And welcome, everybody, to another smart money circle show.
I'm Adam Sarhan. With me today is Tom Logan,
who's the founder and CEO of Marion.
Ticker symbol is Mir. Tom, thank you so much for
taking the time. And I'm very excited about
today's show. Adam, it's a sincere pleasure to
be with you today. Thank you.
So Tom, I always like to begin. Can you tell us your story and
how you got to where you are today, please?
Yeah, I'd be. I'd be happy to.
My story is is probably a little bit atypical and probably a
little bit too circuitous. But I did my education at
Cornell undergrad and MBA and as I left Cornell, I I moved out to
San Francisco and began my career with Chevron Large,
obviously one of the global leading global oil producers.
Yeah, it was a great experience for me, you know, very strong
opportunity to see the world. I had expatriate assignments in
the UK and then in Kazakhstan did a lot of things that really
help me to understand and really create kind of a framework as to
my particular view of the world at least in terms of how
business should be conducted. And that was informed in part by
by both positive experiences there as well as negative
experiences there. I love Chevron and joined a
privately owned family owned enterprise that was focused
principally in the in the food industry.
Ultimately becoming CFO of of one of their food ingredient
businesses and also President of a cogeneration business they had
where they ran a small power plant in the Central Valley of
California. Exited both businesses selling
them to to the food business to a a major food ingredient or
packaged a food producer the the power plant to a a major
independent power producer. And at that point I joined my
first private equity backed company which was a roll up of
contract manufacturing of businesses.
I joined a CFOA very operational CFO and that was a business that
was focused large largely on the the global tech community.
And the timing was perfect in that I joined the company right
as we went through theother.com collapse and it led to a very
stressful couple of years since we figured out how to how to
deal with a essentially a demand equation that had collapsed and
ultimately to gain the the maximum possible value for the
business, which ultimately did, we did.
We ended up taking the company through Chapter 11, selling it
out of Chapter 11. But in many respects it was a
successful failure and something that that was an enormously
useful learning experience for me overall.
But on the on the heels of a couple of good exits for me
personally I decided to take a swing at the at the startup
world and was involved for a period of a couple of years with
three different early stage companies in the in the San
Francisco Bay area which is my my my primary domicile and again
tremendous learning experience. Did a lot of things had the
opportunity to really I think creatively and and generate some
IP particularly in the in the financial world relating to
financial trade credit disintermediation and just kind
of the evolving payment space overall.
And then randomly I was approached by a one of the one
of the top tier recruiters to enter into enter into a dialogue
with a financial sponsor that was interested in rolling up
three very different small companies into a more unified
play that could gain them in a fairly rapid fashion, a scale
multiple expansion. And it was, it was really
playing off what at the time was a lot of talk about a nuclear
renaissance. And this had been spurred on by
principally by the sale of of Westinghouse, the leading
reactor designer in the world, from the British government to
Toshiba, which sold at a record multiple.
And it was, you know, again just emblematic of a very frothy
environment overall. And the hook for me is that
they, they offered me a seat on the Piper aircraft board.
I'm a lifelong pilot to me that was particularly intriguing.
So I agreed to do it. And shortly thereafter Miriam
was born. You know, we worked very hard to
to integrate these three initial, three initial companies
and get them into a position where again we could do a
relatively quick exit. But as we thought about it, as
we as we learned the market and as the macro picture evolved
ultimately we concluded that there was more value to be
gained by by doing a deeper integration fundamentally
reorienting the strategic vectors that we were focused on.
And and ultimately what was intended to be kind of a quick
three-year round trip turned into my life's work.
You know this is now I'm now on my 21st year at at at Mariana.
It's been an incredible adventure.
You know we've we've built I think a a great company.
I I have great affection for the people that I that I work with
on a day-to-day basis and I think what we're doing is truly
making the world a better place. And by the way we've also
created a lot of value. Our first sponsor got nearly A7X
cash on cash return, which by private equity standards is is
pretty good. Our second sponsor was better
than 2 1/2. And I think the, I think the
metric, Adam, you know I reserve on this a little bit is that if
you had invested a dollar and in Miriam back in 03, it would be
worth more than $21.00 today. We can talk more later about the
kind of environment that that we've had to deal with through
much of that history. But fundamentally that's my
story. And in many respects, I feel
like we're just hitting our stride and, you know, I can't
wait to see what we do over the next 5 to 10 years.
