Rob Fraser: The Power of Focus

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/741dfceb0d2e19ac

For 10 years, I woke up with a very clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life and where it was gonna go. And I loved that. I woke up every day with a fire in my belly saying, This is the goal. Here's how I'm gonna get it, and here's what I'm gonna do. And then almost seemingly overnight when I walk away from the sport.
That's gone. Your identity's gone. You know, like the day before I retire, it's hi, I'm
Rob Fraser, professional psychologists, it was everything. The next day that's gone. And over the next year that fades away because you're no longer on the scene. And the friends, they're still friends, but you don't see them and the common interest starts to fade. And you know, that kinda led to this dark period for me where I was like
What am I gonna do with my life?
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You've been successful against the odds in both professional sports and business. Talk me about the mindset required to do that.
I mean the mindset really comes down to
Like a personal mission.
I mean
You think about
doing both of those things whether it's sport or anything hard, having some intrinsic
reason or some motivation or some personal drive to accomplish something really
pushes you forward and pulls you into that goal. A lot of people talk about
building a resilient mindset or building a stronger mindset. And I really think
That sure maybe there's some benefit to trying to
Teach that or learn it, but I really think it's something that
you can really only learn by going through it.
And you go through those tough times and push through those things when it's because you care about something. So that personal mission. So when it was with sport, it was this goal to become
a competitive cyclist professional cyclist and reach different goals that I had. So whether it was coming back from injury or coming back from setbacks, the goal was so much larger than the pain I was dealing with or the stress and
The idea of kind of not pushing forward.
wasn't even there, you know, whereas I look at other parts of my life and
Sometimes you don't push as hard because there's no
Personal mission there. There's no reason to push. It's not necessarily something you you take that mindset into everything you do, but it's really.
helpful in those larger goals and similar with business, you know, it's just
I ultimately think success in any large goal comes down to your ability to endure over the long term.
Perseverance, resilience.
I think
extending the time horizon. People always talk about, you know, hacks and quick wins and
How can you shorten the timeline? And ultimately I think that leads to maybe a quick win here and there, but not longevity.
And in business and in sport.
the careers are built on longevity and uh
And that really comes down to a mindset because
along that path and anything worth doing. There's just so many ups and downs and sideways and with sport and business and
There's just so much going on. Where does that drive come from? Are we born with drive or is it something we develop by following our passion? For me
My drive.
Started
Kind of in
Childhood going into adolescent early teens.
And it was really, you know, my personal journey was
I wanted to
show the world that I could do something. My childhood was kind of marked by
Not quite succeeding at anything that I set my mind to. I was an overweight child and I loved sport, but I never
was able to find what I was good at. So I would try out for all the all of the school sports, your basketball team, your volleyball team. And uh I wouldn't just not make it. I was always
the first person not to make it. So I was always on the cusp and that almost made it a little bit worse because I could like taste what it would be like to be there. And so that started over time to build this drive of like
You know, when I find something I'm good at, I'm gonna go all in and I wanna win because when I looked around me, the feeling I felt at that time was.
And I'm not succeeding in these areas, and everyone that is seems to be getting some level of acceptance. And
you know, for me as kind of a child and growing up as like, maybe that's that's love, that's you know what I should strive for. Um, and I just wasn't able to do that. And and so like that started to build and build. And so when I found
early on it was cycling, I was like, Oh, I'm pretty good at this. I was like, I'm gonna I'm gonna go all in. And the drive was really
I think when I reflect back, it was a drive to be accepted, to feel like, oh, I finally am in the club. I finally am good at something. And then I w I didn't want to be good at it. I wanted to be great.
I think that
Has some destructed
kinda tendencies to it as well, but
Um, that's ultimately where it came from is this feeling of
acceptance and, you know, a chip on my shoulder of not being able to pull it off for so long and seeing my peers do it and
Assuming that's what it felt like to be
Part of the club or accepted.
The one thing that stood out there for me, actually two things stood out was
The
ability to consistently fail.
And keep going. At such a young age where you're the first person not picked.
over and over and over again, but you didn't give up. Whereas I think a lot of people would give up. That relates, I think, to the acceptance. Like you're
You're striving for did you have a brother who got attention or something where for a different reason and you're like striving to sort of like get noticed?
Yeah, totally. I mean, so yeah, I had a younger brother and he was almost in our childhood the exact opposite. He was
incredibly good at sports. It came natural. And you know, so we're big hockey family.
You know, we grew up in a very traditional family, you know, very traditional around school, like go to school, go to university, very traditional around team sports, hockey. Um, and hockey was the big one. And my
My brother was really good at it, you know, Triple A and
came natural and you know, I wasn't as good. You know, I was
barely could make like the select team and so seeing that is like
Oh, my parents really
like value sport and and in particular hockey. And my brother's really good at it. And I see him succeeding and I'm not succeeding at it. And my parents are great and of course they love me, but I was like, I wanna be good. I wanna make them proud with something, right? Like because I'm not particularly great at school. I didn't enjoy it, you know, I just I I never really understood
It wasn't articulated to me in school what the purpose was. And I was like, You're learning this because this. It wasn't made kind of real for me. Um, so I didn't enjoy that too much. And then I did enjoy sport, like, but hockey just wasn't the thing for me. And so the ability to to fail over and over again, I think
You make a choice every time you fail whether that's gonna hold you back or push you forward. And ultimately
I decided early on to let that push me forward and I've carried that through because
That's where you learn your most important lessons. You can learn from winning, but
a lot of the most important lessons and the stories I tell and what I reflect on in my life has come from all the losses or the the setbacks and and that's really over time built such a base of lessons and insights to just kind of
Propel me forward that, you know, I'm thankful for all those failures. They're incredibly difficult at the time. And when you're going through them, you wish they'd go away. And I've always found one year.
three years, five years in the future, you become more and more thankful for those opportunities. Last night you told me that
Competitive sports is better than business school. Talk to me about that.
Yeah. As a training ground for business. Yeah. Yeah.
I think for life as well, honestly. I think, you know, what does sport teach you? Ultimately sport will teach you that you have to put in the work. If we use running as an example, you can't just show up and run a marathon, right? You can get to the start line.
Anyone can go to the start line, but it's gonna be pretty clear who prepared and who didn't. But beyond that, competitive sport, at least in my uh experience, you know, as competitive cyclists, I was five times on the national team.
For about 10 years, traveled around the world racing my bike. And what that taught me was a bunch of things. Most importantly, failure and resilience. Like
Like how do you ever like we would race
Maybe still say ten times a year.
maybe win once or twice. So you're failing more than you succeed. And how are you dealing with that and building forward and how are you dealing with injuries? But more than that, it's
How are you networking yourself? So I managed myself as well. So I was negotiating my sponsorship contracts. I was booking worldwide logistics. You know, I remember when I was
sixteen.
uh in high school I was named to the f my first national team.
And I got an email. So I had just won a national race and that named me the team that year. I didn't even know what world championships was. I was so green in the sport, so new to the sport. And I got an email from the national federation. It's like, hey, you've been named to the the world championships team. It's in Italy next month. Like we'd love for you to come. And I remember emailing back and being like
No, I can't, I have school.
And'cause I had no idea. I was so green. And then I uh I showed the email to my parents. They're like, What did you do? Like
email them back, like you're gonna go, we'll talk to the school, we'll get you out and like we'll support you to go. Um, and so I emailed them back, I got on the team and what that led into is like
It was going to Italy, so hop on a plane, arrive
in Germany for a layover, having no idea where I am and just being kind of thrown into the deep end like that. Like as a young kid, just hop on a plane, you end up in Europe. I don't even really know where Europe is at that time.
Embarrassingly, if you said point out Italy on a map, I would have had a tough time. And so that's like how kind of I just but now I'm there. And how do you deal with that? And how do you meet new people and then how do you perform? All of these lessons we talked about earlier about
building a resilient mindset and how do you learn to kind of just push forward when things get tough.
And sport will teach you that. And
You know, business school
I think's important. I don't want to knock on it too bad, but
They're teaching you
You know
all the things you can read about and learn about, right? So all the the the tactics and and kind of just the the common knowledge and how you would apply that. But I think ultimately in business, at least what I've learned is like you could know everything, but it's how are you gonna react when shit hits the fan, right?
Um, and how are you gonna talk to people and negotiate and use your network and and kind of think creatively? And those were a lot of the lessons that I learned in sport is like how do you use some of your past experiences to your advantage? Like having the network I did was so incredible and
I just think that sport, if I if I boil it all down to like a succinct answer, it's really that it taught me that everything is earned, not owed.
You had to do the work.
There was no substitute for the work that things almost never go to plan and you need to figure it out.
Uh, and then just build so many skills of have performing under pressure.
You know.
talking to people. It's just it just you're immersed in it and there's no getting out of it. And I just thought that was such a formative experience. You know, everything we'll talk about today and
Everything I've done in business has been
on the like on the back of the sporting career. You know, I didn't go to business school. Of course I've read all the books and I've tried to learn the common knowledge and I have, but
the lessons and the the the actual mindset I take to business for almost the last ten years.
Is the same mindset I had when I was competing in sport. Talk to me a little more about the role of sort of preparation or positioning when it comes to sport and business.
Seems like there's a lot of similarities between the two in the Yeah.
In sport.
I was never
The most talented writer.
Um, and honestly, sport was a manifestation of my entrepreneurial tendencies. Cause I, like I said, I grew up in a sport family. I think when I look back, if I had been introduced to business at that time, I would have gone into business and done something more entrepreneurial. But I didn't have an entrepreneur model growing up. I didn't really even know that was a thing. It was, like I said, traditional family.
normal jobs and sport. And so I was like, okay, I have all these kind of tendencies of, you know, wanting to go after a big goal, willing to take risk, resilient, point it out of sport.
You can be pretty successful. My superpower in that I use with those entrepreneurial tendencies in sport was preparation and positioning. How can I be more prepared than any other athlete when it comes to the start line? How can I study the course? How can I take what I know that's coming up on the season before, replicate that at home and practice and study it?
Knowing that I had disadvantages, you know, so I raced downhill mountain bikes, but I grew up in Pickering, Ontario.
There's not a mountain.
in Pickering, Ontario. So how do you compete?
of people that live around the world around mountains or the what I call the B C kids, the people lived in BC with all the mountains in British Columbia. And you have to really figure out how to make that work. And how I made that work is I would build little 10 or 15 second
Um
parts of the course on the hillside by my house. And what that taught me was
I really learned precision and and the importance of really executing at a high level and executing when it mattered, positioning myself and being prepared for when the race run came to be the most ready I could be where that started.
