is showing up in the workplace for you. I always talk about this conversation between two people because we did all this work, right? So, I knew people's stories and I had done this work with them, and they're fighting over a budget and like they're really pissed at each other, and I'm like, "She grew up not feeling heard and it's really important to feel heard. He grew up dirt poor and like can't stand waste,” and that is the core thing that they are fighting about here. She doesn't feel like he's listening to her demands, and he thinks that she wastes money. And I've seen so many of these things where, again, like it's there, so are you aware of it? And do you lead with it?

People who have trust, there's a lot of people who have trust as a core value. Almost every time I've done this, it comes from a violation of trust in their life. So, these are people who keep small groups of friends. You violate their trust, and you're out, right? And it seems really threatening to them. Now, you'd have no idea as the employee that if you show up five minutes late for the meeting or they can't find you in the afternoon, that this basically is disqualifying and puts you in the penalty box, and you're never getting out. But I've seen those leaders do that until they actually have this understanding.

And then what they do is they go to their team and they say, “Justin, thanks for joining my team, whatever. Just so you know, like, trust is really important to me. And like once you've lost it, you'll probably feel it. And here are some ways it can be lost. And if I feel distant or whatever you feel, like come talk to me about it because there might be an issue.” So, that's a huge difference between the first person who's being run by it and doesn't know, and the second person who just kind of lays it out there.

Justin Donald: Yeah, that's good. That's powerful. And it's fun that you did write a parable. I'm in the process of writing a kids' book, so it is in the form of a parable.

Robert Glazer: I want to do that because there are so few words.

Justin Donald: Well, I want to write an adult's version of a parable as well. So, maybe that's at some point in the future. So, I'm excited for your book to come out.

Robert Glazer: Is the kids’ book about investing?

Justin Donald: Yeah, it is.

Robert Glazer: Awesome.

Justin Donald: It’s going to be for like 7 to 14, 15-year-olds, in that range. And I'm thrilled about it. It comes out in September for our big live event, September 8th and 9th.

Robert Glazer: That's exciting.

Justin Donald: It should be a lot of fun. And the goal is to have… We've got myself, our COO Ryan, and then our Head of Membership, Dane. The three of us are going to bring our daughters to the event for the unveiling of the book because they've also had feedback.

Robert Glazer: Yeah, I got feedback from my daughter on my book, and I'm a pretty brutal editor. And so, she gave it back to me. It's when you watch what you've created, it's always interesting.

Justin Donald: Yeah. That's awesome. How do you see these frameworks working in the investment world, like making decisions on investing? Because I would imagine, you know, I kind of shared a little bit of how I see frameworks for how I invest, but it has to translate well, these frameworks for culture, these frameworks for scale, but then from an investment perspective, in theory, it should kind of blend pretty well.

Robert Glazer: Yeah. If I took some of the questions in the discovery process and I just word them a little differently, because sometimes the question is about like, "What's the worst work experience and what was it like?” If you did this on, what was your best investment, and what was it about the people? What were the qualities or otherwise? And what was your worst investment? Because the ones that really irk us are not the ones where we lost money or it didn't go well. It's why it didn't go well, right? That's sort of more important. And I think you'd see some of these trends, and I think if people could be really clear on their values, they could be smarter about making sure that they're connected to whatever the company's values are, but more kind of doing that test with the founder.

Like, when things get hard and they get sh*tty, like, how are you going to behave? I think that's probably really relevant. And I think a lot of people are probably really frustrated because they're making investments that are a little more, they're looking at the details and the numbers, and that stuff's important. But there are other factors that they're probably missing that would reduce the stress of their investments. If they knew how to screen for them, they knew how to ask the questions, it's almost not different than a company. One of the things a company does is it should ask behavior-based questions about its core values.

So, if its core value is resilience or something like that, you'd say to the person, “Hey, look, when’s the last time you really got stuck and your back was up against a wall, and how did you get out of it? And like that answer would be pretty telling.

Justin Donald: Yeah. I love that. Bob, where can our listeners find out more about you and more about your new book?

Robert Glazer: Sure. Everything's at robertglazer.com. You can look for the Compass Within in Amazon or bookstores or at compass-within.com. And if you're interested in sort of starting, and if you get the book before it launches in October, you get the course that goes with it for free, which will walk you through everything. But as I mentioned, there are these six questions, which sort of start this discovery process. If you go to robertglazer.com/six, you can just get the questions. And just take half an hour, write the answers to them with a cup of coffee, look down, and a lot of people are like, "Huh? I see some real clear trends there.”

It's a lot of questions that provoke sort of highs and lows. And a lot of them are inverses. The thing that really drives you crazy is usually the opposite of something that you value. So, it's interesting when it's framed that way.

Justin Donald: Well, that's good. And I just want to encourage everyone to go answer these six questions, answer them honestly, put some time into them. I mean, I know Bob beyond just being an author, like he's the real deal. He lives out what he talks about and preaches in his everyday life. So, I'm excited to dig into these six questions. I'm excited to read your new book, and I just want to thank you for taking the time to share all this great stuff on culture and these frameworks that we can use to grow our business, and really to level up ourselves I think is what it is. It's like we're playing at whatever level we're playing at, but if you implement the right questions, if you create clarity in what you're doing, if you figure out how to create culture and develop leadership, you're just going to level up yourself. You're going to level up your team, and I just love what you're building.

Robert Glazer: Well, thank you, Justin. Look, they should add those bonus questions about investment, good investment, bad investment, but really, as you said, like your listeners and your mastermind group and whatever, they have a lot of big decisions coming at them. Should I do this investment? Should I be on this board? Should I buy this house? Should I move to this community? Like, it's really helpful to have a rubric that helps you kind of make those most important decisions. I think that's what this can be for people.

Justin Donald: Ah, I love it. Well, I love ending every episode with a question. So, if you're watching or if you're listening, what is one step you can take today to move towards financial freedom and really to living life on your terms, a life that you desire, so not a life by default, like most, but a life by design? And figure out one or two things that you learned from Bob here today and put him into play in your life. Thanks! And we'll catch you next week.