Oh, I absolutely love it. That's a phenomenal story.
So let's talk about the company, please.
Marion, what exactly you do and then some of your competitive
advantages, please. So Marian is the global leader
in ionizing radiation detection and measurement and I know that
strikes people on on 1st hearing as being very esoteric and and
and you know very technically complex field in some respects
it is. But the starting point is to
note that the the overall addressable market that we're
playing in is about an 18 or $19 billion addressable market.
It's huge and our currently served market you know where we
are playing today is about 4 billion.
To parse the the, the components to a little bit, you know
firstly when we talk about ionizing radiation we are
talking about radiation that can knock an electron out of its
orbit or you know maybe on a more relatable fashion that can
cause tissue damage in in human beings.
We're not talking about microwaves.
We are talking about alpha, beta, gamma, X-ray and neutron
radiation and we make instruments and provide software
solutions and highly tech enabled services that allow for
again the detection, the measurement, the analysis and
ultimately the harness of of this energy for for beneficial
purposes. So that's kind of who we are.
In a in a nutshell, we are the the global leader by far.
We are #1 in, in 17 of 19 product categories on A on a
global basis, we are by far the largest player in this space
that that we have defined our largest competitors, our Thermo
Fisher, AMETEK and and Affordive and we are on a like for like
basis many, many times larger than any of those individual
competitors. And it's a great space, has
tremendous dynamics. Again, I'm happy to unpack those
deeper in the conversation, but that's essentially who we are.
I love that. So basically for the audience,
there's radiation that comes out from nuclear power plants or
from heavy duty medical devices, things of that nature that could
hurt people or could damage tissue.
So what you do is you ionize the radiation, so you help reduce
the harmful effects from that radiation as it's emitted.
Yeah, let me, let me let me reorient that just a little bit.
Firstly, ionizing radiation is everywhere.
It comes from the ground that comes from your body emits
ionizing radiation. It comes from extraterrestrial
sources but it also comes from man made sources like commercial
nuclear power, medical applications defense
applications and and other things.
And our capabilities set really is to be able to to detect with
incredible sophistication in any of those vertical markets this
type of radiation. Let me let me put some flesh on
that bone. Overall, one of the areas that
we, we, we, we don't tend to highlight enough simply because
it's not a huge component of our overall revenue mix is the work
that we do in the big science community And some of the the
talking points that engender enormous pride in in internally
Ed Maran would include the fact that our instrumentation was
used for the discovery of the last nine elements on the
periodic table. We have been on most significant
interplanetary space probes. Our our instruments literally
confirm the presence of water on Mars.
We recently launched on the European Space Agency a Jupiter
mission. We are involved with the Artemis
project for the Mars mission and the next movement mission with
NASA. We're on the International Space
Station. We are deeply, deeply involved
with the global space community. But we're also at the opposite
end of the spectrum really the go to firm for the kind of
instrumentation that's used to better understand dark matter
and sub particle physics. And so our technological
capabilities are second to none. Our innovation experience and
record is second to none. And the important thing, maybe
the coolest thing about our business is that the things that
we learn in those big science applications have immediate and
direct relevance in commercial nuclear power, in cancer care,
medical treatment writ large in the life sciences space, in the
defense space. And we have a very strong track
record of taking innovation out of that science lab,
particularly as it relates to detector design, material
science, signal chain management, software
applications that support all of that and figuring out how to
repurpose them into commercially viable form factors and
producing them at industrial scale.
And that's really the magic behind Marion, because
fundamentally what that allows us to do is to grow within this
rather large total addressable market without ever having to be
a conglomerate. You know most of the, the great
industrial tech firms and even even some of the the hybrid
industrial tech and Med tech firms, which is more what we are
ultimately end up conglomerating.
They buy companies and enter into markets that really have no
connection with their historical presence.
And they really make their living by being great operators,
by being very sophisticated financially.
But again, the great thing about Miriam is that we have the
ability to grow within this enormous Tam without ever having
to conglomerate and continuing to apply that fundamental
technological leverage that really drives our ecosystem
today. No, that makes perfect sense.