Way before
the actual event started that with studying the course in advance, the sort of preparation, the training all the off season, and just knowing ultimately when you get to the starter line, whether it's in sport or business, that you've done everything you could do to prepare for that. And that usually worked for me because the pressure in those situations, no matter what you know or how much you've done
If you're not prepared to position properly, the pressure will.
Overtake.
all the talent that you have for sure. The the ability to execute is so important.
One of the other similarities I think
is from the outside looking in
Sports looks really sexy.
business looks really sexy, but from the inside it's a bit of a mess. It's a total mess. In both really in sport.
being a professional athlete or competitive athlete is glamorized. It's you're seeing the the very tip of the iceberg. You're seeing the one percent of the time that it goes right and you're standing on the podium and you're seeing these people succeed, but you're not seeing the early mornings, you're not seeing the injuries, you're not seeing the setbacks, the mental health that comes along with it.
And similarly with business, you see
the headlines, but you don't see
what led into that. And the athletic careers and the business successes that we all read about, these are often these 10 year overnight successes, right? And people glamorize that and latch onto that and be like, you know, that's what business is or that's what sport is. And I think that's somewhat destructive because
It really misses
the true nature of these endeavors, which is
Resilience and tough times and
in a long time to get there as well. And we kinda get into this world with
where people want to hack or they want to shortcut. And I just think it's it's the wrong messaging and it's the wrong uh way to approach these things. It's just so important to extend the timeline on these things and and and really just give it your all.
Is it true you taped your broken wrist to a bike?
To compete.
Yeah, I mean, so the way our sport worked is you train all winter
And you basically compete in the summer.
And so you spend so much time preparing for a race that you have three months of racing.
And
you would constantly get injured and you would just have to figure out how to make that work. And yeah, leading into one of the biggest races of the year, I had a broken wrist, uh a broken finger. There's no
long term damage to just dealing with the pain. I can get this dealt with when the season's over. In my mind it was like I've worked too hard to just
back away from this challenge. It's like so I asked myself
What is it gonna take to get this done? You know, I couldn't hold on to the handlebar. I didn't have the strength. And so I was like, I'm gonna have to tape because everything's led to this moment.
I'm I'm not gonna back down. Like if I physically can do it, if I'm awake, I'll I'll be there. And I think
It's those lessons. And ultimately, we talked about earlier about resilience and that mindset of doing hard things. And I talked about you just have to do them. That taught me.
You can do it, you know, like
the pain I was feeling was so crazy, but
ultimately you get up there and you're prepared and
You know, when you're ready to execute, the pain goes away. I think it's really important to go through those tough times and realize that you can come out the other side. Cause that's ultimately where you start over time to build that muscle and be able to deal with the really high stress things as they come and stay calm during them. I'd be very surprised someone could teach themselves to do that without going through the tough times.
You went through a bit of a an identity crisis.
Post sport.
Talk to me about that.
Yeah, for
Ten years.
I woke up with a very clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life and where it was gonna go.
Uh, and I loved that. I woke up every day with a fire in my belly saying
This is the goal. Here's how I'm gonna get it and here's what I'm gonna do. And then almost seemingly overnight when I walk away from the sport.
That's gone.
Right, your identity's gone. You know, like the day before I retire, it's hi, I'm Rob Fraser.
Professional cyclists.
The next day it's Hi, I'm Rob Fraser.
Who is that, right? I've I've identified as this cyclist for so long my
My entire identity is that, my friend network is that. You know, my friends at this point were from all over the world. We would meet up during the season or the off season and be in the same place. It was the common language we all spoke. It was it was everything. The next day that's gone. And over
The next year that fades away because you're no longer on the scene. And the friends, they're still friends, but you don't see them and the common interest starts to fade. And
You know, that kinda led to this dark period for me where I was like
What am I gonna do with my life? At this point, I was in my early twenties, so m the rest of my life was still ahead of me.
But I felt so lost, you know,'cause
I was I I just I didn't really know what to do. And then the idea of not having that big goal.
was terrifying.
And it really led to this period of trying to figure out what am I gonna do with my life. It sounds a little ridiculous sometimes, but it was just kind of, yeah, it was this identity crisis of how do you reinvent yourself? How do you build a new network around something you don't even know and what am I good at? You know, like I I didn't go end up going and or finishing university, you know, I I hadn't worked
any other career jobs. I worked the odd jobs here and there, but cycling was my life. Sure, you could go into coaching or something like that, but that wasn't really where my my passion was. It was really about that
fulfilling some large goal and ultimately being in kind of control of my destiny. And yeah, so it was about a two year period of trying to
navigate that and figure it out and
It really makes sense to

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Is that when you started the business?
The business was the way out. And so during that two years
I tried a bunch of things. I was applying for jobs. I ended up getting into the local college in Victoria where I live in Victoria, BC.
uh for sport management. I thought the logical step here was a career in sport. It's like I said, coaching. It's like here's my skill set. How do I apply that moving forward? What's the logical thing to do here? So get into sport management. I simultaneously got a job with the Canadian Sport Institute, was working with future Olympians. I was on paper doing
what made sense, what you would see the typical post athlete do. And I was dead inside.
I was just like, This can't be it. You know, I'm I'm doing what
Is supposed to be right.
This is what everyone says is right. And I was like, if this is the rest of my life, I'm not sure like I can do this, you know? And
At the time I was going into my second year of school
And I was just kind of
Yeah, I was in a four year program, so three more years left, but I was starting to get that angst of like
this is gonna be over soon and like real life's gonna hit. I'm gonna be expected to like go deeper into the career and just kinda go further down this path I'm on that I really don't wanna be on. And I don't know how I
got onto it. But I for some reason
listened and listened or read to the four hour week w four hour work week.
Um, by Tim Ferris. And it sounds so so trite. It's so it's so common. I got into that book and what it really taught me, I can remember exactly where I was. I was walking around a local golf course. You know, I listened to books more than than read them. This idea, listening to the book really gave me the idea that oh
I think I have some skills here. What he's saying makes sense.
I understand this, I think I can do it. Business sounds interesting. And the way it was framed in that way was like
Oh.
This is the sport of business.
Like this is a new thing that I can go and try to comp like compete in and not necessarily win, but just a big goal. And that was so exciting to me. It was like a a new
a new path and it had more longevity, there was more income opportunity.
And that was incredibly exciting. And that kind of
evolved into how do I stay in sport but on the other side of the table? You know, if I'm not going to be in coaching or an athlete or on the kind of more common path, is there a way that I can build a business or a brand in the athletic space? Like how do I keep this party going was kind of the idea while also having a new big goal and trying to just chase something? Why socks.
Socks.
particularly in cycling are
a large part of the culture. So
In cycling.
When you're on a team, it's an individual sport. We race individually, but you're on a team, and the team, whether it's national or your your sponsorship team, you'll get a kit. So you'll all look the same. You look the same as your teammates. Socks were this area where you could wear whatever you wanted. And so
I would always wear kind of funky colored socks. I actually had a sock sponsorship. That was a way that my parents ultimately could pick me out on the hill,'cause you're watching a bunch of bikers come down the hill and I would wear really loud socks like pink and blue, and you could kind of spot that and be like, Okay.
that there's Rob. Um, beyond that was a way to kind of like express your individuality, right? It's like okay, you're in the sea of sameness. How can I have a little bit of me out there? And so socks were already in my blood and still I took that same kind of
mentality out of sport into the real world. So at school, I would wear those socks in the gym at work. And so I became known as the sock guy before owning a sock business. Uh and so when it became time to like I'm gonna start a business
I sort of think of like
What do I know and what do I like and what do I think can be improved? And
ultimately wanted at the time I loved brands like Lululemon and Red Bull. Those were two like
Kind of.
top tier brands for me about around their athlete marketing, their product development. I just I loved everything about those brands. I was like I don't really I'm not technical. I didn't have like a particular set of skills. I was like
apparel seems like a more an area that I could get into and understand. I've got some skills I could do there. And what's you know, what's like the simplest form of apparel, at least, you know, my my thinking back then was like, oh I kind of know sock. Socks seemed like a good place to start because relatively low risk in terms of how much I would need to invest to get get started. It was the the culmination of all of those things.
And I could probably tell a story right now of like why socks were this incredible business opportunity, which they are, but at the time, I was just like, socks are cool.
You know, I think socks could be improved. And it turned out as I went further down that path, I uncovered how much opportunity actually existed in socks. And you know, ultimately the insight was the entire world was moving towards athleisure. We were coming into a less traditional, less formal way of dressing.
and much more into a more functional way of dressing.
And we can see that with our clothing of the pants I'm wearing right now, for example, or the yoga pants. And when I looked at the sock category
Um
They remained use case specific. So the recycling socks or running socks or dress socks. I was like
Why isn't there a yoga pant for the foot? That was the idea. It's like look at the yoga pant, how versatile that is. You can wear it exercise and you can dress it up, down, casual. I was like, what a functional, fantastic, and fashionable piece of apparel. It's like, why are our socks not like that?
And so that was the simple idea, and I got kind of obsessed with it and I was like, this can be improved. I remember the first time I tried on a pair of your socks. I had never thought about socks before. I mean, I was the guy who who sort of went to the store and like, what's the cheapest per pair of socks that I can get?
Put them on your feet. They sort of cover up your feet and that's what they do. And then I tried on a pair of yours and I forget how I got the first pair.
I think a friend gave it to me and then I instantly went to your website and I ordered like I threw out every sock in my drawer.
And I just ordered a brand new drawer of socks. I had never thought about the difference between a good pair of socks and a bad pair of socks, and I still have no idea, but I know your socks feel really good. What's the difference between a good pair and a bad pair?
So what you said is not uncommon. If you think about socks in general, they're the world's worst gift as you're a kid. It's what your parents always would get you as a gift. Yeah, if you're bad for Christmas, exactly. It was almost a punishment. And then as an adult, you've learned to almost hate this product and buy it.
begrudgingly at the department store. It's an afterthought. No one actually thinks about their socks. And so we're living in this world of 90 plus percent of the population is thinking a lot about everything they wear except for one of the most important things. Really the like one of the mo like the pair of apparel that touches the ground with you, right? And is is is kind of foundational to
to the feeling right up to standing and walking and everything you do. The idea that this was
An unaware category was super interesting. But what makes a sock special? I mean, there's so many things. Like the common socks you'll buy.
they're just low quality. The seams, uh, they're not seamless, so they're gonna, you know, create hot spots and pinching. They're gonna be typically probably low quality cotton. And so they're gonna absorb sweat, which leads to blisters.