So I'm curious here for a second because you mentioned roll up.
Let's go back to your story for a second.
PE roll ups, you started off with Chevron, then you moved
over and you did many other things.
What initially attracted you to this space?
Did you see problems slash solution or was there other
motivating factors? Because I love your, I love the
mission and I love what you're doing here.
And I mentioned to you before we started recording, I'm family,
my father-in-law and my wife when she first started my first
met her came from the nuclear space, nuclear industry.
So I understand the problem and the Tam and the medical device
side of it too. The radiation itself is just a
massive thing. How did you get drawn to that
and how did you figure out that you want to help solve this
problem and create this business?
Yeah, the the way I got drawn in Adam is that firstly when
presented the, the initial opportunity again for this you
know kind of quick transactional flip that that really formed the
the the Colonel of of Marion. I absolutely was a believer in
the importance of nuclear power. And at the time, I should note
that the the business and its original incarnation had about
70 to 75% exposure. In other words, 70 to 75% of the
total revenues ultimately came from commercial power.
Today, that number is about 35%. But I was a true believer that
the world had to emphasize nuclear energy to a greater
degree. And clearly in the 20 years it's
passed, there's been a lot of bumps in the road.
But today, I think that sentiment is shared more
strongly than ever. But that was the initial hook is
that I thought, you know, this is a crucial component of the
solution to decarbonizing the global economy, ensuring energy
security across the globe. And and I think more and more
people share that view today than probably we've seen since
the 1970s. Yeah, and I couldn't agree with
you more. Now I love that visionary
component too. Think about the actual
footprint. Are you globally operating?
Do you have revenue from all over?
Are you more centered, centered in the US or how does that mix
come into play? No.
And in fact the majority of our revenues are are from outside of
the US We're a we're very global enterprise today.
We have about 2700 employees globally, 21 factories again
across the globe and principally we are in Europe and in the US
We do have a number of facilities in the in China and
in Japan and and elsewhere in the world.
But it's a very, very international organization and
you know tied to the the markets which in turn obviously are are
very international in scope. Got it.
That makes perfect sense. OK, beautiful.
Thank you very much, Tom, for that overview.
And and the people can learn more by going to your website
for Investor Relations, it's marion.com.
And then click on the Investors tab.
Is that correct? For those, that's correct.
OK, beautiful. So next few questions I have for
you. Let's talk about risk
management, neither more timeless in nature.
How do you handle risk and what mistakes do you see people make
with respect to risk management? Yeah.
So there are a couple of things in my background that that I
think have been particularly useful to me in thinking about
risk. Firstly, you know as a as
somebody that you know came up through the the various
financial roles in my in my formative years where amongst
other things when I was in London I was managing you know
hundreds of millions of dollars of liquidity portfolios and
foreign exchange exposures and things like that.
And you you learn to be very, very cognizant about about
different elements of risk, you know that are driven by large
scale macroeconomic factors and it also forces you to quickly
become very decisive. You learn very early on as a
portfolio manager running multi current, you know different
multi currency portfolios that when an arbitrage opportunity
comes up you have to be prepared to act on it instantaneously.
You can't wait 30 seconds to pull out your calculator.
You have to go. And that decisiveness and that
risk awareness has served me well throughout my career.
But another very important, I guess, early experience for me,
you know, again starting my career at Chevron, was to
understand how careers are made at large companies that that
that great careers at large companies are essentially a war
of attrition. You know, any of the leading
Academy companies have incredible, you know, talent
benches, They're deep, they're broad and they're very, very
good. Get onboarding fresh new talent
and people quickly realize that to to, you know, thrive and
prosper. In my career, I can anticipate
that I'm going to be in any new job for about 3 years, give or
take. And my job is to make things a
little bit better incrementally to be very politically aware and
and very well networked, you know, essentially to build my
brand, to build my relationship capital with any enterprise and
to not make a mistake. And if you can do that
consistently, then your competitors overtime blow
themselves up. Either they make a mistake or
they leave the enterprise and go elsewhere.
And essentially the people who win are the are the last men and
women standing. But part of that, and this is
again kind of a crucial philosophical pillar for for
Marion, given the people that we compete against, is it part of
that really forces people to think of a very linear fashion,
a very incremental fashion. And of course this isn't true at
every large company. This is a generalism not a I'm
not calling out specific companies here but we learned
early on that if we can embrace risk in a in a systematic
fashion you know and understand what risks are we prepared to
take. What risks are we not prepared
to take. Then we can take a longer term
view and we can embrace risks that we know our larger
competitors simply can't face because of those career building
dynamics. And that to be clear Adam has
been a major factor in in in our track record where we have
systematically outrun our markets, you know not just for a
couple of years but for 20 years and and done suit so in tough
markets and good markets. But part of that is again that
we're very risk aware and we know what risks we're prepared
to embrace and generally speaking we are prepared to take
on systematic strategic risks to a greater degree than some of
the people that we compete against.
And you know, that's been a real, again, critical element in
our success. Yeah, I absolutely love that
that systematic risk component, knowing what you're going to do
and what you're not going to do before you even engage is such a
big because it helps eliminate all the bad or quote UN quote
lower quality decisions. So you're by definition, you're
help. You're setting yourself up to
win because you're focusing on the best of the best and then
just making a decision within those predetermined decision
range. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
OK, beautiful. Some timeless lessons, Tom, that
you've learned along the way that you'd like to share with
the audience. Please you know timeless
lessons, I mean it's such a great topic Adam and I just
wanted we could talk about for the for the duration of the
podcast. But as it as it relates to you
know the the business overall and just you know acting as a
leader in any in any kind of role overall.
I will tell you the things that that are are most meaningful to
me in terms of how you should manage a business would would
include these firstly that. The I'm a huge believer in
delegating power and authority as deeply and as broadly into
the organization as as possible and that's something that's very
hard to do. A lot of people will talk about
you know having a federalist type governance structure and
and and taking this approach. But if you are very disciplined
about it to the to the point where you allow people to fail
in a contained fashion, you're not kind of hovering over them
like a helicopter parent guarding them for making
mistakes, you allow them to make mistakes.
Ultimately that creates an entrepreneurial dynamic and it
gives you the ability to manage a a, an enterprise like this
that does have a very far-flung geographic footprint, is
involved in many different businesses, different verticals
etcetera in a much more effective fashion than you ever
could and in in more of a conventional command and control
a basis overall. Every time I have sprayed from
that philosophy, I have lived to regret it.
And so it is a, it is a bedrock principle within our company
that we will do this. We will take a federalist
approach. We will have, you know, the
flattest possible organization. We will delegate power deeply
and importantly what has to happen to make that work is that
you have to be eyes open about boundary level issues and you
have to be very explicit about who has the ball in every
circumstance. You know I mentioned earlier
that I'm a I'm a pilot and one of the things that you learn
early on in in flight training is that there has to be clarity
as to who is flying the airplane.
When you're first a student pilot, you can feel your
instructor coming out of the controls to nudge them in One
Direction or another and you think, OK, I'm not he's flying
the airplane or she's flying the airplane.
I'm not really in charge to the point where as you evolve up
through a jet type ratings and things like that.
There's much more of an emphasis on crew resource management
where you're very, very clear that Adam, if you and I were
sitting up front on the flight deck of a of a jet and I was
handing over the controls to you, I'd say Adam, you have the
flight controls and you would repeat, I have the flight
controls and then I would say one more time you have the
flight controls. And the reason for that is that
it is clarifying and this is a lesson learned in blood.
It is clarifying that ambiguity is dangerous and that if both of
us think we're flying or if neither of us thinks we're
flying, then that's the recipe for disaster in a corporate
setting. The same thing applies that when
you have boundary levels either between operating groups or
between corporate functions and operating groups, there has to
be absolute clarity as to who has the ball, who is flying the
airplane at any given time. And that is a critically,
critically important lesson for, you know, NEC level executive to
make sure that the organizational is or the
organization overall is 3 of that ambiguity.
You know, beyond that, you know the other timeless lessons would
relate to leadership and and envision a whole host of other
things. But in terms of you know,
running a business, to me, I would start with those and then
get into just the clarity as to what really matters and and how
you're you're establishing a clear eyed vision and how
ultimately you're creating coherence from the C-Suite down
to the shop floor. To make sure that everybody is
aligned and everybody is focused on the things that matter most,
obviously is a critically important life lesson.