There's a ton of different things. If you look at, you know, any good athletic socks and specifically ours, they're gonna be seamless, they're gonna be moisture wicking, they're gonna have support. So there's gonna be support in the arch to help with, you know, mid foot fatigue. There's gonna be strategic cushioning. So like where is the foot making contact with the ground? We could go on for days, but ultimately what I was trying to solve for was like
I want something that is gonna be incredibly comfortable.
useful across a bunch of different sports or activities. And it was born out of a personal need, right? Like I said, I was going to school
I was working a job and I was still training and and staying active. I was doing some triathlons at the time and I wanted a pair of socks that could do all of those things because the cycling socks I mentioned I would wear at school, they weren't great for running. They would fall down, the cuff wasn't compressive enough. And so I was like
that led to that kind of discovery of like, why isn't this better? And ultimately a good pair of socks should be supportive. They should look good.
They should feel good. You should be able to do almost everything in them. I mean
That seems obvious, but it wasn't at the time. It's crazy. They're almost like compression socks too, right? Like they feel really good around your feet and your feet just feel happy. Yeah, that's the fine balance of like it's it's like a hug for your feet. You know, and and but how do you not make that too compressive and how do you make that work across a wide variety of foot sizes? And we're not always perfect, but
That is the goal. Like it should hug the leg and not fall down, but it also should come off the leg without leaving marks, which is a tough thing to do. We are striving to always improve that, but I think we've got a good mix. And your story is not uncommon. The people will come in and they'll buy a pair.
Typically because a lot of our stocks
Have fun designs on them. What we recognize early on is socks are this, like I mentioned with cycling, socks are this way that people can express individuality.
Uh, and within that people have different ways they like to do that, whether they're not they like to celebrate different animals they love or you know, nature landscapes or
their favorite food. So we discovered that like it's really hard digitally because we're primarily sold all online.
Um, we're also sold in store, but primarily online, at least for the the the majority of the business. How through the the computer screen or the phone screen can we convince you that this sock feels good without putting it on your feed? That's really tough. An easier way is to give you an emotional response being like, I love cats, for example. I want to buy that sock because it has cats on it.
But what we know is that's the best pair of socks you're ever going to put on. And so that person buys the pair of socks because they like the design, they put it on, and then like you, they come back and go, Oh my, like
I didn't even know socks could feel like this and they replaced their sock drawer with it. And that's
That's quite literally, you know, our mission is to like or vision for the business is to replace the sock drawer. I truly believe that
We should be able to make
a great all day performance sock that someone can line their whole drawer with based on how what height they like and what kind of material they like. And you shouldn't have to make a decision in the morning anymore of what you're gonna wear. It's like
That sock will do it for you.
Did you have a business partner when you started?
I was in school.
When I started the business, I was in my second year. I just had the idea. You know when I said I'm gonna start a business, I was quite literally listening to that book, laying in bed, kind of
You know, having my nightly
identity crisis, some existential crisis like
It just snapped. He was like, I'm gonna start a business. I kinda got up right there, I started opening my Apple notes, started thinking about different brand names and went to school and I talked to my good friend at the time. I developed a good f uh a g a great friendship with a classmate. We do all our class projects together. We actually got a job together outside of work. I was doing some rep work for a brand and I got him
Involved, we're doing some field marketing. And so we got on well. You know, we're friends, we worked well together, and I didn't expect the business to work. I was like, it was
It's like, what are the odds? Here's this like former athlete guy that's kind of like not particularly great at school, has no business experience, who set a goal to build a sock company.
Everyone looked at me like I was crazy. Like some people still do, right? And so I was like
This would be way more fun with a friend, which by the way is like the world's worst reason to start a business with someone. This'cause it's fun to do with a friend that I've learned in high side, but you know, ultimately what I didn't ask myself at the time, which I think is so important for
entrepreneurs and just people in general to ask themselves is what happens if this goes right?
The common knowledge is for people to hedge their downside. They go, What happens if this goes wrong?
And that's very that's fair. People want to protect themselves and these are
ultimately risky endeavors. But I didn't ask myself at the time, like what happens if this goes right? Because if you think about it, and I try to always tell young entrepreneurs is like, what would be more painful? Failing because it didn't work or failing because it did and you didn't capture the opportunity. That would be so much more painful. And I felt like that kind of happened in my cycling career. So
You know, if like I'm working really hard now to not kind of repeat that mistake. But yeah, I started it with a business partner and it was fine when it was kind of like just something we were doing, but
You know
Ultimately, as it started to get a little bit of traction, like I said, I didn't expect it to work, but that doesn't mean that I wasn't incredibly committed. You know, I was obsessed. The second I decided to do it, I was all in. I was reading every business book I could find. I was, you know, like I said, I had entrepreneurial tendencies. I just didn't know. They had manifested in sport for so long that I was like,
Oh, I found business now and I just got obsessed with it.
The same was not true of my business partner. That wasn't kind of his thing. You know, he wasn't necessarily I don't think he would identify himself as an entrepreneur. So as things started to grow and we were
Pretty lucky with some early success, the business started to work.
Um, you know, in the first year we did, you know
multi-six figure revenue of just selling socks kind of around town for the most part. The first socks I sold, I just took to school in a Tupperware and hand to hand combat and sold them to students, teachers based on like
You know, we're not friends if you don't buy these. And so that was like the how it got started. And so ultimately after a year, it started to get real. Like the work required nights and weekends is like the common stories go. And you know.
It became pretty clear that this was out of line with his values, you know. We didn't have those discussions early on of like, what do we want out of this?
We were doing it for fun. We were friends. We just wanted to have a good time and try try something.
Kill time and and during school. Like we always expected just to continue with school and kind of continue on
But that for me evolved very quickly into like, oh no, I can do this. You know, like I really like this, and there's a big opportunity here. So
And ultimately over time, that tension started to grow and the gap between our abilities to have conversations of what's going on, because I was just like
consuming knowledge and trying to to learn at such a a rate because I was obsessed with it. It became very difficult for us to be aligned on what we wanted out of the business, which ultimately led to him leaving the business and and quitting true to form. We didn't have any proper resolution for that. We didn't have a shareholders agreement. We didn't like we just
did almost everything wrong when setting up the company, which is really easy to do because there's
Almost no great resources for
helping an entrepreneur and and ultimately
To get the proper legal agreements is expensive. When you have like we started the business with a thousand dollars each.
Right, so put a thousand bucks in.
That's all we had and it all went in inventory. There was no money for a legal agreement or a lawyer. And you're in the honeymoon phase of business. Of course you're never gonna fight with your partner, right? Everything's great.
it's gonna be successful. But when shit gets real, that's when those those kind of things are super important to have, at least a discussion about. And there was no discussion. And so he left the business. There was no resolution. And that kind of led into this this period of where I had to figure out how to how to resolve that. And it was super messy and ultimately ended up um
coming to an arrangement and buying'em out about it ended up kinda closing.
two, two and a half years into the business and
kind of March of twenty nineteen is when
Uh he officially left the business and I got
full control and that's kind of what I peg as like the real star. That's where I was like, I'm all in because I had to go take out a personal loan to make it happen of like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which was
Insane, right? I remember
We finally agreed on a number and
I didn't have that money. I I had student debt. I had the exact opposite of money in the bank and
But I was so committed around that we talked about earlier, around just the mindset and the willingness to kind of just go all in. I went to every bank in town and
And would just I was like, okay, I've got credit cards I'll draw out on, I've got a line of credit, I've got some student loans.
um my then girlfriend now wife, like she was like, Oh sign on, we'll get some loans and I was able to kind of put the money together through all these various very high interest, high risk kind of
uh funding sources. I didn't want to ask anyone else. Like I believe in this, but I don't want to put anyone else at risk. You know, like I'm willing to take this on and put it on my shoulders and go and um
And the act of doing that actually my now father in law reached out after he's like, Hey look, I appreciate that you were willing to do this, but I'll loan you the money and I'm forever grateful for that because
A it was a vote of confidence and it was it just it it allowed me to kind of
you know, push on and I was super proud to be able to pay him back in a couple of years too. We paid him out like relatively quickly and the terms are super fair anyways, but it's like I I wanna get his money back and I take that responsibility incredibly seriously. Christmas dinner for Yeah, yeah.
Of course, and but I had such high conviction that like I would do anything to get that money back. If the business wasn't gonna fail, I would that money would go back first. And
And I take those sorts of things. Like when people bet on me or you know, my employees or investors, whatever, I take that incredibly seriously. I the number one thing you should be focused on is like doing right by the people that believe in you and bet on you. Who is the first person that ever bet on you? My mom.
Yeah. So I went to university and dropped out. So that's like that was a big riff in our family'cause
going to university was the safe path. That was the known path of
You know, my dad sold insurance and you know, my mom when when she had us stayed at home and it was it was super traditional, super go to school, get
get s whatever job, build a family. And so the idea of kind of going all in on this cycling career at the time was just like a pipe dream for the most part. And it wasn't really anything yet was a big riff, but my mom would like,
I could tell deep down she was like, I know you got this, I know you'll figure it out. Cause what I would always say to my parents at the time
And I was telling you about this yesterday is like
Whenever I have these big goals, I kind of hold two beliefs at the same time. One belief is I'm absolutely sure I'll pull this off. Like I have no doubt.
I will figure this out.
But I have no idea how I'm going to do it. I could not articulate that, which is very difficult for a parent because they're like, I want to believe you, but I need to see some pathway forward. What's the plan, dude? Yeah. It ended up working out. And it was the same thing in business too. It's like I have no idea how I'm going to do this, but I do know I can do it and it's going to work out.
My mom being like, you know, kind of just on the side, you know, being like
I know you'll figure it out. That was, you know, so important. And she's always kind of been in my corner like that and
certainly the the person to kinda bet on me and and understand I was different.
You know, she understood that like I was intensely passionate about things as a kid and I don't think also she really had a frame for entrepreneurship, like'cause it just wasn't a discussion. Like I had all these little things going on. I had my own little my own little bike shop repair. I built an office
in my bedroom closet. I was always doing these I just didn't know what it was. I was obsessed with the idea of kind of building business. I built bike teams. I would get all the kids in there before we build teams. I was organizing people, we had like schedules and so I was always building teams, leading teams, building little businesses
And I just didn't know what I was doing was entrepreneurship or building a business. That that was just what came natural to me and what I loved to do. And so she knew I was different. So she knew when I was kind of gonna go on a different path.
Um
she encouraged that, which was I'm like forever thankful for because you know, it's it's hard to
To be the only one that believes in yourself sometimes. How important
Are the people you surround yourself with.