And I guess piece of wisdom that that just works and it always
works. You know, this is absolutely
wonderful. So I'm taking notes as you're
speaking, and that clarity matters and ambiguity is
dangerous. Is phenomenal.
I love get. I love doing the show because I
get Nuggets of wisdom. Everyone's got a different
flavor and how you word things and how you process information.
To me, it's just it's brilliant. It's absolutely fantastic.
I love that clarity matters and ambiguity is dangerous.
Wow, that's fantastic. All right.
Next question for you. Timeless mistakes.
What are some and then how do you avoid them?
Yeah there. I mean the the corporate world
obviously is, is, is, is paved and and and mistakes that that
that people would make and some of the things that would be top
of mind for me would be firstly failure to act.
You know that that often times maybe most of the time leaders
are dealing in environments that aren't perfectly clear.
You know there is the the the the fog of the battlefield that
the kind of mask. What's the right way forward in
a way that some people deal with that is that they'll just
analyze things to death and rather than understanding when
do I have enough information to act.
Their question is, do I have all of the information before I act?
And failure to act probably is is one of the, you know, one of
the most critical catalysts of failure for for any business
that when the dynamic is changing, whether it's positive
change or negative change, you have to understand it.
You have to understand again when you have sufficient data to
to act, which is never 100% of the data is just enough.
And then you you have to you have to move.
I think a second important lesson or you know root cause of
failure is lack of environmental analysis or understanding.
And again for me one of the great advantages I had as a as a
young stud puppy was working in that environment of of you know
managing liquidity portfolios and foreign exchange where you
have to really, really understand you know the tie
between interest rates and exchange rates and and and
global geopolitics and things like that.
I've been a student of you know geopolitical issues for for my
entire career. And one of the things that I, I,
I experienced continuously is that people don't lift their
heads up, don't look at the horizon, don't understand, you
know, don't understand well the macro factors that impact their
business. Because most people are just
kind of heads down trying to trying to deal with rights and
what's right in front of them, what's in their pipeline, you
know, whether it's commercial pipeline, a technical pipeline,
a financial pipeline, whatever it happens to be.
Most people are heads down again focused on on what drives their,
you know, their immediate, you know, kind of task tyranny.
And so I think it's very, very critical for people again to
understand the environment, to lift their heads, to look at the
horizon periodically to step back and and take it a a a big
picture view. And it's always a mistake when
when people don't understand that.
I think the next thing on my list would be would be lack of
financial knowledge. At the end of the day leaders in
any commercial enterprise are responsible for creating value
and this is not some ambiguous concept.
You know value in a commercial enterprise is driven by three
things. It's increasing, you know, your
your, your top line volume, it's expanding margins and it's
improving the velocity of your free cash flow.
That's it. It's very quantitative.
It's very clear. It's very objective.
But many, many leaders don't don't have deep, deep knowledge
of of, of finance in a way that's sufficient to understand
this. It's in many respects like
having English as a foreign language where some people, you
know speak it fluently and perfectly and others have a
minimal vocabulary. And I think so.
It is with with leaders that understanding the financial
implications of what you do is such an important and critical
predicate for understanding how you create value that I think
that's a a real and and and fairly pervasive shortcoming of
part of many leaders. Final thing I would say is just
poor leadership where you know in this, in this world that
we're in right now where there is a perpetual war for talent
and generational shifts in in as we move from Boomers and Gen.
X to Millennials and Gen. Z.
They're profound, general generational shifts in terms of
what people are expecting when they join a company.
And you know it's often said that people don't leave
companies because of, you know, they're not leaving bad
companies, they're leaving bad managers.
And so poor leadership is is obviously a perennial source of
of mistakes. And we we've all, we've all had
bad bosses in our careers and we all would know how to describe
them in terms of things like being controlling, volatile,
short sighted, self-serving, inaccessible, not caring about
them, all these things and obviously that all of that's
avoidable within, you know some certain parameters but that's AI
think a common root cause and in many failures.
No, that's really, really wonderful.
I love what you said about just understand those 3 principles of
creating value, increasing revenue, expanding margins and
improve the velocity of free cash flow.