Towards.
happiness and accomplishing your goals. I think it's
It's everything, really. Let's talk about like businessers' life in general. It's like you want people around you that are rowing in the same direction, right? Like you want people that have goals, you want to be able to swap and share insights, you want to be able to encourage each other. The power of having like a great network or group around you is kind of a double edged sword sometimes too, though, because
although the like a great network of people are going to propel you forward and teach you things you wouldn't know.
Sometimes you start to kinda
try to keep up with the Joneses a little bit. So in particular, like as I started to get some level of moderate success in business, my network started to grow and I started to become friends with people that were much further ahead than me. And it almost led to this insecurity, you know, like
For the five years before I was building my business, relatively unknown, didn't really know anyone else built building a business. I was really operating authentically and like what I wanted to do and setting goals that I thought was achievable. And then I'm immersed in this world where people are thinking much bigger, which is on one hand great.
you know, lessons of thinking bigger and and realizing like, oh, I am limiting myself, but at the same time trying to shorten the time horizon to try and catch up to these people that I admire. There's just no way to rush that process. And every time I've tried to rush that process, particularly over the last couple of years, it's ended up backfiring.
You know, like this year in particular
I made a conscious effort to be like
No more.
I'm gonna
We're go back to to operating authentically.
Doing what I feel is right.
listening to the vice around me, but filtering it and using it to the best of my ability. And it's going so much better. It's it's really back in that that way of
operating authentically. And so there is you I think you have to be careful as your network grows that you're not trying to compare yourself to those people as much and you're gat you're just gathering inspiration from them. When you're around a lot of smart people too, ideas are going to start flying. And it's your you need to have the confidence
And willingness to say, like, that's a great idea. That one's not for me. Or how do you synthesize those ideas? Cause in the early days, I thought,
Well, these people all know a lot more than I do. And sure, they know maybe it's more about business, but they don't know more about my business. They don't have all the context of what's going on. They don't understand the complexities of simply introducing a new product, right? Like that has so many supply chain implications, marketing implications. Like, sure, like the the most common advice I got.
from people is oh you sell socks. Have you thought about doing underwear?
It's like yeah, of course I've thought about doing underwear. But like
Those are completely different supply chain psychologies. Now it's gendered where socks are unisex. Like there's so many considerations, but on the surface, it's good advice. And so I've had to really learn that, you know, advice is welcomed and appreciated, but it's my job to synthesize it and actually use it when it makes sense. So to start
accumulating all of that and making sense of it and
you know, I've stopped applying a lot of it when it doesn't make sense anymore. And being okay with saying no, which is tough when you're surrounded by smart people, right? You've got investors, you've got mentors, you've got advisors, and of course they're smart, they know what they're doing, but I think it's really important as an entrepreneur to know you know your business best.
Right. Um, and the advice is there to help guide you, but sometimes it's not not what you should be doing.
Walk me through some of the changes you made specifically this year. Like what what's different between
The mindset approach attitude.
processes that you you're doing this year that have led to incredible results.
versus what you were doing last year. I'd say the number one thing we talked about was removing ego.
Let's just not do things because we think they're the thing to do. Let's just do the right things. We need to understand that.
We can't
Necessarily change.
The market.
We can't create demand that's not there at our current size right now.
We need to be okay with the ebbs and flows and we don't need to when things are not going well or we're in a slower period, we don't need to try and artificially inflate that. We don't need a hail marry. You know, silver bullets and like hacks and all these things, they're so
appealing to an entrepreneur. Every entrepreneur is like, you're just in it, right? It's so hard. And when someone has this new hack or new thing, it's it's that that fallacy of like, oh, that one thing I'm not doing is going to unlock all of my all of my
Uh solve all of my problems, unlock all of the growth. And it's just not true. And the worst thing that can happen is the the one time that maybe that silver bullet does work because then it it
Teaches you that oh
There's hacks here. So I always kinda caution, like if you get lucky, just appreciate it. But these hacks typically don't work. What we ended up doing is just extending the time horizon. You know, like I said, I was trying to rush before to to for for what reason, though? To
It was literally
expectations I had put on myself. No one around me was saying you need to grow at X or do Y. It was really me just feeling like I needed
You know
to gain acceptance of people that already accepted me. It was kind of weird.
And it was really just the self discovery of being like
No, these people already accept me. I'm I'm doing what I do. I'm I'm it's kind of that kid again, right? Of like, oh, if I don't keep performing and outperforming and winning.
Maybe they won't like me anymore or they won't be accepted anymore. And then just being okay with like look.
You know
I have to just operate this authentically. And I asked myself
What would it look like for this business to be around in 20 years? Forget about what we grow this year. How do we build a business that endures over time? And that makes the building so much more fun. Like how do we actually get back? I fell back in love with the product again this year, right? Like I love socks. You know, it's such a weird thing to say, but
One of my superpowers is I actually really
love socks and care about the product. And that comes through in the product that we we offer people love them as well because
I'm obsessed with making it better. And you know, like I'm obsessed with the customer feedback around it and falling in love with the product, serving the customer.
extending the time horizon and not doing things because your ego is dictating it.
That's a pretty good recipe for business success. The thing that gives me the most joy is, you know, sit down with our team now and we're we're talking about the future and it feels like we're on our toes and not our heels now.
And they're also feeling really inspired and they're saying, you know
even when you know, like there's still challenges, you know, business is still super hard. But
We're dealing with the hard problems calmly. We're like, we can figure this out. We've learned the tough lessons and we planned for this. Versus throwing Hail Marys. You know, it's like we're operating from a position of just trying to play catch up on on hitting our arbitrary goals that didn't really matter. And it ultimately led to
an unhappy work environment. Like it was just it was stressful.
And it just wasn't fun. Like, why are we doing this? Like why we we we do this because we we enjoy what we do. We enjoy learning and improving. Um
And that was that was the big unlock is is ultimately just extending the time horizon being like what makes us happy running this business. It's interesting when you think about extending the time horizon. There's so many different ways to do that, right? Not going into debt, there's operating from a position where we can run a marathon instead of a sprint. It's not taking advantage of your customers and treating them as a win-win.
Like you're gonna be a customer for live. Is there anything else that comes to mind when you think of
extending the time horizon. In order to extend the time horizon, I need to be physically and mentally as healthy as I can be. Same with our team. This doesn't work if we're not all operating to the best of our ability to. And the business has been so stressful, like any business over the last 10 years, that it really took a toll on my body specifically over the last two years. We had
a few very stressful events and I didn't deal with them I dealt with them well in business, but the rest of my life kind of fell apart and my body
And realizing that that's
not a sustainable path to go on. Like
being an athlete for so long and and a younger like in and younger in general is like I death gripped through life. You know, I was just like I learned very early with the injuries we I rode through is like, oh you can just
just make it through this. You can just brute force your way through this. And that's not the best approach always in business, and especially if you have an extended time horizon and longevity in mind, right? It's like the same idea of
Are you better off consistently working out or going once a week and just like demolishing yourself and the consistency is gonna be better for sure. I had kind of like three goals this year is like get the business back to a place where we're thriving and having fun. Get
my health back to a place where I feel confident and inspired and like kind of all in on this. And then the the third one was a little more personal. It was just like, you know, I had a a new kid, I have two two boys and one was born this year. It was really just like
you know, like really focus on the family,'cause I had my first kid during like the real thick of business and during Covet as well. And you know, I really wanted to kind of enjoy the process of this. So it was kind of like, you know, family business and health were three core pillars. And those things
Holistically all need to be kind of
going well for me to operate at my best. You know, we talk about
work life balance, which is like
I I
I hate the concept of it in entrepreneurship, you know, like
For for an a like a a salaried worker, like sure, like balance should be, you know, something that you're w thinking about. But in particular in sport or high performance careers or something that you're doing, it's like
You need to tilt the scale.
In your favor, right? And that's
By definition, no balance. However
I think what gets missed here is that
Part of the work for an entrepreneur, like an athlete, is like your health and your personal relationships. If those aren't
In a good spot, you're not operating at 100% efficiency. And so that's part of the work, right? What's not part of the work is maybe partying or doing things that you shouldn't be doing that are gonna set you further back. But people think about
You know, if I say work life balance is
uh is a joke. People are like, oh, what about your health when health is included in the work.
Um
And I think it's such an important part of it, too, is like how can you be a high performance entrepreneur? How can you tilt
the scale in your favor, how can you how change the odds? And I think
Your ability to
To be sharper.
more alerts physically and mentally fit is is gonna do
So so much benefit for you, especially as the business grows, too. The business now in its current stage is much more dependent on me.
thinking clear and having good ideas and meeting people and and being on.
When I do that.
Um
And that requires me feeling good.
I like how you said tilt the odds in your favor. I I've never really understood this concept of balance. The balance implies that you're perfectly equal in these things. And so I always think of this as like a mosaic. You have a border and you have different size pieces. And some of those pieces are family, some are work, some are maybe your hobbies.
uh health is definitely one of the big pieces there. And they they shrink and they sort of like
But they can never go away. Sometimes work's gonna be more of a priority. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes you're gonna family's gonna take over. So the these
the pieces expand, but they can never really go to zero. And health is like so foundational for all of these. But when we get busy, the first thing we do is like what do we do? We skip lunch or we get a really crappy lunch, we stop working out, we stop sleeping really well.
And we think we tell ourselves that we'll just make up for it later and we we start making worse and worse decisions, we're cranky, we're irritable, and it just compound negatively.
Yeah, it it almost ensures destruction. Right. So I've got a protocol now because that's what happened to me.
Two years ago when when things were going
poorly, that's what I let go and it just it cascaded into a two year event, which I'm sure could have been much shorter.
Um
And I just treat it much more like an athlete. You know, if you're injured, you go into recovery protocol. So if you're dealing with a high stress event in business, what's your recovery protocol?
What's that look like? How do you build that? How do you build that into a system and follow it? When these things happen.
You can't solve them overnight.
And so like working extra three hours. I mean, sometimes you need to stay up late. You know, there were late nights because
I'm literally on email chains with my lawyers for dealing with stuff, but like
That's not every night and that's not super common. And you can
you know, moderate that stuff. Letting your health go is is kind of
the worst strategy I've found, honestly. Cain through those times is down to resilience, perseverance. And if you let your health go. And when it did, like that's when, you know, very rarely have I ever felt
Like I couldn't do something.
when my health was in a poor spot about two years ago, going through the thick of it. That was one time where I was like, I don't know if I can do this much longer. Like if I don't get better,
I I honestly don't know if I could do this or I would trade this business to feel better because I'm just so sick right now and I just don't want to do it anymore. That was the only period. So that's when my health left. I was like, Oh.
Was that the lawsuit? That was the the cease and assist that led to our ultimate rebrand. Yeah. That was like the first walk me through that. We're five years into business operating under a former name.
And it's going really well. It's twenty twenty one. Our business that previous year grew a hundred and thirty five percent year over year.
And we were already growing an average of a hundred percent year over year. So it was just up and to the right. I was physically feeling good. I was fit. I like ran a half marathon PR that year. Like everything was great. Uh it's the year I think we met and I was raising, we bootstrapped the business from the start.
And
Like I said, I started to build a network and it this opportunity rose to to raise some money that
Not only there's kind of three parts to it.
You know, there was uh a personal
Security part to it. There was capitalizing the business for the first time, like actually having some some buyerpow behind what we want to invest in. And then also.
inviting in some voices that that I was so desperate for, of people I admired. So it was kind of this
Offer camera telling
You know, a bunch of friends and and my wife being like
You'll never get this. Like all my business heroes like want to give me money and invest in the company. Like, this seems almost like cheating. This isn't this is incredible. So I pass that opportunity. But literally the day the money hit account the account, we raised, you know, millions of dollars, it hits the account, I get an email from my lawyer that says
urgent in the subject line, and that's just almost never a good thing. And it's from my IP attorney, which I bar I rarely hear from. It was our first ever cease and assist, and it it basically said, you know, there's a a company that
uh believes they have rights over your name and and is demanding that you do X, Y, and Z, and one of those is stop using the name.
And so I was kinda like
immediately just shook'cause
We just raised all this money. We've been in business for five years. And that was the first time, you know, in sport and in business to that point.
Everything was something that like
I was solving problems that I created. I wasn't battling somebody. Like
I was in charge. This was something happening to us that I was completely out of control on, and I had
no frame for it. I had never gone through it before. I didn't know anyone that went through it for
maybe half an hour I was like, this is a death blow. You know, like I was kinda like let myself in
Yeah I called.
called you actually, I called a few other people, I was like, Okay, like this is
Not uncommon.
Um but
It was incredibly stressful. And it basically led us onto this six month journey of rebranding and changing our name. And that's an incredibly complex process for a business that's been around for five years. And how do you even start that process of, you know, communicating the messaging? What is a name that's going to work? And the stress, I think ultimately the stress came down to was.
Not messing it up, right? I had so many people that relied on me at that point. I had a young family, I had employees, I had investors.
I had what felt like the world on my shoulders. And none of them were putting that pressure on me. I put it on myself because I told you I take these responsibilities incredibly seriously.
Someone gives me money or bets on me, like I said, like
It's my duty to do right.
Um and so I wasn't gonna
not put a hundred and ten percent effort into it. And I had to learn. So I basically overnight like over the the next six months it became
quite
educated on I on on IP law and figuring out kind of everything and working with the best attorneys and we found the best people and working through the rebranding process and kind of going through discovery of what is a brand. You know, like when I started it, I kinda just picked a name that that I liked and
Yeah, we filed trademarks, we did all the right things, but I didn't do any diligence to see if there were other brands using similar names and
So this time around it had to be like, what's a brand name that could champion a business going forward? We've been in business for five years, people know about us. It's not a massive business, but it's growing. And what's one that's protectable? And you've got a timeline because you've got a person on the other side saying, Change your name by this date or we're gonna sue you. And it's just like so you got a gun to your head.
And you've got this huge list of things you need to accomplish. And it was incredibly daunting. And and this was
You know, the one time
Uh like I had no one else to lean on. Like my team couldn't do this for me. Investors couldn't. I had to do all of it and kind of
absorb all of the stress, work directly with the like I don't have a like I didn't have a co founder or an operating partner at that level. So like it's me on email chain with all the attorneys understanding
all the complexities of it and then figuring out how are we gonna go down this process. And so yeah, it was ultimately
the stress of that. And but like I said, now kind of a few years removed, I'm incredibly thankful for that period. I just like learned so much. Like the buyout of my co-founder, that was kind of what I coined as like 150 grand, that was my MBA. I learned so much during that process just around what is a shareholder agreement? What's the importance of it? Like
around co fo co founder dynamics and values and bios and the way we had to do everything. I learned so much at that period. This was now another learning opportunity of like, oh okay, we're we're operating in a different league now where like this is a thing and people
You have to play a little bit of defense. People are gonna throw like shoot arrows at you, you know, and
And so that was an arrow, and ultimately I let the second arrow hit me, which was my reaction, you're right. You have the first arrow, which you can't control. The second arrow is like how you deal with it. And I forget where I'm quoting that from, but someone says that I loved it because it's like you can choose not to get by the second arrow. And I chose to kind of like not do the right things in terms of taking care of myself. I give myself grace now because I didn't know any better.
I didn't have protocols built. I didn't know I was gonna get burned out because
Similar to work life balance.
I believe burnout is
the result of working long time uh a lot on things you that don't fill your cup that are out of line with your mission, it's not from overworking. The common thing is like, oh, if you work eighty hours a week, you're gonna burn out. It's not true. I can work eighty hours, a hundred hours a week on things I love and feel very energized and excited and you're obsessed with it, but working that eighty hours on this legal stuff and which was
completely counter
to what I wanted to do in our mission. It was it was such a distraction and a sideshow. And it's draining. It was
Incredibly draining. The stress, the anxiety around it. I smile, right? Because it's just like if I think back, it's there's so many incredible stories, and it was just like such a rewarding thing to go through knowing we've been on the other side and we've now under our new name outway sold more product and than we did ever as our old name, but like it just
Yeah, it was incredibly difficult.
It goes to show you then like as you get more successful, you start to attract attention. And a lot of people like to compete with lawyers instead of product. That's the losing mindset. Those people that are doing that are like operating from a place of fear and they're playing more defense than offense. And that's not how I like to operate. I'm much more of a friends in business kind of guy. I think like
Business is not uh zero sum. I think everyone can win. The markets are massive, especially in the stock space. It's a$50 billion market. But yeah, we went from
Um
No no legal.
issues to three in one year. So it wasn't just that one. I got like within the next six months got two others around completely unrelated things as well. And I was just like it was almost comical. You know, it's just like it kicked me while I was down. And but
I learned how to deal with those things. We resolved all of them.
Um
But
Yeah, man, it's it's it's something you just kinda have to go through. What went into the decision to rebrand instead of fight?
So every bone of my body wanted to fight.
Right. I came from a career of where like
you're in a sport, you're competitive, like
your number one goal is to fight. It's to win, right? Not physically, but like fight for that podium spot. Like
That's what you're doing.
But
I had to this time
Prioritize.
everyone else as well and think through what how does this affect not just me, but everyone involved, like I mentioned. And it was just a lot of discussions. You know, first it started with like if we do decide to fight.
What's that look like? And the quotes I got were
It could take you two years per country you fight this in and up to a million dollars. There's the financial and then there's the brain drain of doing that.
And so you weigh that against what are the financial
and other implications of changing the name. And ultimately, you know, what I landed on was this
understanding of what our brand is, which is why this whole process was incredibly
rewarding is'cause
Got to really dig into like why do people buy our product. If we were
a brand like a luxury brand where we were trading on our name as a big piece of the value, this was gonna be a big problem.
But we were a product driven. So people bought us because they loved the product. The name in that in that scenario was a reference to the product. And the way I thought about it was like I broke brand down into kind of three core components. And I like to use kind of like analogies to help visualize things. I I visualized a brand as a human.
And we'll use you as an example. Okay.
Three things primarily. You have your name.
How you look and your essence.
And so your name is how I'm gonna reference I'm gonna
call you or I'm gonna talk to you about other people, but if you came to me and said, you know, now my name's Dave
That would be like a little weird to take some adjusting, but like it doesn't change who you are.
Whatever, no problem. We can figure that out. How you look. If suddenly you came and had shoulder length hair somehow and and changed how you look and look completely different, it would take some getting used to how to recognize you, but ultimately you'd be the same person. And I would still want to hang out with you. If you came, looked the same, had the same name, but were a completely different person.
And our interactions were different.
I would question whether or not you were the same person, whereas you changing your name or how you look doesn't change who you are. Brand is ultimately.
How you make someone feel.
And it's the essence of the company. Understanding that.
gave me a lot of kind of like a much more kind of positive path forward of realizing, okay, we're changing the way people reference us and we can communicate this story. We're not changing how we look. We're able to maintain our logo. We're able to maintain our product and everything that made us
Visually look the way we do. That's not changing our mission and vision. That's not going to change. It's going to evolve with our community and with our customers, but we had to change our name.
And so once we understood kind of like
What are the implications here and how should we be thinking about it? It became a lot less daunting, not easier, but less daunting to figure out.
We're just changing how people reference us. And thankfully we
Uh people don't buy our product because we put our name on it.
You know, our name is just the way that we're referenced in the world for the most part. And there is goodwill. There's not to say that a name's not important. It is incredibly important, which is why we took so much time to figure out a new one. Once we could communicate that message and do that authentically and try to
get that message to as many existing customers as possible.
Um
We can control the narrative there. And also understanding that this only really affected people who've heard of us. And when we looked forward, it's like all the majority of the growth was still in front of us. So this doesn't actually matter for people that never heard of us because they wouldn't know our current name from a hole in the wall. So it's like okay.
That also makes it a little less daunting is like we have a community of customers here that know about us, we know how to reach them and we're gonna be very authentic. So we actually ended up creating like a little YouTube series where I walked people through and brought them along on the rebranding process. I was like, Here's what we're doing. We
interviewed like hundreds of people of our customers being like, what does the brand mean to you? We're gonna evolve this and we're gonna actually like
Take it in a direction that you now help us build. When the name changed, I was almost
A part of the ego I'd attach to like, I made this thing, it's mine. That's where that kind of like left, which I think was really a good thing. So it's like
This is our brand now. This is the customers brand. This is
the team's brand and we're all building this. And I think that's really important for an entrepreneur is to
Let go of that my mine mine.
Um because
You need to be able to delegate. You need to be able to bring in people that are better than you. You need to realize that your job as the entrepreneur, the founder,
is to really get the thing going and and if you're the person to scale it, do that as well. But you need to build the system around you. And so that was also a a really unique time where I was like it felt like what I had created, the name I created kind of died a little bit, like that phase died a little bit and we were reborn.
as like I had this kind of other analogy as like
F up to that period.
We were
You know, we were a caterpillar in the first five years and we went into a cocoon and emerged a butterfly. It was like a called it our butterfly moment. And, you know
although like we look different or with a new name or whatever, we're still the same thing. We're just kind of now we've got wings and now we can fly. And it was like it was kind of this like beautiful little way I I made myself feel better and explained that to the team and was like this is our butterfly moment. You know, we can either like I said earlier, we can choose to let this this
unfortunate situation hold us back or propel us forward.