That's so powerful because without that, there's no
business or the business not going to grow.
You're stagnant. And then if you're not growing,
you die. So OK, that's fantastic.
Thank you. The failure to act not having
you'll never have perfect knowledge is really, really
good. Have enough knowledge to take
action that's really powerful and leaders responsible for
creating value. Really some great, great advice.
Thank you, Tom. So far.
Next constant next topic is leadership.
What makes a great leader in your opinion and from I guess to
be more of the soft skills. Again, if you want to mention
the hard skills as well. Whatever, we're in any direction
you want to go. Sure.
Yeah. So to me, leadership really
begins with clarity around mission, values and vision.
You know, mission is, you know what is, what is our reason for
being vision is where do we want to go, what not, do we want to
climb values or how we're going to conduct ourselves as we go
there. I think these concepts are often
viewed as being kind of bureaucratic, kind of Dilbert
Esque parodies of of the the, the, the, you know, the sincere
importance of these things. But again, these are, these are
incredibly important components of of of dogma in any company.
And I I'll tell you we use these all the time.
We talk about them all the time, you know, mission we, you know,
we're a very quizzitive company. We've done 16 acquisitions since
2016. That's a really important part
of our story. But every, every acquisition
that we look at, one of the key screening criteria is, is this
consonant with our mission because we get shown things all
the time and you know, bankers telling us all the time that oh,
you should think more broadly and think of yourselves as a
test and measurement business. And you know I have a great
vibration sensor business or gas detection business that I want
to show you and we'll always begin by comparing that with our
mission and we do use it as a lens and it's got a true
pragmatic purpose in focusing us on the things that matter and
again the things that that are consistent consonant with our
our mission overall. Secondly, vision is critically
important. We want to build a great company
here. You know we're proud of what
we've done today, but we want to build a a lasting recognized
company that that has seen as a as a true leader in its in its
space overall. And the vision is critical for
that because it it is very clarifying to your team in terms
of what it is we're trying to accomplish, what good looks like
and you can then take it and break it down into bite sized
pieces that says here's how we get from here to there.
This isn't just some ridiculous hyperbolic statement.
This is real. And we can get there by taking
these steps and then finally the values.
You know, one of the other things that I learned in my
early days in large companies is that culture matters.
Every enterprise, every business, every collection of
human beings has a culture. And culture is a choice.
It can be propagated the way the senior leaders want it to be
propagated. And if you have a good culture,
it is a, it is a free strategic weapon, strategic tool that
allows you to beat your competition, particularly if
they have bad cultures. And when we talk about bad
cultures, we're talking about companies that are, you know,
very political, bureaucratic, risk averse, slow moving.
Whereas our culture is 1 about, you know, being, being, you
know, kind of employee positive. Let's let's have a healthy sense
of you know, self deprecating sense of humor, if you will.
Let's be prepared to accept risk.
Let's be free of politics. Let's be free of of of these
types of constraints. And again you can express all of
that through values and you can love those values if the leaders
choose to propagate this. Again, this sounds, it sounds
trivial, but it's amazing how many organizations really don't
take these things seriously. And again, this is stuff that
that we talk about all the time and it's important for every
leader, whether they're the CEO or a middle manager to to be
able to express these things, reinforce these things,
etcetera. The second key element is to
build a team, Great leaders, build great teams and they do
that in different ways. But having you know having the
talent on the field necessary to win is obviously critically
important. And and the key thing here again
is being decisive. Having a system or process, a
methodology to be able to identify emerging talent, to be
able to identify a talent that needs help, that needs coaching
and or redirection and some level of dialogue.
And ultimately to make sure that through some combination and
some array of processes you're making sure that you have the
best possible talent on the field.
And again, this is seemingly obvious, but but many people are
are too slow to react or in some cases too quick to react where
they're not helping people that are.
You know that that will benefit from that help and ultimately
will be great at at what they do.
You know the final element, you know in terms of how I think
about leadership is then taking those things and and being being
able to inspire people, inspiring them by firstly making
it clear you know what matters the most and then secondly why,
why achieving this is worth worthy.
Thirdly, your personal connection, why you are critical
in in helping us achieve these things, but basically to inspire
people that hey, we're doing great things.