And so we went through the demise of like, how do we actually use this as a springboard? How do we bring the community along for us and actually walk them through this and make them feel involved and like their voice was heard and
It ended up working out really well for us. I suspect you're gonna have a lot more legal challenges as you go from eight figures to nine to hopefully ten.
Um, as you get more and more attention. At dinner last time, I think Davis said this too, is like, you know, you're not a real entrepreneur so you get a legal letter, right? And I've that he's not the first person to say that to me. And it's just so hard when you get the first one. Like anything in business, you know, it's like
The first time it happens to you, you feel like you're the only one in the world this is happening to. And it's very lonely.
Especially if you don't have a network.
Like if you don't have a network in particular, that can be very scary. I love thankfully at that time I had people to be like, Oh, this happened. They're like, Oh, no big deal. Like you'll you'll do it. And now I I have I I dealt I met with a younger friend that kind of something similar was happening. I'm like, No, you'll be okay. And it felt good to kind of be that voice. I could see them kinda like
start the wheels were starting to turn and start to get stressed. I was like, listen, just trust me. I was in your position. Like
you will be okay, but you need to do this. You need to like take care of yourself and kind of walk them through what we did. Ultimately, if we can share those lessons, I think they're so important. I welcome the challenges.
I'm I'm I'm happy to be in a period of like smooth water right now. Um, but you know, ultimately like the challenges, like I said, are how we grow. And uh you're right. These are just is part of business. It's like people are are shooting arrows, you're gonna get hit. It's what are you gonna do about it? And learning that what seems like a death blow often is not is
Is how you build that resiliency and the ability to keep pushing forward. So now when we got the each subsequent legal letter.
That initial shock impact and how I dealt with it was
was better and improved a lot and how I managed those things and
And that's ultimately the goal is how how can you build that resiliency and how can you build the teams? Like we've got incredibly great
you know, attorneys now and and processes for when these things happen. You only build those out of the first time it's happening, right? So like no one's building up an IP attorney team and the whole process around IP infringement if you don't have issues there. I can say things you can't, but like some of the stuff that people are claiming is just like absolutely ridiculous. Like it shouldn't be granted that this has
you know, any sort of intellectual property rights whatsoever. Yeah, and I'm I'm intentionally having to be quite vague and not even mentioning what our previous name is because that's that's in these agreements of like what I can and cannot say, but you're right. It's the unfortunate thing about IP law in in in specifically is it it almost exclusively operates in the gray area, right? In in
trademark infringement in particular, what they're looking for is will the non observant consumer
In other words, a person who knows nothing, who's not paying attention, would they be confused between one brand and another? That come down to logos or words. And that's a hard thing to prove. And ultimately, who's gonna prove that over time is the person with a lot of money because they're gonna argue different things. The battle of bank accounts it's a battle of time.
Right. Like how much time are you willing to spend? Like I said, it was like much more than the million dollars. It was the two years. The two years with no certainty. So I was like
That's too much of a looming.
You know, too big of a risk. Too big of a risk. And generally these things are are without they're pretty baseless, but it uh
They're usually bigger companies with firepower. I wanna come back to the mosaic or balance.
uh with two young kids, uh rapidly growing business. What have you learned about using your time effectively? It's had to evolve, right? Because I've been
in a few different I've worn a few different hats at a different scale of our business. And like as a
A founder.
you start day one doing everything. And as the business evolves, you start to hire people, but you're still
doing a lot of the things and you're micromanaging. You're not
Yeah.
Yeah, I had done this before, so I'd do all the mistakes and you're you're overriding things and
And you don't know any better, but eventually
you start to learn, like I mentioned, with kind of how we evolved after the rebrand, like you've got to bring in better people than you and understand.
How are you best applied? Right? How are you the most effective in your job? And how I manage all that now is like I kind of had to
For myself, relearn what work is? How do I hold myself to account? How do I judge myself? Because the other kind of
downside of entrepreneurship is you don't have a lot of feedback as a founder. When you have a boss
You're getting feedback, you know, if you're hitting marks or not. And you know, we have investors and stuff, but our investors are also like entrepreneurs and they're great. So they're not exactly kind of
Uh
keeping tabs uh as much as like a boss would, for example.
And so
You have to
One, hold yourself to account and figure out what that looks like. Uh, and for me, I had to reinvent that as like work.
Today is not what it used to be. It's not hands on the tools as much. It's not
overriding decisions, it's not getting too into the weeds. It's not losing touch. I still have
A a very
uh firm kind of finger on the pulse of the business. I have a lot of consumer feedback sent directly to my inbox. So I want to know what's going on at that level, but it means not getting involved in the weeds and in kind of doing those jobs. And so work for me is
How do I like the mosaic, how do I holistically make sure I'm in the best mindset?
To have a good idea.
I say my my job's to really have a good idea once a quarter. Like a really good idea. And and those ideas
move the needle quite substantially, and they often require
A lot to go into those ideas.
But
I've got such incredible people working on kind of
the day to day, week to week, month to month stuff. My job is to be looking six to twelve months out. And then further, but typically six to twelve months because I think beyond that you're guessing.
In six to twelve months we can make a pretty good idea of where we need to be going. Um
And ultimately it's to have those good ideas. So how do I put myself in a position to have those good ideas? That's a lot of reading.
That's a lot of consuming just basic
information out there. So reading even just like the the s publicly traded companies in our space, reading the reports, how are the CEOs thinking, you know, how's the market
looking at these businesses and what are they saying? It's networking with people, extracting those insights. It's called like almost like engineer serendipity as well. It's like how do you put yourself in a bunch of different situations to just extract an idea? How can you go idea harvesting? I look at that as my job to basically go out there and collect the information, come back and synthesize it and apply it.
in which way makes the most sense for our business. And of course, like that's not all all I do. I would love to that's all I do, but I get pulled into you know the in a business
Problems flow uphill.
And so there's still those things, but thankfully I've got incredible people that kind of head those off now as well. And
My area of excellence and like where I'm the most effective is when I'm creative. And so I'm creative when I'm not stressed.
When I'm creative, I'm thinking about those ideas and networking and kind of
But
The lack of stress all also comes from taking care of myself.
And so it's been tough though to redefine work as that because it doesn't look like
sitting in front of a computer, it doesn't look like nine to five. And so I had to battle with this, like, am I working hard enough? And it was this this realization that like, oh, I'm out of the death grip phase.
That's no longer serving me. I can't just sit down and death grip a good idea.
I can't just sit there with a a a Google Doc and be like
Good idea time. That's not how it works anymore. My my my work is twenty-four seven, the mosaic. It could be something my wife says. Like she's incredibly smart. Like she gives me tons of ideas. She's the real co-founder in the business, right? Like those early days, who am I
going over everything with, like her level of business knowledge would
be higher than you know people going with MBAs like she's seen it all talking to her about things, walking through problems, talking to everyone. It's just like work looks like that. And so it's spending time with family, but it's it's are you can you extract something? Is there an insight that comes out of that as well? And another way to look at the mosaics is seasons.
Right. There's seasons where you need to be busier and
I've really identified where those seasons are and and that's communicated with my family and you know, my wife and partner, and where that's gonna be kind of all in.
Like what's and we'll just say what season are we in, right? And and how do we adapt to that and make sure that we're operating
At the best of our ability in in all areas that matter.
What have you learned about simplicity and focus when it comes to operating a business that most people miss? I think the tendency
To do more.
is just the common
The common path people go down. They're like, okay, I've got some level of success. How do I replicate that by doing more? So like, for example, we sell socks, should you sell underwear? What people fail to realize there is have you fully maximized the opportunity that's in front of you? I mean, really optimized it. I mean, the power of focus is so important. The way I kind of like explain this to our team is imagine
You're running a race.
And you're in the lead pack and you're you're doing a good job.
And out of the corner of your eye, you kind of catch another race going on. You're like, Oh, that looks fun. And you hop the barrier and you're in that, but now you're middle and back of the pack. You didn't prepare for that race. You don't really know the landscape.
Oh, and you're you're now falling behind in the race you're running because you haven't built the infrastructure to maybe have another teammate that could run that race who trained for, for example, that'd be like hiring or developing a different line of business. But I think what a lot of entrepreneurs do is they try to run multiple races. And that's like a surefire way to burn yourself out and also just not give the attention and focus to what really matters. We're taught that
Like to get more, you have to do more.
I just don't think that's true. I think to get more you should be doing less typically. You should be subtracting. So going into this year
We're very clear on our goals. Almost like a bit of an insecurity we were trying with us too is like
Are socks enough?
You know, is it a big enough goal?
But
Outside of my own ego, it's like
Why aren't socks enough?
Right. It's a fi like I said, fifty billion dollar industry.
We're a leader in it.
And we're doing really well.
And we're
of that market size were
Just scratching the surface, if you would even say that, right? It's a massive market. And so what I always go back to is like we've barely maximized the opportunity here. We're at the start line still. Why would we do anything else? And we love doing this. And I think.
That level of focus
empowers you to like really become an expert at it and really become a master of it and and extend the time horizon. Not to say we won't do other things in the future, but right now.
The best opportunity we have in front of us is what we're doing. So why would we take any of that focus away? And every time we've kind of faltered.
Over the past years it's been
Like I said, chasing a silver bullet or trying to go down a path.
That is just out of line of our circle of excellence. You know, like why are we doing this? Other than and it it wasn't really a
Th those paths were never something I was like, this is what we need to do. Like the conviction I have around socks. It was
advice or
Or or grasping for growth or trying to figure it out. And I think like in anything in life, like
Focus is so incredibly important, and business is also just so hard, like life, there's just always things coming at you.
Being able to simplify what you're doing your day to day to deal with those coming in. Like I said earlier, we're we now, of course, still have problems, but our ability to deal with those problems is incredible, right? Because we're not
So
underwater with everything we're trying to do.
We're just so ready to deal with what's ever coming that way. And I think
the focus and and just the the mental clarity around it and being okay.
With socks, you know, which is it it sounds
Kinda funny now that I say it, but just being okay with that is is is so important and
It's uh it's just unlocked this level of like love of what we're doing again.
When it comes to design, how do you go about anticipating what people want? It's become more data driven. In the early days, I designed what I liked, of course. And young entrepreneurs or people starting their first business, they have solutions looking for problems.
So that's what they teach you in business school. Like come up with
a solution and go try and find the problem. Whereas you should be solving problems, right? You should be looking for and in particularly if it's your first business, you should be solving a problem you deal with. Cause otherwise, why are you qualified to do that? And so like I said earlier, I was solving my problem of a pair of socks that could could do it all. Figure out where your advantages are
And you know, what product path you want to go down and why that
Why that matters. I'm not that unique. What I like, there's likely millions of people that are gonna like these designs as well. And so that was the simple start, not trying to guess what people wanted. I was really trying to just solve my own problem. That's evolved now to having core categories of what we know people like. And like I mentioned earlier, the designs are a way that we get people into
the business. So we kind of design things around nature, animals, food, abstract, funny. And that's really a way to evoke some sort of emotional response from people. Give them that kind of like giggle or or laugh that maybe they want to buy that pair and it makes them feel a certain way. But ultimately what's super exciting too is we found that designs
Actors
a certain level of inspiration for people. It's one of the first pieces of clothing you put on in the morning and
What I would do with socks is I would lay them out like
how I'm feeling that day is the kind of design I would use. And I heard that from customers and friends as well. They're like, oh, I've got this important meeting today. This is the pair of socks I wear for that. Um so I think that's a really cool aspect of the product too is is like can our product
be this thing you put on in the morning.
that inspires you to go after your big goal. One of our internal kind of goals is to inspire personal bests. That's kind of why we do what we do at a brand level. We don't really care if you get to the finish line first, we want to make sure you get to the start line you try.
And you set a goal and you actually go for it. I think that's just so important. Move forward and and kinda
Remove the outcome.
But like
really focus on getting started. And yeah. So ultimately like the designs follow that kind of pathway and and we we're trying to inspire people, but also just give them what we know they like our best selling stuff and what people buy the most of are just really basic stuff. And I've kind of
evolved into wearing more basic designs. We're both wearing basic versions of your style. That's that's the season I'm in is more basic. Well, I got like more of a retro inspired kind of design going on, which I really like right now. But yeah, the designs are just this fantastic way people express themselves. And I love seeing what our customers how how they kind of
move through the world with them on and I love to ask them when I see them like why'd you choose that as well? Like why does that mean something to you? We've got incredibly talented designers now and they use a lot of kind of insights and and data. And then sometimes we'll just
Pro
Shit the wall too. Like I'll have an idea. You know, like of course, like founder has an idea for something stupid and we'll try it. And typically those don't do well. One thing I have had to get better at is not letting my preferences dictate what goes out. So if I dislike a design, I have to ask myself, I have to remove kind of my personal preference, be like, do I think our customer base will like this design? Because
were now much bigger than my preference. And it's no longer the million or so people that are like me. It's it's much bigger than that. And so that was challenging, because like it is your business and you ultimately kind of want it to be in line with what you like, but again, it was it it plays into that like it needs to evolve to be much more than you
'Cause I don't like for example, one of our best known designs right now is a cat and I don't like cats.
So I'm just like secretly I'm like
I I don't want to see it do so well, but at the same time I'm like, hey, people love it. You know? And like
Cool. Power to them, too. Like people love cats. I don't like cats. You know, I'm allergic to them. That's why I don't like them. But I think that's really cool. And that was important is getting out of my own way, too, and realizing like that comes down to just
hiring good people in general. It's like you hire them because they're better than you. It's like so guide them.
And have your inputs, but
You know, make sure you ultimately
let them bring forth something that is better than what you would have done as well. What have you learned about taking big swings? I think it comes down to like why are you taking that swing? So I've taken big swings that were authentic and they're like the big goals, like even just starting the business or trying to go after certain, you know, athletic goals, but then there's big swings that are
Trying to solve
problems in a faster way. So maybe making a big hire that you're trying to rush because you think they're going to come in and be able to solve all your problems. Just choosing a co-founder because you think it'll be more fun. Like these are just never good reasons to kind of take big swings because you're relying on hope. And the hope's just generally a bad strategy. The big swings I've taken where they weren't
in line with auth my authenticity and kind of why we're doing them. Like like I talked about earlier, that that personal mission and drive of why are you doing what you're doing. Like how like that's what's gonna take you through the hard times. That's what's gonna make you endure and
And if you're gonna take the big swing, you've gotta know it's gonna come with a lot of
turmoil, it's gonna be challenging, and you've gotta be ready to back that up. When I think about it now, I try to imagine
I'm in a room
With
a hundred people and I'm explaining my rationale for taking a big swing.
And I like to imagine that like
I need to do a good enough job that the majority of the people be like, that makes sense. At least that's rational that the why you want to do that. So I try to take myself out, metaphorically put myself into a room and be like, would the mo would most people agree with this? And then the second question I'd like to ask is like, and would I would I be happy with this decision in five years? So I like to extend the time horizon on that. It's like, is this
Solving a short term problem, but creating a long term one is something
I've had to learn the hard way, of course, but I really try to do that now. And like even if it's going to be short term, good, long term, bad, I just no way. It's just, it's not worth it.
What have you learned about hiring?
I learned that I got really lucky early on. And so that like I talked earlier about the worst thing of like
hacks or or doing hard things that work out for you is that you get lucky. So I got incredibly lucky with my first few hires who are all still with us.
Um and they've scaled and grown with the company and they're leading major parts of the company, which is incredible. During the period of high growth
Um
we had to build the team and build it fairly rapidly'cause we started growing pretty quickly and
And
Honestly, I just was
Not experienced enough to to
really do that properly. And you know, hiring for
What I would say now are probably the wrong reasons. Hiring for org chart, not really what needs to be executed. Um, hiring in ways because that's just how it's been done. Cause I was just trying to like look around what I've been. I'd never done this before. Not really questioning if we should be hiring or subtracting.
Right. So a lot of hiring happens because there's just a lot of inefficiency in the organization. And I think that's a really important thing is like
Do you need a person or a process? Or do you need to stop doing that entirely? And so when we were half the size we are now, we had twice as many people as we do now.
Which is crazy because we were just so inefficient. I really didn't understand the concept of subtraction and and how we could build efficiently. The biggest hiring mistake I made was thinking like
You know, going into our second year of not hitting the growth goals, like I arbitrarily said, ego really attached to it. Like we need to do better. We need to kind of keep the good times rolling. You know, COVID was this big inflationary period for e-commerce businesses and direct consumer businesses. Like everyone started shopping online, you got this huge boom, and the market started to draw down really hard. And so you're trying to
to find growth and exceptional growth in a market that's going down is a it's very challenging. But I was kind of hard headed about it and I was like, surely we just need an experienced person to come in and lead marketing. I ran a good
process in terms of diligencing the person that I ended up
Hiring but
the mistake I made was not filling the top of funnel. I didn't get enough candidates of that same quality to compare and contrast them against. I was they were able to tell me exactly what I wanted to hear. I got good references, you know, all the typical things. Yeah, ultimately the lesson I learned there was like
I need to actually take what they're saying and compare it to other people as well. And so I took a big swing. That was this is one of those big swings that I took that.
wasn't authentic. It was like it was trying to accomplish something that like trying to force something. Trying to force something and shorten the time horizon. And it just went incredibly wrong. You know, it turns out they were not exactly truthful about their experience. Like they weren't as good at the job as they were. They were working other jobs during ours. It was a remote, they were you know based in the US. We're here in Canada. I got played. It felt like almost violating
'Cause it was just like totally like
I'd never dealt with that before. It was it was just it was very weird. It didn't only work. It caused a lot of internal conflict as well because like it was a big org shift. The guy currently had running marketing was now replaced with this this expert. And that's, you know, wasn't a great move on my part as well. And that was kind of the last straw.
You know, like last year, mid year is where we kind of like that didn't work out. That's where I just like
Wiped the table clean and said, like
Here's everything we're not doing anymore, because we're just gonna strip this down. We're gonna subtract and rebuild because this just isn't working. And I don't care about these growth goals anymore. Like we need to get back to a place where we're operating authentically and doing good work and and fulfilling our mission. We're just like we're not even listening to the customer anymore, right? We're doing things.
try to chase growth and that chasing growth will
will as a consequence force you to start doing things that, you know
aren't inherently good for your brand or you're going to new categories that don't make sense or change messaging that's out of line with why your customers are there in the first place. And so again, as painful as that hire was in getting that wrong.
It was just kind of the last draw of like another lesson learned for sure, but last draw of like, no, I need to rethink how we're doing everything right now and the internal team and that's where you went for simplicity and sort of focus. Yeah, that was July of twenty twenty three. I was like, This is
where we're resetting. And that's really like the success we're seeing now is the result of a thousand things we've done over the last year. It's not, we're not doing anything special right now. But the the the choices we made in July and subsequent choices after that all build
this forward momentum of doing the right thing that are now all working. And so people could you could ask me right now, I was like, what are you doing that's leading to your your growth this year? I couldn't really answer that question because it would be, Well, here's how much time do we have, right? Are we gonna do an eight hour podcast? Cause there's literally a thousand things we did. It started with subtraction, but
It goes much deeper than that. It goes it goes, you know, into everything that we do. And it's been so fulfilling to do that though, because like
From that point on, we've just been building and it's just been
It's it's felt way more like it did previous to like the the tough times. I remember we went for a walk.
July last year we were talking about
Bill Walsh's book, The Score Will Take Care of Itself.
Instead of focusing on
The revenue, the score.
Just focus on the things you control. The revenue will be the revenue, right? I can't like go like the early days where I could force my classmates to buy a pair, I can't go force people to buy socks now. And I think like it's not gonna move the needle if you're knocking on doors.
Yeah, well, exactly. Maybe a little bit, but yeah, not not in not where we needed to. And I'm not shy to still get out there in hand to hand combat. I will do it. If you're focused on the work and you're focused on fulfilling
The promise you have to your customers.
Like the results will come. If you if you do a good product and you market it well, the goal for us is socks on feet. The product is so damn good. I want to get more socks on feet because then people will come back. So how do we do that effectively? The same's true of sport, right? Like
Every time I got to the start line to race, like anything could go wrong. There's no guarantee I'm gonna win. Like if I focus too much on the result.
you lose sight of everything else that's important of just actually executing. Like my job was actually just to do what I trained for. And that's all you can really do, right? Like those people out there will be like we don't have goals. I think goals are still important. I think goals are incredibly important. You need a North Star
But
that's how we think about goals, much more of a North Star than like we need to hit this, like because those are fairly arbitrary. You know, we're not a public company, you know, we're not having to like do arrange reports that are gonna move our stock prices. Like it doesn't matter, right? If we're doing good business and we're growing and our customers are happy and we're profitable.