You know, our mission ultimately is about harnessing our
capabilities for the for the greater good of humanity.
And people really believe in that and they really are
inspired by it. But to be clear, you know my
that's my style of leadership and there's an infinite number
of leadership styles that that clearly are effective.
You know some some leaders you don't have a reign of terror.
They but they build brilliant companies.
That's certainly not the way we do things at Marion.
But that's how I think about leadership.
I love that. So it's funny you say that
because I have a book. I wrote a book about investing.
It was #1 on Amazon for two months and I talked about
there's an infinite number of ways to make money in the
market. Your job's to find one that
works for you. So what you're saying here with
the infinite number of ways to lead, I love that as well.
Let's talk about adversity and some obstacles.
How do you handle adversity? And what are some obstacles you
had to overcome that you'd like to share with the audience?
Yeah. So the nature of of of
leadership again at any level within the enterprise is that
you're going to face adversity and seemingly constant adversity
because that's the, that's the nature of business.
It is the ultimate kind of Darwinian environment and and
bad things happen all the time And so you have to be able to to
react to it. And you know the way that that I
personally handle it is firstly yeah when it occurs to not be
surprised by it and and be able to to react to it in a in a
systematic and positive fashion. Again this is AII think at one
point I'm going to write a book about lessons learned flying
piloting aircraft and how ultimately that relates to
business. But as an example you know if
you have have a, if you're having a bad day in an airplane
and you have to be very level headed and think systematically
OK and and firstly recognize immediately that I have a
problem and then secondly systematically go about solving
that problem. And so it is in business where
you know first thing to do is maintain a level head and and
not overreact to it because experience demonstrates that
people do tend to overreact to adversity until they they calm
down a little bit. And so it's important to start
there, recognize that adversity often times it's not just
impacting you, it's impacting your competitors or you know an
entire sector. And so it represents not only a
threat to your business but an opportunity.
And so the key thing is to figure out how are we going to
get out of this, Are we going to mitigate this situation and
ultimately can we turn it to our advantage in terms of being able
to respond to it better than our competitors are.
You know some of which involves preparation and anticipating
adversity and some of it just relates to you know the the in
the moment option set that that you have to deal with.
And beyond that understanding that you know this takes a toll
on you. It's a it's a grind and it it
creates enormous stress. And as you know Adam running,
running your business that you know as the as the key guy you
know it's on you 24/7 365 and you think about your business
all the time and you wake up in the middle of the night thinking
about it. And so you have to find a way
of, you know, of of turning this into a marathon and being able
to deal with the occasional body blows and the stress that comes
with it. Part of that is being
spiritually grounded and and whatever you know whatever that
means to you it's being physically fit so that you can
be resilient and and deal with these things as they come and
recognize that you know the more senior you are in an
organization the more eyes are going to be on you to see how
you're reacting to it. And if the world is you know
upended if you're a steady hand on the teller, then that's going
to be enormously calming to the to the people that work for you
and around you. And that's you know that's how I
would approach adversity in general.
The the second part of your question relates to, you know,
personal challenges and you know, here I'd I'd probably cite
two things that that have been obstacles that I had overcome in
in my career. Firstly, I would tell you that I
am naturally highly introverted. And you know, I think the
classical definition of introversion is a When you're
around people, you feel like they are consuming energy rather
than generating energy for you. The world is run by extroverts.
The the corporate world in particular is run by extroverts.
And so ultimately as I have learned how to, you know, to be
extroverted when I am fundamentally wired to be
introverted, I think that's kind of like a superpower.
Because not only do I understand the extroverts, but I understand
the introverts really well. And some of our our greatest
leaders, our best ideas come from introverts and and too
often if you're not sensitive to how these people are wired their
voices won't be heard and their talents will not be leveraged to
the greatest degree possible. But you know that would be #1
for me again is that I'm I'm an introvert in a in a world run by
extroverts. A secondly I would tell you that
my background is in finance. I'm not an engineer and I'm
obviously running a you know a hyper technical company.
The advantage I have though is that I'm naturally kind of
technically or technologically oriented.
I was a bit of a Motörhead as a as a kid.
I've always been fascinated by vehicles and you know taking
engines apart and putting them back together and things like
that. And despite being a finance guy,
hold over a dozen patents that I have more in the works, I push
people to think in a very lateral and expensive fashion.