And we can do that.
over twenty years, we've got a pretty damn good business. I have a saying with the kids, which is the lack of patience changes the outcome. There's a natural pace to a lot of things, and we get into a lot of trouble when we try to speed that up. I agree with that wholeheartedly. That has been kind of the theme. Sometimes these things can work, but I think very rarely over the long term
They they do. That's not to say don't try things as they come up to. I think like
I always try to be cautious of
I've
Telling people like, Oh, don't try the hacks, just focus on long term. Sometimes you need to try things and you need to like touch the stove once or twice. But generally speaking, if you prioritize the long term and do good business, it's gonna work well. And in life, like even with um just health, man, it takes so long.
You know, it's just like if you actually want to build a resilient body and a healthy body, like it's just it takes time. Same with the business and and sport and results. It's just like be kind to yourself, I found. It's like you don't you don't need it all right now. You know, you're just like
One foot in front of the other, steady progress. You went through a process recently to learn
not to care as much about what other people
think about you or what you're doing. I kinda had this current fear, or like I got to a certain level in my cycling career.
Where
I peaked.
And but it wasn't
where I wanted to peak. It wasn't kind of the ultimate goal of
Well, the ultimate goal would have been winning being the best in the world, right? I never got there. Um, one year I was
number one in Canada, but like
I didn't I don't feel like I kinda had unfinished business there before I I I just didn't reach the top. And you know, looking back, there were a lot of things I wish I did differently. And I was looking here, like I don't want that to happen again. So I was trying to search for like what am I not doing?
What have I never done before that I should be doing to try and challenge myself and grow? So I actually texted a mutual friend of ours, Andrew Wilkinson, us like, here's kind of what I'm going through. I didn't know if it was therapy I needed to do. I didn't know if it was a business coach. Like I I just knew I needed to
work through this and understand myself better and and just learn more about like
What is my superpower ultimately? Like where should I be focused? And uh I I just want to make sure I'm doing everything I can. And he mentioned this guy, Jack Skeen, who does this.
Road map.
process where
Andrew had done it and
few other people in the business community had done it. And it's this kind of extensive process where you work with Jack and you do some
clinical kind of like psychology tests understand kind of your tendencies and he does interviews of your close friends and family, people that have opted in
To being around you, um, for the most part. They see something in you. Uh, and then interview calls and coaching calls with him. And the goal of that is to kind of
understand yourself better and understand
You know
what your superpower is. And I didn't go into it with the goal of
trying to care less about what people think that was an outcome of the process. I actually didn't know
What to expect.
I just knew that I I wanted to be taken apart and put back together. I wanted to like actually piece by piece really understand myself. Like I wanted to dig into the childhood and be like, what does drive me? Why do I do the things I do? Why am I
so intense. Why do I have these goals and and need to what or
and need to achieve them. Why are my expectations so high? A lot of why I was moving through the world was acceptance and and caring about what people thought, like like attaching my worth to how other people
Yeah.
And that was a
really unique insight of just like
I wasn't living authentically, you know, and I was kind of
Limited by
the belief of others. I I've never really struggled with caring what
People think
Unless I like admired them or care like cared about their opinion.
I think it's important to like
prioritize what people you care about think, but
that can't limit you and it it can't change, you know, what you feel is right and what you need to do as well. And so
Going through that process
And and
Building the
um the systems and kind of building the understanding of how do you deal with that. Like I one thing I I did daily
Is I all kinda like
Do some journaling.
Um, and I just started asking myself every day, when did I not say or do
What I was really thinking.
or feeling.'Cause I didn't want to moderate myself anymore. That's not say be rude.
But it's not to like if if we're having a uh a conversation and I disagree, like I wanna be more willing to say that because
I don't want to have a fear of thinking that
the other person across the table is gonna not like me anymore because I disagree. It's like is that a good friendship anyways? It sounds obvious, but a lot of people operate that way. Yeah. Right. It's it's very natural to like want to fit in and and want to kind of be
Accepted.
And so it can be a bit scary to kind of like be really authentic. And it causes resentment if you're holding that in. Well, totally. Yeah. It's it's exhausting, right? Because you're actually not living your true self. You're you're like a chameleon. And that's where a lot of
People who think they're maybe introverted, I think, or they're just actually limiting a lot. They're just kind of molding to their environment. That's why they're so exhausted after it's they're just around the wrong people or they're not being authentic. So yeah, learning like strategies on how not to care. That's a lot easier said than done, but asking myself that question and kind of like knowing I have to be accountable to that.
allows me to be more authentic'cause like I don't wanna answer that question and be like, here's where I moderated myself and
How you say, like I've only
like once in a couple of months had to like answer that question and
And and not uh
Yeah, be like, Yeah, I moderate myself here. Um, it was just out of fear it was like a public speaking that I didn't want to get up and talk. It's like I don't know, I cared what people thought for some reason, it it kind of
affected me. Outside of not caring what people think, the the real kind of unlock there was
I said superpower and like it came down
that you know, like my love and appreciation for socks and the util like the utility and how they can improve what I see there and learning.
how that that can be enough.
You know, like learning that.
Um
I would like I mentioned earlier, it's insecure about socks being enough. Like I I do now feel I'm in a spot where I know a lot about business, I've got a lot of experience. I kind of had this
This angst of like, are socks the best utilization of these skills that I've built? And I kind of mentioned that to Jack. He's like,
Well
That's kind of silly. Like w
If you're doing shoes, would that be enough?
What about tennis rackets?
And I was like
Oh, I've never thought about it that way. I was like
you know, Nike's a great business, right? It was shoes for such a long time as like no one ever was like
That's a lame business, right? I was like socks. I was like
I met I've mentioned a couple of times, it's a big market. I was like, why isn't this enough? Why in my head are socks, you know, not as good as shoes or rackets or some tech thing? It's like it was just this kind of like
self imposed sort of limiter of like
I don't know, of like I guess
caring what people think'cause I don't have a better idea right now and I really love what I do.
And so it was really helpful to understand that'cause it like I said, it helped me
I was already falling back in love with kind of the process, but it was like it almost allowed me to kind of like fulmit to it again and be like, Oh no, socks.
you know, are enough. Until the next idea comes. I kinda challenged him'cause I was like
Oh, I did all this work and like
Socks are my superpower? And he's like, No.
They are right now. Your ability to like
take a product and see how it can be improved is your superpower.
But you don't have another product in mind right now. He's like, that will come and you'll know when it comes. He's like, be okay with where you are. And that's been a kind of theme for me is, you know.
I got to see the feedback and read the report and you know, one of the things that like Rob tries to rush through life. And I do. Like I'm always like on to the next thing. I don't celebrate the wins.
And it's just like I'm trying to rush to the next thing. And it's like as I get older too, and I'm trying to appreciate
the moments and smell the roses. And a good example of this is when I was cycling, I got to travel the world and see all these incredible places.
I was so intense and so focused that I would not enjoy anywhere. I'd be in Spain or Italy, and I would be so tunnel visioned that I didn't even give my time myself time to like appreciate where I was. And I always told myself I'll be back. I'll appreciate it later. I haven't been back, right? Like it just ended. And I look back, I'm like, I think I would be
a lot more fulfilled if like I actually just smelt the roses, right? Cause like the results are one thing, but like
the experiences and
the opportunities to like be there. And like we always look back and like we don't talk about the results, we talk about the experiences and the journey.
And unfortunately I just like didn't
take time to appreciate the journey.
And so I'm really trying to do that now. And you know, it's just way more fulfilling to be like, we're in it. One of my favorite quotes is one of my favorite shows, The Office.
And selling the final episode and Andy says
Uh he's kinda reminiscing. He's like
Um
I wish someone told us we were in the good times, like in the good old days, right? He's like they're looking back and they're like
I wish they would tell you before it ended. And I'm kinda getting goosebumps talking about it. It's like I'm in the good old days right now, right? Like I know when this business is over as tough as it is, or whatever going through, even like raising young children. I try to remind myself, like these are the good old days. Like another thing I read was like
You know, like it can be hard to take your dog I have a dog, hard to take them out in the rain.
but when they're gone, how much would you pay?
to take that dog for a walk right now. It's almost like rewinding a little and just being like, Remember when you wanted what you have now.
Yeah. And just being happy and content with that.
But also still, you know, striving for more and maybe
There's a title of a book by David Sokol, which I like, which is Pleased but Not Satisfied.
And it's sort of like you can be happy where you're at and you can still drive for more. That's something I've struggled with is like
I'm incredibly happy this year and like and I've been
You know, struggling with like
People ask like, what's your biggest challenge right now? And I'm like, or what's your biggest problem? I'm like, I feel like I've spent two years fighting problems, that like I'm in kind of like a solution phase right now. On one hand, hyper ambitious, but on the other hand, content, because tent is almost like counter to ambitious, right? And it's how do you balance those two things not to use balance is it's like, but how do those two things live
simultaneously and and maybe it comes down to seasons. That's the thing ultimately been like
When I'm in a creative space.
It's not tied.
to the result as much. You know, it's not it's not like
Yeah, I'm in a place now that's incredibly hard to even imagine ten years ago. But there's still so much more I want to go. And but I'm not driven. And I never was driven. I think that's why I go back to sport is like the ultimate motivator where I said everything's
The goal of starting my business

financially driven.
It was this deep desire to accomplish something. And that hasn't gone away.
You know, and that that won't go away. And so there's no level of income where that's gonna kinda leave me. And so it comes down to like how are you resilient or why are you doing what you're doing? It's that personal mission of like why are you doing it and and being authentic. I think that's a great segue to the question we always end with, which is what is success for you? This changes over time.
Because my life's changed so much over the last few years. I feel like I'm learning
A lot of hard lessons and a lot of great lessons. And I look at my young children, I'm like, I want to do the best job I can to share these with you and give you kind of.
A bit of a head start. You're gonna go through pain. You're gonna go through tough times, but
I want to do as good of a job as possible to prepare them with these lessons that I've learned. And I I try to do that.
Um
through young entrepreneurs too. Like I do a lot of work with the local schools and I I try to share these lessons on different platforms too, just because like I didn't have anyone to go to.
You know, like I didn't have that where my whole network was was athletes and and all that. So like when I was going through all the early challenges, it was kinda me and just internalizing it. I'm like, I wanna be that voice that says
You'll be okay.
Right. And I think success looks like being able to
Show my kids what hard work looks like.
Shall I
doing that while having like a great family life as well and you know, honoring my partner and and that. Just sharing the lessons, you know, that would be
That would be success is the kids grow up and they're in a good spot. You know, like what's what's more important than that. And I think
Ultimately
having fun while doing all that, operating in this zone of being healthy and being happy and
That would be success, man. That would be winning.

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