A lot of people assume I'm an engineer by by virtue of that.
And then you know, there are, there are many occasions where,
you know, I wish I had a little bit deeper technological
understanding about certain things.
But at the end of the day, you know, in in the seat that I hold
today, I I don't need that. And I I I have enough of it.
The last challenge that I would cite that I have personally is
that I am definitely ADD where you know I and this is something
that I've had to deal with my my entire life which is a challenge
when you're a student and you know you sit down for a lecture
and the minute the lecture starts speaking you know you're
1000 miles away. But on the other hand the things
that you learn somebody with that background is the ability
to hyper focus, the ability to multitask in a way that many
others can't. And again I think weirdly you
know being a bit ADD as ACEO again it's kind of a superpower
that allows you to to focus deeply on things that really
matter at that moment but otherwise to to be able to keep
a lot of balls in the air. So those are the things that I
would, I would say them challenges for me personally.
Right. Come absolutely knocked it out
of the park. I I mean, I could spend an hour
commenting on on what you just said, the spiritual stuff, the
state grounded stuff, the superpower stuff.
So in my book, I literally have cartoons and I'll share with one
second. The idea is to bring out your
Superman, your superhero inside of you and then beat the that.
Is awesome. Yeah, thanks.
So I've got 2 characters. One's a smart money superhero
and then the other one's a dumb money beast.
And the idea is to make rational, not emotional
decisions. Which is exactly what you're
saying. Stay grounded and then ready
when the body blows. Come.
Every garden has weeds. You just got to take the weeds
out. It's going to the weeds are
coming. So but you can still have a
beautiful garden. So I I absolutely, I mean, next
level, what? Very well.
Amen, brother. I'm.
I'm right there with you. 100% OK.
Final question for you, what's the best piece of advice you'd
like to get to the audience or share with your 30 year old self
please? The best advice I would give
I'll, I'll I'll address this to my 30 year old self is is is
maybe three things. Number one is work hard be good
at what you do and you know that's obviously obvious advice.
Secondly, I would say have an agenda.
You know too many people will come in and and even in a, you
know, a more humble job, you should have an agenda.
You should have a point of view, you should have a world view
that informs the way you think about your job.
Understand how your job is connected to, you know, whatever
the overarching mission of your organization happens to be.
And you should have an agenda focused on here's what I want to
do while I am in this role. Here is the here.
Here are my personal set of visions and values and in
mission, while I'm in this position and too many people
don't have an agenda. They just come in and they wait
to be told here's, you know, here's what you you need to do.
Here's what good looks like. And even if you are told all
those things, you should still, you know, have a countervailing
point of view as to, you know, how would I think about this
organically? What should my agenda be?
The final thing I would say is to be kind.
You know, the world is a small place.
The business world is a smaller place.
In any specific industry is a smaller place still.
Being kind to everybody that you interact with cost you nothing.
It it makes everybody feel better about the way that they
interact with you, the way that they they feel about themselves.
It gives people the ability to take off their armor and to
think not about how do I protect myself from what may be an
unpleasant or hostile interaction, the one where I can
think about, How can I be my best self?
How can I? How can I you know, how can I
play offense instead of defense? And kindness is really the most
fundamental prerequisite to that, understanding that
kindness is a reflection, that you care about people, that you
want the best for them, and you're not in this just for
yourself. And too often, again,
particularly as as young ambitious people, you know, we
don't think about these things overall.
So those would probably be the the, the most important
elements, I guess maybe the final thing too would be don't
love for the future, you know, smell the roses, take your
victories as they come, as you take your lumps.
But try and be present and and appreciate life as a journey.
You never get to the end until the end comes to you and it's
important to keep growing. Keep keep looking looking
forward but also try and you know try and smell the roses
along the way and and be present.
Don't live for a future state that may may or may not come,
and if it does come, you know may not be what you think it
won't be. I love that have the internal
scorecard instead of the external and and be.
Yeah, I love that. Absolutely fantastic.
Well, Tom, thank you so much for coming on the show.
This has been absolutely pleasure and hopefully we'll
have you on again soon. Adam, thank you very much for
inviting me. Have a great day.